how to create a customer persona
A comprehensive guide to develop your Customer Persona and zoom in on your First Customer
NOTE: Some content is a copy-and-paste from Spike Morelli's excellent blog post on this topic. I have used this approach in at least 40 of my entrepreneurship courses now with positive feedback from my students. Your startup doesn't have any customers yet, so why focus on market segments like big companies do? This activity gives you a close approximation of the first customer you'd like to interview, solve a problem for, and keep as a customer. Most big companies don't have the capability to interact closely with prospective customers as they design a new offering, or they won't do it because it "doesn't scale." The best time to engage in creating personas and refining who is the first customer is while you are still small and early-stage. This activity will help you identify who you need to RECRUIT as your first users or customers.
"The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them."
Paul Graham, "Do Things That Don't Scale," July 2013
Example: The online survey builder service provider Wufoo required its programmers to answer all customer service calls (as opposed to using a call center). The programmers found out immediately what needed to be fixed and could fix the problem as soon as they hung up the phone. Compare this approach to how your current cable, satellite, or cellular provider handles customer calls...
what you need to do
Read this page.
Create a persona for a person who you think is likely to be one of your first customers, someone who clearly has the problem you are trying to solve and may desperately want your solution.. Use a Powerpoint slide, google slide, or sheet of paper; it's just a cross with four labeled sections. The "person" needs to be a drawing or picture, have a name, and is saying or thinking that s/he needs to solve *this problem.* When listing "behaviors," be sure to identify behaviors that reflect the situation the person is in when s/he is having the problem you propose to solve; age, income, education level, location, type of job are demographics (don't mistake behaviors for demographics, and vice versa; operative words to help you are "is" and "does"). Needs and goals should tie together the person, behaviors, and demographics to give you clearer insights into the problems of your customer.
Send the slide or take a digital image of your drawing and submit it through this google form.
Bonus: View good and not-so-good personas from previous offerings of this course here. These personas indicate that students need frequent exposure to the process of creating personas and carrying them through future iterations of their value proposition. Below is the template I want you to use.
Customer persona on one slide
OK, the rest of this post is Spike's work; peruse for your enrichment. Nothing below the green line is required for turning in your assignment, but reading will also make your persona more useful for the steps that follow. It's a lot more than putting stuff in the right quadrant!
"Often times business people, and marketers even more, think about customers in terms of segments: young entrepreneurs, mums at home, single professionals, you name it.
This can be useful to think broadly about who you're hoping to serve in the long run, but offers little value to plan and execute on your next move.
The person that you're hoping to serve with your product is much more than a bunch of demographics: they are a human being with problems, needs, goals, habits, that live and work in certain environments.
It's only when you truly understand that that you can hope to be effective at serving them well, which goes from reaching out to them to creating a great experience for them.
This is universally true, even in a B2B setting you don't sell to corporations, it's a human being that cuts you a check and that person will have his own agenda.
What is Persona development?
Persona development is a process to represent in a usable format that information I mentioned above.
When I first spoke to FC she was targeting anybody with an internet line which is the equivalent of targeting nobody as your offering will be lost in the noise.
Going through a Persona development exercise helped her bring clarity to her marketing and product development and dramatically increased the odds of her startup.
There are various ways to put together a Persona archetype, but the one FC and I used is borrowed from Luxr.
But my product can really be used by anybody!
I get it, FC told me the same, I told the same to my first startup mentor. And it's true, I can see how years from now, if she's successful, her product could be used by all sorts of people.
But not today.
Today she needs her first customer because without that she is never gonna get to next month, let alone years.
And likely the person that will want her product today is different than the one that will buy the product when she's an established brand on the market. This is the idea of early adopters that I've expanded upon in this other post and won't go into details here.
Persona sounds singular, do you always have only one?
Actually, most startups deal with more than one persona, often times at least two. In the case of FC she's looking at a marketplace so at minimum she has a buyer and a seller. Now those might be the same persona, but also not, think of Amazon Vs Ebay: on Ebay sellers can be buyers too, on Amazon most sellers aren't buyers and the way being a reseller on Amazon works is different than selling something on Ebay.
In the case of a B2B product, for example an IT management system like I used to build, the persons that's cutting the check is the CFO, but they have no clue about IT management so it will likely be the CTO to make the call. The user however is the sysadmin, not the CTO, and he's gonna have a completely different outlook on your product.
Depending on the business, you can have as many as 5 personas:
decision maker - whoever decides to buy your product
economic buyer - the one with the money that will cut you the check
recommenders - which can be the decision maker herself or other peers
influencers - generally known figures in the industry your customer is in
end users - those that actually will use the product day in day out
This is often easier to picture if you're working in B2B with larger corporations, but it's actually true for B2C as well, just think about your friends or husband/wife, especially in the case of a family product the decision maker can often not be the economic buyer.
Customers Vs users
One special case of a multiple persona scenario that's worth highlighting is the one that's actually the cause of many startups' failure: they have users, not customers.
A customer is someone that pays you, a user just uses your product. Any product hoping to make money from advertising falls in this bucket with the people using the product being the users and the marketers being the customers.
In a case like this you have at minimum two personas and failing to be clear about it will kill your business. Furthermore once you have the two persons with stated needs & goals it should also be more obvious how the two are potentially in conflict, a problem you'll have to deal with.
Your Persona is still a hypothesis to test
As much as you want to use all available information and develop a Persona that you're likely to be able to meet somewhere (or possibly even know already), it still remains an hypothesis to test.
The most important thing you'll have to test for is obviously their needs and goals, which must be aligned with your product offering, but you may also find that the demographics you put down were incorrect or that the person doesn't engage in the behaviors you thought they would.
Some of them you will have to specifically test for, others will just be side-effects of more important experiments, but it's crucial that you treat what you wrote as a living document that you need to update based on the outcomes of your experiments.
Luxr's Persona Development Framework
There are several frameworks to develop a persona and while most are very similar we all have our preferences and I happen to favor Luxr's model.
This is what it'll look like in the end:
As you can see there are four sections to it:
Give it a face
Facts (though I would argue "avid reader" is a behavior)
Behaviors (note how these behaviors are related the situation Jane is in when she might be having the problem you want to solve; remember that opportunities are situations for making an improvement)
Needs & Goals
The goal is to have a visual and contextual (to the problem you solve) representation of your customer, an idea of what that person may look like, what things they engage with and what they are looking for (again in the context of the market you're in).
Lets do an example on paper
You can do this in any way you want and later I will show you a couple of alternatives working on a wall or digitally with Google docs, but I find paper to be the best compromise to quickly iterate over some ideas.
1. Preparing for the exercise
The base for the exercise is really simple, just copy from image below:
As far as filling the quadrants goes, you can think about stuff in your head and write it down into the boxes, but experience suggests that it leads to poor results.
A much better method is to apply a technique called dump & sort.
This approach separates the creative phase from the analytic phase allowing you to go deeper and generate much richer insights.
2. Give it a face
This box is all about visualizing your customer. There are four components to this:
a name
a face
a place
a bubble speech
The face really means a face and a body, potentially clothing, accessories and gadgets. The idea if that if your persona walks by you will instantly recognize her.
The name is another detail to render the persona more real and remind you that you are dealing with a human being and not a market segment.
The place helps you give the whole thing a context, generally it's the location/setting where your persona will be using your product.
The bubble speech is the finishing touch, externalizing the problem you're trying to solve.
By the time you're done your persona archetype should totally pop out, you should feel like you know this person and could find a way to meet her tomorrow if you wished so.
As we move to the next quadrants keep referring to this drawing as you fill them in. Again, it's crucial that you keep in mind we're talking about this person you just drawn and named, not some faceless, nameless manikin.
3. Facts
Think of facts as added information to identify your customer. They often take the form of demographics, but feel free to add other relevant pieces of information. Classic examples are age, yearly income, where they live, marital status etc. This may be more important for some products than others.
For example if your service is very expensive, lower income individuals might not be customers, especially early adopters. If you are targeting certain locations instead, where they live or work may be of particular relevance.
4. Behaviors
As the name suggests, this box is all about behaviors your persona engages with. These should be written starting with an active verb and should be actions that you can observe.
For example, she likes to read is a valid behavior, but A LOT of people like to read. InRather write that as she reads a book while sitting at the park on sundays.
One very important thing to point out about behaviors is that they will often map to channels you can use to reach your customers. For example in the case above it's obvious you should be able to find your persona in a park on sunday mornings holding a book and reading.
5. Needs & Goals
In the context of your problem space, what does your persona want to accomplish? what does she need?
It's important to avoid being too generic and put things in here that anybody would want and a lot of products would provide like more money or more time.
Generic Customer Persona canvas
