Episode 773 | How to Find Your Early Customer Profile (ECP)

Rob Walling:
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Check the show notes for more details. And note that Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Welcome back to another episode of Startups. For the Rest Of Us, I’m Rob Walling, and in this episode I talk with Maya Voer. She’s the author of Go to Market Strategist, everything You Need to Reach Product-Market Fit, and her book and her consulting and her writing is all focused on B2B SaaS. We have a great conversation today defining what go to market is, because that’s always a term that I’ve struggled with because it feels very MBA, like feels theoretical in a way that maybe isn’t helpful for Bootstrappers, but I’ve become more comfortable with it over the last several years and Maya has a nice way of communicating that Go-to-market or GTM is really just pricing and positioning and packaging and customer. It’s like an umbrella term for several things. 

So we dig into that. We dig into ECP, which is your early customer profile, which is different from your ICP as well as some early stage scrappy marketing approaches that don’t scale. Before we dive into the episode, I want to let you know about the MicroConf Growth Retreat, a new event we’re launching in London from May 14th to the 16th of 2025. This isn’t your average conference, we’re keeping it intimate with just 40 to 60 SaaS founders joining us for deep networking and invaluable insights. We’ll have focused morning work sessions where you’ll gain clarity on your business challenges, followed by unforgettable afternoon excursions, exploring the best of London, and then we’ll end each night with a reception. Tickets are limited, so head over to MicroConf dot com slash retreat to secure your spot. We will sell this event out. If you want to go to the MicroConf Growth Retreat in London, head to MicroConf dot com slash retreat. With that, let’s dive in to my conversation with Maya. Maya, thanks for joining me on the show,  

Maja Voje:
Rob, it’s such a pleasure. Let’s talk about everything. Go to market today.  

Rob Walling:
Everything go to market. Alright, so I want to ask you to first define for someone who has never heard the term go to market or they hear it and they think, isn’t that something that Proctor and Gamble does with a new brand of toothpaste? It’s very MBA speak. How do you break it down for a mostly bootstrapped founder who is just trying to build a product that people want? By people, I mean businesses of course, and trying to sell market that product. What does go to market mean for them?  

Maja Voje:
Well, that’s our best plan to reach. Early majority, the first customers are not that difficult. These are usually people who come from your phone book or some sort of social media, early adopters group, so that’s not that much of a rocket science. Then in the later stage, once you defend product-market fit, you are facing a big question. So how to build these predictable and scalable ways, how to get customers. These are called go-to market motions, and that in my science is the holy grail of the go-to market stage for startups, how to just stop worrying where our next customer is coming from, that we have some sort of predictable engines to do the work so we can maybe take vacation one day. That’s nice, but I have to emphasize here, and it’s such an important thing because oftentimes go to market is mistaken for marketing or sales or LinkedIn. 

So it’s a combination of different factors and if you are deep into the product, you will probably say, oh, go to market is that, but hear me out first we have to find a very good market market where we have a chance to win. Then we are dealing with just this selection of customers. So what are the customers that will indulge our product and help us grow this business? Later on, after we kind of figure that out, we can return to product and maybe we could be even playing around with different value propositions and different ways. How do we provide value? After we have a little bit of an initial traction going on, initial feedback, then we have to learn what to say, how to present our product. That’s positioning and messaging, and nevertheless, it’s nice that people pay us as well. So we are not doing everything for free. That’s pricing. And later on we bump into the last component, which is growth. So this is how to get customers. Ideally we would build go to market motions. Hope that was clear, but if you have any sort of sub-questions, this is my favorite topic and I cannot shut up about this.  

Rob Walling:
Your favorite topic so much that you wrote a book  

Maja Voje:
That’s right  

Rob Walling:
On it called Go to Market Strategist, everything you need to Reach Product-Market Fit. It is that there’s a hard copy there. You have paperback and Kindle, and of course it’s available on Amazon, and I believe this is how you came across our radar. Folks on X Twitter have been talking about you. And then go-to-Market strategist. The book came across our radar, and I think before I want to dive into this concept of ECP, right? It’s this early customer profile. But before I do that, I guess in summary, saying go to market is really this umbrella term for packaging up and bringing the product to market. And that’s the thing I think that confused me. Even five years ago, whenever I heard go to market, I thought, this is very academic, it’s very theoretical, it’s very big business, and it’s because every example that I read in a book always used Intuit and Best Buy and Target and these Fortune 500 companies, you know what I mean? 

And none of that ever applied, but if you package it up as no, it’s your early customers, it’s the market, it’s the pricing, it’s a plan, right? I think the summary, so I want to come back then to ECP, this concept that I just mentioned. So we talk a bit about on this podcast, about ICP, your ideal customer profile, and especially if you’re early stage, that can be impossible to know, difficult to find. Once a business is more mature, the SAP makes more sense. Maybe you have one, maybe you have two, whatever. What is this ECP concept? And talk me through how, again, maybe an early stage bootstrappers should be thinking about it, why it’s important to them.  

Maja Voje:
Awesome, and this is such an irrelevant question for our audience who’s mainly in B2B, right? Because in B2B, you know how it is. If you want to target big companies, you need to go through compliance, you need to have a couple of badges and everybody will ask you, can you show me 5K studies, seven use cases, and yada yada that you don’t have at the moment. So we have to build our way to the ideal customer profile. It’s very good to have a strong vision. Literally, I’m working with enterprise cloud AI softwares right now, and we are dealing and bumping into the same problem. So the technology is really good, but so far ideal customers have big, big, big considerations just like doing pilots and use cases because it’s not enterprise safe yet. So in order to bridge this gap between where we want to be and where we currently are with our product, our traction, we are using this proxy of early customers in order to strategically generate references and traction so that we can move up market later on. 

And why I like to call it early is literally a very personal reason as well because you need to do something right when you are launching. And of course you can have this big vision that might be true in three years, but where we are today, it’s a little bit different. So you need people who are thinking differently and acting differently. Early customers usually have much bigger risk tolerance, so they are those early adopters. There is a new tool I would like to play around a little bit. Sometimes they’re even inclined to break corporate rules. They are just using it from their personal emails or something like that. So I became obsessed with just this idea how to get early traction. So first in your beta it might be free, and these are not customers, these are users, and there will be huge discrepancy between people who are using it and saying it is awesome. This is why I wanted to differentiate this concept from just early adopters because the essence of customers is that they are paying for it. Meaning not only they are saying they are loving it, but we can actually reinvest in our business. So that’s a little bit of a why I’m so bullish on this early customer profile.  

Rob Walling:
So that’s an early customer. It sounds like ECPs are your early adopters, right? They’re willing to try your product  

Maja Voje:
That are  

Rob Walling:
Paying, that are paying that their customers, not users. This is something I often say on this show. Someone will say, I have 10,000 users, and I’m like, great, zero people paying you. It’s 10,000 customers. That matters. Okay? So ECPs are willing to try your product, provide feedback. Now, what’s the danger here? It seems like it could be pretty easy to make big mistakes. It’s like I’ve seen folks launch, you get 20, 30, 40 paying customers that maybe we could call ECPs in this context and they’re all over the place. Someone’s like, I want this to become this other competitor and I want this feature. And it’s just like 40 different people, 50 different feature requests. I can imagine this being overwhelming. So what are some big maybe mistakes that founders make as they’re trying to build out their ECP?  

Maja Voje:
Okay, best case scenario. You think about this before it happens. So when we are just deciding who is going to be ideal customer for our profiles, we can come up with a couple of hypothesis. And at this stage, I love to use prioritization framework. So I never, ever, ever want to say to people, just select one and let’s live with this for the next six months or something like that. No, your technology, your maybe AI agents could be helping a compliance B VCs, C banks, okay, we have three ideas of the segments. Do we really feel secure that we are just like saying maybe I like VCs, let’s go with VCs and just take it for granted for the next months of our go-to-market operations? No, we need to do validation first. So ideally you would not encounter this problem, but in reality you often do, and especially when you are launching and you are reverse engineering who either retained best or who converted best, which segment with your product, you can come into the very conflicting situation. 

So for example, freelancers love my AI content writer, but agencies would use it if they had this and this and that feature. And you’re like, okay, right now mission critical is to get 50 customers. At this point, I can no longer heavily invest in the product. And previously I have decided that my vision is to help small and medium businesses. So currently I don’t want to deal with this partnerships and with these agencies, by the way, I love to work with agencies. They are great accelerators, but point you have to be true to your vision, to your product vision. And if you have done the market research correctly, the segmentation, if you have done interviews, that could be a little bit easier because you will feel much more confident about your choices. But then another very common mistake with early customers is also how we are acquiring it because in literally the channels that we will choose for launch, terminate, who are we going to attract? 

So it’s mission critical to also do a very solid research on which channels our ICP is. And that’s not that difficult these days because JGPT, clo, what else could we be talking about? So yeah, definitely do your homework and especially if you are dealing in a very, very, very, very strict industries. For example, injection molding or some sort of transportation companies where people are not online, you can literally ask them where do they find relevant tools and information to advance in their career or businesses? So you can get this information from some of your people as well. Don’t just blindly follow this blueprint and I should post on LinkedIn and maybe Hacker News and product hunt launch if that’s not relevant for your audience, that’s a big mistake that we have to avoid.  

Rob Walling:
I like to dive into examples if we have them. Do you have any really good B2B SaaS case studies for ECP implementation?  

Maja Voje:
So I will not throw in the names of the companies right now. Some of the founders are public with this one, some are not. But yeah, let’s talk through a couple of ones. We have an AI content writer, a typical staff for repurposing a little bit better train that you could in your projects. And it was super, super, super interesting because we just launched, we thought that it is going to be a very broad product that everybody, every marketer and let’s say salesperson, business developer who needs to post on LinkedIn could be benefiting from this. That was our initial assumption. But once we saw the results from the traction, I mean users was always okay, but customers who were the first segments that were converting, rightly it was founders. So that was a big surprise. We anticipated that this is going to be very interesting for marketers, but we ended up serving founders and we literally had to pivot the communication of that one because just like for marketers, the value was not that convincing. 

We could not differentiate it much nicer than copy AI or what you can do in Jet GPT, but for founders it worked amazingly well. We have another example from an analytics tool and analytics tools. You know how they are, they’re a little bit heavier to sell, right? It’s a big investment like CRM, you have to learn it, you have to commit to using it for a longer period of time. So these types of launches are specifically interesting when they are done on the red ocean market. So when there is a lot of competition, and usually we go with vertical positioning, meaning that you narrow down to one specific audience, one specific persona and go all in to get early traction. Well, for this one, the situation was very similar. Again to what you’re saying the tool got, I kid you not 50,000 users from Reddit, an additional form and everybody was like, yay, this is so cool, yada yada. 

Product managers were playing around it. So far monetization was a pain in the arts. So what happened there was that initially they went with this idea to be serving in the developers and yada yada, but later on they figure it out that the real customer for them are just small and medium businesses, B2B businesses. So that was a huge one as well. I mean, I can be going on forever, forever, forever. It happened happen on to my launch because there is another fallacy that is kind of dangerous here. As a founder, you have this vision and usually the vision is to be helping everybody and to make your product super horizontal and useful in all different perspectives. And I was kind of the same. And there is another fallacy, so I literally envisioned that I want to serve growth people and marketers, people just like me, AKA eating your dog food. But in reality, just like after seeing the response from the market, these ideas of segments, who is actually my target customer refined probably 11 times since I am operating this GTM strategist venture. So end of story, even when you nail it, market changes, technology changes, go back to the drawing boards, make sure that you are always, always, always on point with that.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, there’s a lot to that. You have done a tremendous amount of writing specifically and maybe you’ve also done speaking in podcasts, but I’ve seen your book and I’ve seen these articles that you’ve written@gtmstrategist.com, one of those that really caught my attention. The title is Go to Market Actions, do whatever it takes to get Customers 12 proven ways by Unicorn Companies and how to apply Them Now. And the thing that I find really interesting about this is again, if folks who are familiar with GTM or Go-to Market go-to Market Motions, that’s usually the term everyone hears and that is actually bringing the product to market. It’s doing, I think you said five things earlier, right? It’s like pricing, packaging customers, blah, blah blah. Yeah, but you’re talking about GTM actions go to market actions which happened before go to Market Motions, much like ECP is before I-C-P-G-T-M actions are before GTM motions as far as I’m reading into it because this is the first time I’m hearing of all this, but we’re going to link this article up in the show notes for sure because you have this great diagram that we won’t have time to go into in an audio podcast, but you have the 12 different GTM actions versus go-to-market motions. 

I want to talk about a few of these because they really remind me, frankly, they remind me of what a lot of our listeners do, which is our listeners. They are almost all of them start bootstrapped. Most of them probably start nights and weekends. Some of them have the luxury, they have a spouse or they’ve saved some money and they’re able to quit their day job and do this and some of ’em raise money, 10, 20%, probably 20% of our listeners wind up raising some type of money. So it’s not about bootstrapping versus not, but there’s a certain level of scrappiness, there’s a certain level of doing things that don’t scale and not saying if I want to be a $10 million company, I have to act like a $10 million company today. And if you act like a 10 million company today, you’re probably making a mistake, right? Much like a unicorn. If you want to become a billion dollar company, you don’t act like that today. You do these scrappy early stage things, which I think, am I summarizing it correctly? That’s kind of what you’re talking about GTM actions, they may not scale, but they get you your first 5, 10, 50 customers.  

Maja Voje:
I love it. No, seriously, your founders are heroes. You totally understand the sentiment of doing this. Why? I mean, when you are just like this founder and you have marketing growth, sales and fundraising and product and HR and accounting, this portion of energy that you can devote into this, it’s critical, but it’s not like your full day job. So I saw a lot of people just like being so burdened, so burned out by I should be posting on LinkedIn five times a week. I should be writing a weekly blog post. I should be doing this and this and this and this and that. Why? Because the big companies are doing this. But methods, actual techniques, how to get first customers doing things that don’t scale is a very nice comparison of it. I have literally talked to tele, tele is this loom like video recorder, but they have raised 2 million before and in the article it is mentioned that okay, they were with a Y Combinator and the first batch of customers were just like their peers from the incubator. 

So it was nothing fancy. Then they did outreach. And you don’t have to build full fetched marketing and sales machines. If your job to be done is to get 50 or 100 customers, you can do stuff which are much, much, much easier, often very inexpensive, even for free. But you have to go out there and this is the biggest obstacle, Rob right there. People are so afraid to just send out a couple of messages post on a couple of forums. I don’t know why. I’m sure that it is psychologically and I’m not an expert, but yeah, those actions are easier than you think.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. And I did want to touch on a couple of these. You have 12 examples again in this article. What I like too is that you kind of starred a lot of these are things that I’ve talked about on this podcast. These are super practical things.  

Maja Voje:
Awesome. Which one is your favorite though, Rob?  

Rob Walling:
Well, I mean, so your third one is warm outreach. So relationships or credibility. You also then have a cold outreach with a hook as two separate things. And I’ve talked a lot about this concept of concentric circle marketing, where at the center or people that know me, that’s the warm and then people I have relationships with and then it’s my audience is probably the next one and then it’s my network and then it’s my network’s audience. You got concentric circles and that’s what you’re talking about here.  

Maja Voje:
I love this concept. I would love to see a visual, but just going back to our previous discussion about ECP, you have to be intentional because even people from the second cycle who could potentially do this introduction to let’s say more distance cycles, you need to have good use cases. You need to have good case studies and just like traction. Because if you are pitching that, you have these accounting software for let’s say high schools, then if I work in construction, I’m not interested in this because I would be much more inclined towards seeing references, case studies from my vertical. So whenever you are starting out and doing this segmentation work, think really hard. Are these companies attractive for case studies? Will I be able to move up market if I do this business? If your discrepancy between early customers, the one you can close today and ideal customers, you should really, really, really be intentional about what type of businesses are you serving or white gloving.  

Rob Walling:
And another one that I like is fishing on forums and online communities.  

Maja Voje:
Are forums still a tin crop are still a thinkink? Which forums do you need?  

Rob Walling:
They are. I only go to forums when they mention something I have an alert set up for. But Reddit is going to be forms in Hacker News. It used to be Cora, but Cora. Cora kind of went bye bye. It’s still around but people aren’t using it as much. But I call these hangouts where people hang out online and oh, Facebook groups. I’m not on Facebook, but Slack, private Slack channels and everything. I call ’em Hangouts. Where if I’m going to target electrical contractors, people who are in construction industry, they’re going to be on Reddit, they’re going to be on Facebook, they may have a private Slack channel, probably not. There are some places my brother runs an electrical contracting business in California. And so I know there are places he hangs out online. It’s not a ton and it’s not like Hacker News where everybody’s on there all the time, but I would want to lurk and embed and start offering value. 

And look, it’s not a shortcut. And this is the thing, I was interviewed on a podcast a couple months ago and someone was asking me about these things. How do you get early customers? And I was listing all the things that I say, right? I have my standard big five approaches, there’s SEO and content and forums and warm outreach, cold outreach, blah, blah, blah. And they were almost treating it pretty transactionally. And here’s the thing, 5, 10, 15 years ago, you could go into online forums and you could be kind of transactional because not everyone was doing it, but marketers ruining everything. They’ve ruined everything, right? That’s what’s happened. That’s happened. A producer, 

Producer, Ron just sent me a screenshot of a completely random niche brick and mortar forum on Reddit. It’s a sub Reddit. And one of the things, it’s like posting rules, don’t be racist, blah, blah, blah. And one of ’em said, we don’t want to hear about your stupid startup idea. Don’t ask for it and give feedback. We will remove it and why they have that because a bunch of people have come and basically spammed kind of spammed it. And so you really have to walk this line of am I actually going to come in and contribute value? Am I actually going to become part of the community a bit or am I going to jump in and just try to weigh in and link to my stuff? And I don’t know if you have examples or experience with any of this.  

Maja Voje:
Tons. Tons. So a colleague, he was not a client, he was just like This dude that I hang out in afternoon hours because he’s built equal stuff all the time. He built AI for lawyers. He literally put one country’s registration and it was such a nice interface, you could literally ask a question, is it legal that my neighbor has this car partner? And it produced really good answers. So he got, I kid you not 8,000 users from posting in 12 different communities, like random communities here locally. And I was just so taken aback. Two days after he launched, one of the political parties called him if he would be interested in data exchange. He was all around the news. Why? Because his stone of communication was really, I build this, it does this, the that it’s not perfect. If you are sick and tired of paying for lawyers, just take it for a spin and tell me what’s wrong. 

I’m not saying that this is the formula, how should you be doing this? But it was just like this authenticity. It was just like this not promoting stuff or something like that, but it was just like, look, this is it. I think it’s very cool. If you think it’s cool as well, you can use it. Whatever. It’s for free. I’m not taking your data by now. So yeah, you can still get in. But as you said, the technique when you are just like there and developing a little bit of credibility and trust before you go full on and spam literally makes me think that less is better. So surgically choose the communities that your ICPs or ECPs are active in. And freedom as a tour Fremont project. I mean I was working with communities a lot when I was in my crypto times. Literally had to manage a telegram of 40 K people or something like that. 

It was ludicrous. And you can feel it as somebody who’s on the count that is there with a banner, with a hammer. As an admin, you can fill this stuff from a distance and if the community act, the member is active, you would support them. Literally you are developing a different type of sentiment towards them as an admin as well. But I wouldn’t place all my bets into that basket. I would definitely combine it with a little bit of outreach. And what I like to use these days a lot, especially with B2B softwares are influencers because people and LinkedIn, that’s just crazy. Five years ago and just like this B2C influencer game started to show up in ads and it became an official UGC, like small counter generation stuff. I think that we are approaching these days in B2B and I just love these type of tactics because the audience of micro creators usually has a lot of love and credibility towards that. So yeah, that’s the one that I sneak in as well as AKA community slash influencers.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. And we’ve talked about three or four of the 12 examples that you give in this article. And if folks want to keep up with you, I mean you have a ton of resources@gtmstrategist.com, you have a book checklist masterclass, as well as obviously the article that we will link up in the show notes. Maya Voer, thanks so much for joining me on the show.  

Maja Voje:
Oh my God, it was such a pleasure. And guys, when you are launching and just like these GTM plays in 2025, everybody’s screaming like SEO doesn’t work tomorrow. I’m publishing how a company got 200 K users for just programmatic SEO. They’re saying that outbound is that they’re saying that inbound district or something like that, forget this stuff. Just first informed choice that you have to do is where your audience hangs out. That was a time that I took from Rob. The second thing is that you are there with a genuine message that you are contributing value, that you are not there pitch slapping them. And the third thing is just be consistent, right? Because oftentimes things don’t work the next day or the next week. Sometimes, especially with inbound, when you’re producing content, you have to go all in for two, three months, sometimes even like six months and just observe the progress. So that would be my best way how to say goodbye and thank you.  

Rob Walling:
Love it. Thanks again for joining me.  

Maja Voje:
Yeah, my pleasure.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again, Maya, for joining me in this episode of the podcast. And thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 773.