LP | E444 | Defining and Validating Your Ideal Customer Profile with Alicia Carney, ex Deliveroo [Path to Market]

In this insightful episode of “Path to Market”, Director Natasha Lytton and co-host Micah Smurthwaite, Partner at Pipeline Ventures, are joined by Alicia Carney, a seasoned product marketing expert with extensive experience at high-growth startups like Deliveroo.

Together, they dive deep into identifying and validating Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in pre and post product-market fit stages. Alicia shares her insights on navigating early market fit through to scaling operations post-product market fit.

She emphasizes the importance of starting with customer needs rather than product ideas, advocating for qualitative user research and pain mapping to identify and validate ideal customer profiles (ICP). She also shares her best strategies for conducting effective customer interviews, iterating quickly based on market feedback, and leveraging practical tools and methodologies for market research.

Elaborating on her experiences at Deliveroo, she explains how she managed to segment and prioritize different types of customers, from small businesses to large enterprises, and used iterative testing to refine go-to-market strategies.

Chapters:

01:01 - 01:36 | Pre-Product Market Fit Strategies
01:36 - 02:30 | Validating Customer Assumptions
02:30 - 03:50 | Effective Customer Interviews
03:50 - 05:04 | Identifying ICP and Pain Points
06:23 - 07:39 | The Importance of Customer Feedback
07:39 - 08:54 | Retention vs. Acquisition Strategies
08:54 - 10:15 | Post-Product Market Fit Tactics