Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 27, 2025

Define your ICP : Clearly identify your ideal customer profile before building your sales process. Your first sales hire should generate predictable and consistent revenue, not just hunt elephants 2. Your first sales hire should generate predictable and consistent revenue, not just hunt elephants 2.

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advice founder startup enablement 71

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

It should also be employed only after a company has established their ICP. No matter how cutting edge or sophisticated, from a technology perspective, your product might be, you’ll still need to present compelling metrics to get a deal signed. And a surefire way to win over your economic buyer? Through your champion!).

frameworks 112

frameworks incumbents leadership advice 112

The Zapier Blog

APRIL 10, 2023

When you identify a B2B target, you're really identifying a group of targets—and your strategy needs to account for the differences among multiple contacts within a company. Cycle length Buying something on your own doesn't take very long. Cycle length Buying something on your own doesn't take very long.

strategy 111

strategy education B2B marketing leadership 111

Entrepreneur's Handbook

JANUARY 4, 2024

You should only consider raising investment when your house is in order. So if your house is not in order, if the co-founders and team are not picking up the slack on tasks that a founder doesn’t have time to do while fundraising, that startup is doomed to fail before the raise is over. When everything is going really, really well.

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startup VC pitching sustainability 102

Entrepreneur's Handbook

OCTOBER 25, 2022

No market demand” means there are too few customers for your product (no matter how good it is), or they are unwilling to pay enough for it. You might have identified an exciting market and now need to test your product in a structured way. You will then know which market (ICP) and product to focus your scarce resources on.

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startup leadership frameworks founder 102

StartupNation

JULY 26, 2021

One of the keys to successfully scaling a business is being able to find and identify your ideal customer. You might already have some insight into who this customer is through your business plan. And when you’ve reached the point in which your business is successfully scaling, it’s time to revisit your ideal customer.

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media strategy education networking 140

TechCrunch

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

To begin with, you’ll have to craft a strong ideal customer profile to know your customer’s pain points, while developing a competitive SWOT analysis to scope out alternatives your customers can go to. Your target customer will pick a solution that will help them achieve their goals. Craft the ideal customer profile (ICP).

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frameworks SaaS education development 97

Tomasz Tunguz

FEBRUARY 27, 2025

Here are the highlights : Define Your ICP Before Anything Else The most fundamental decision for any startup is determining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). We could only get to that level of insight because we knew our ICP really well. We told customers, “Google is killing all your third-party cookies.

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strategy advice startup capital 82

TechCrunch

OCTOBER 13, 2021

Startups still struggling to find product-market fit wouldn’t dream of being able to identify and map out their ideal customer profile (ICP) clearly enough. Account-based approaches thrive when you amend your mindset and focus on long-term investments and relationship building. Has your organization bought into the idea of RevOps?

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startup strategy investing investment 102

Tomasz Tunguz

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

When should you hire your first marketing leader? For pre-seed to Series B founders, navigating GTM strategy, marketing, and positioning can be challenging. How do you scale GTM efficiently? When is the right time to invest in branding?

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founder strategy investing investment 52

Andreessen Horowitz

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

As Ben Horowitz says, it’s “ no prize, no fight ” when it comes to getting the best salespeople on your team. But building a sales compensation plan that both aligns your sales team’s compensation with your customers’ objectives and recruits top salespeople can be incredibly difficult in usage-based pricing.

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frameworks SaaS sustainability support 92

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

All of these tools that were useful as startups for running your business had improved a lot. And I always had in my mind that I wanted to be your primary bank account. But I focused on a very specific ICP, ideal customer profile, which was an early stage startup. So it was kind of in the back of my mind for a long time.

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incumbents founder leadership advice 93

Jason Malki

APRIL 11, 2023

What motivated you to launch your startup? What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup? What are your future plans for your startup? Be laser-focused on your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and prioritize developing capabilities and needs that provide immediate solutions and value for them.

SaaS 52

SaaS technology advice development 52

StartupNation

DECEMBER 15, 2021

And, rightly so, data has immense potential to become your most precious marketing resource. Because if you know how to harness this data, you can figure out what drives your leads to buy certain products, and more importantly, what makes them discard specific offerings. Shutterstock. Predictive analytics.

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strategy pitching media consulting 122

The Zapier Blog

JUNE 30, 2025

3 ways to automate your sales processes Streamline your sales So we asked sales and marketing leaders to skip the hype and share how they're using AI in their day-to-day workflows: what they've automated with AI, what's stuck, and what's quietly saving their teams hours every week.

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A Smart Bear: Longform

JANUARY 7, 2024

Targeting your "Ideal Customer Profile" (ICP) is the best way to differentiate and win sales, but does it limit your target market?

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Tomasz Tunguz

MARCH 24, 2018

Can you describe it for your startup? But articulating the ICP well isn’t enough. Vague ICPs are problematic. Clear ICPs can also be problematic. A clear but useless ICP might be: a disenchanted thirtysomething mechanic who likes to play German board games, read Nietzsche and watch MMA. The perfect customer.

startup 85

startup board pitching enablement 85

Tomasz Tunguz

AUGUST 30, 2020

How do you tell if your sales team and marketing team are working well together? Some potential causes: Marketing focuses efforts on non-ICP prospects. There’s a simple diagnostic that I’ve come to use. Compare the slopes of marketing’s lead generation efforts to sales’ bookings trajectory.

B2B marketing 143

B2B marketing pitching startup 143

Tomasz Tunguz

JULY 21, 2022

Have you asked your customer to stack rank their software needs? and where your product fits in? Narrowing the sales & marketing focus to core ICP (ideal customer profiles) improves efficiency & mitigates churn. It may be worth tracking new bookings in the ICP as a percentage of total bookings to ensure team alignment.

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financing finance pitching board 75

TechCrunch

OCTOBER 20, 2022

Underpricing your product, using a pricing model that is not working for your ICP, not offering self-signup or offering the wrong features as add-ons — all of these pricing and packaging issues (and many more) can cost you a lot of revenue. Does the real problem lie in how you’ve valued (priced) your product?

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SaaS mix-use advice strategy 81

Startup Blogpost

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

If you have no way of separating and evaluating your inbound leads, you’ll be stuck chasing non-value and low-quality leads through the dark, wasting both resources and time with little to no payoff. Talk to a sales rep”) on your website or in an email by the number of times they view that button. Scott Krager , Founder, TubeSplit.com.

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