Sonu Goswami How SaaS Companies Fix Wrong Customer Targeting Fast
Learn how Slack, Notion, and other SaaS winners pivoted their ideal customer profile to unlock massive growth and avoid stagnation.
How to Realign Your ICP for Faster Growth
I’ve been there. You build something, get some early users, maybe even a bit of revenue. Then everything just… stalls.
Prospects keep saying “cool tool, but not for us.” Deals drag on forever. People sign up and disappear. Your churn rate makes you want to hide under a blanket.
Here’s what nobody tells you: it’s probably not your product that sucks. It’s that you’re selling to the wrong people.
I learned this the hard way, and apparently so did the teams behind Slack, Notion, and a bunch of other companies you’ve definitely heard of. They all started by targeting completely different customers than the ones who made them rich.
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When You Know You’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree
There are some pretty obvious signs when your ideal customer profile is off. I wish someone had spelled these out for me earlier:
Your prospects keep giving you feedback that doesn’t make sense. Like, they say your product is “too simple” when you think simplicity is your biggest strength. Or they complain it’s “not a priority” when you’re solving what seems like a huge problem.
The story you originally told about why your product needed to exist? Yeah, that doesn’t resonate anymore. Your users are doing things with your product that you never imagined, or they’re not using the features you thought were most important.
People sign up but don’t stick around. Meanwhile, the folks who would actually love what you built aren’t even finding you.
Take Slack. Those guys were building a game called Glitch. The game totally bombed. But they had this internal chat tool they used to coordinate their team, and other companies kept asking about it.
Most founders would have been like “nah, we’re a gaming company.” Instead, they paid attention. They ditched the game and went all-in on team communication. Now they’re worth billions.
Stop Reacting to Every Piece of Feedback
This was my biggest mistake early on. Customer says they want feature X? I’d build it. Someone complains about the UI? I’d redesign it. Another person wants integration Y? Off I go to build that too.
You can’t make everyone happy. And trying to will kill your product.
Instead, you need to figure out which feedback actually matters. Look for patterns, not one-off complaints. If five people ask for the same thing in a month, that’s worth exploring. If one person mentions it once, maybe not so much.
Also, consider who’s giving you the feedback. If it’s coming from people who were never going to be good customers anyway, you can probably ignore it. But if your best customers are all saying the same thing, listen up.
Notion figured this out. They launched as a personal productivity app — think better note-taking for individuals. But teams kept using it for project management and collaboration stuff. They could have fought this and insisted people use it “the right way.” Instead, they rebuilt their whole onboarding around teams. Smart move — they’re now doing over $100 million a year.
When You Find Your Real Customers, Everything Changes
Once you figure out who you should actually be serving, you can’t just tweak a few things and call it good. You need to rebuild pretty much everything.
Your messaging needs to speak to different problems. Your sales process changes completely. The features you prioritize shift. Even how you do customer support is different.
Spoke Phone learned this during COVID. They were selling phone systems to small businesses, but the deals were tiny and customers would leave when they outgrew the platform.
Then the pandemic hit and mid-market companies suddenly needed communication tools that could scale fast. These buyers had bigger budgets and more complex needs, but they also represented way bigger opportunities.
So Spoke Phone completely changed their approach. They partnered with Twilio for credibility, built enterprise features, and retrained their sales team for longer, more complex deals.
The results were insane — they grew their monthly revenue by 136x and increased their average deal size by 40,000%. Not a typo.
Some Companies That Got It Right
Honestly, most successful SaaS companies started by targeting the wrong customers:
Mailchimp began as a side project for a web design agency. They were just trying to send newsletters. Now they’re focused on small businesses and sold for $12 billion.
Webflow started for individual developers who wanted to build sites without coding. They pivoted to design teams at bigger companies and hit $100 million ARR.
The pattern is always the same: they built something, noticed who was actually getting value from it, and had the guts to completely change direction.
Figure Out Who Your Real Customers Are
Look at your happiest customers. What do they have in common? What problem are you solving for them that nobody else can solve as well?
Then look at your pipeline. Are you attracting people who actually want to buy, or are you stuck trying to convince people who don’t really need what you’re selling?
Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. Maybe your real opportunity is in a market you know nothing about. Maybe you need to charge 10x more and serve way fewer customers. Maybe you need to completely change your product roadmap.
But here’s the thing — fighting against who your product naturally serves is exhausting and expensive. Working with the right customers feels like you’re pushing a boulder downhill instead of uphill.
The companies that figure this out early win. The ones that don’t spend years spinning their wheels wondering why growth is so hard.
Which one do you want to be?
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SaaS
Ready to fix your ICP and unlock real growth? I write about SaaS strategy and growth tactics that actually work. Follow me for more insights on building products people want to buy, or drop a comment below with your biggest customer targeting challenge — I read and respond to everything.