415: Handling Multiple ICPs as a Solo Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Let's talk about handling multiple ICPs, that's ideal customer profiles, as a solo founder. This is something that I've been wrestling with a lot at PodScan over the last year and a half. And I know that many of you face the exact same challenge that I've been facing. You're building this product that could serve two or three or maybe even five different ideal customer profiles from different industries, different kinds of people. And you're trying to figure out how to keep them all balanced, how to learn about them, how to deal with them, or whether you should even try. And before we get to that, a word from our sponsor, paddle.com, because no matter how many customer types I have, I charge them all the same way by using Paddle as my merchant of record. They take care of all the taxes, sales tax and stuff, the currencies, they track the client transactions, try to recapture them for me, they update credit cards when that needs to happen so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors and my customers and not with banks and financial regulators along the way. If you think you would rather just want to build your own product and focus on that, do check out paddle.com as your payment provider. I run a small software as a service business that has several ideal customer profiles just by the nature of what PodScan is. And as somebody with limited time and limited capacity to make a product appealing to particular groups, I'm doing this pretty much solo, I have learned how to juggle trying to sell to several different potential audiences at the same time. Or more like I had to learn how to do this right, because that's just what the dynamics of trying to build this business on my own have kind of forced me into. And no matter how much we try to niche down with these businesses, which is something that a lot of founders do very intentionally, we often find that when it's software, we are building something that is by design quite flexible and that's so flexible that different kinds of people can use it. Just look at Peter Lovell's photo AI, for example, and this is ostensibly a b to c product. So it's not necessarily the same thing that most indie hackers built when they built these kind of b to b enterprise y or at least like fewer customers products. But even with the b to c product, this serves as a good example because it serves pretty much everybody, but some people more than others. It's trying to serve people who need passport photos while he also is serving people who are using these AI generated photos for marketing purposes or for social media posting or to put it into their dating app profiles. And there's so many different audiences that he could …