## Segmentation A customer segment is a group of similar potential customers interested in using your app - they share the same problem and incentives. Big companies seemingly serve the entire world. But they never start there. **Good customer segments are a who-where pair. If you don’t know where to go to find your customers, keep [[Customer Slicing]] your segment into smaller pieces until you do.** ### Being too generic When you start generic, everything you do is generic. You have feature creep from all sides and probably don’t solve any specific customer segment’s problems particularly well. You also end up talking to multiple customer segments at once, which leads to very mixed and confusing results. - Overwhelemed by options, not sure where to start - Aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong - Can you say that a new idea had really worked or totally failed? Is there always some niche group of people who enjoyed it (yet overall it might have been useless?) - Mixed feedback that you can’t make sense of **Before we can serve _everyone_ we have to serve _someone_.** You have to choose a specific segment - it allows you to filter out the noise which comes from everyone else. Ignore everyone who isn’t your customer segment, and cut features until you get a sense of what’s working and what’s not. ### Think past generic terms Having “students” as a segment sounds good on paper but is actually extremely broad - there are tons of different segments of students, and instead of having 20 conversations with 1 segment, you might end up having 1 conversation with 20 segments, hence the mixed signals. Industry experts (advisors), as discussed in [[Asking for meetings]], can help break down segments if you’re not knowledgable in the niche. [[Customer Slicing]] is one way to approach this. **If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t have a specific enough customer segment.** ## Multiple segments Sometimes you might have multiple segments and not even realize it. Like a multi-sided marketplace, or an app for kids (that you have to sell to kids AND parents). Don’t fall into the trap of only talking to the most senior or important people you can find. Talk to people who are representative of your customers. And yes, you should be doing different [[Talking to customers|customer conversations]] for each different segment.