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Your ideal customer is the person who says yes to your one-line pitch without asking a single follow-up question. This skill turns your website into that person, described by how they think and behave rather than by job title, and narrows the description until it feels uncomfortable. Then it gives you a one-line test to check it.
Ask an AI about this skill: ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity
“The ICP is the profile, persona and personality of the person who, if you gave your one-line elevator pitch of your product, would say yes without asking any further questions.”
Turn a website into the person most likely to say yes to it today.
Most ideal customer profile templates ask for thirty fields: job title, industry, headcount, revenue band. Many of those templates are written by companies that sell contact data, and the fields happen to match the filters they sell. A founder with no customers doesn't need a database query. They need to know which human being would hear their one-line pitch and say "yes, I want that" without asking a single follow-up question.
That is the definition this skill works to: your ideal customer is the person who says yes to your one-line pitch with no further questions.
What you need
Any one of these is enough to start.
- The founder's website, or a paragraph describing the product.
- Why they built it, and who they had in mind at the time.
- Anyone who has already used it, paid for it, or got excited about it.
Steps
Start from the person the founder built it for. Every product was built with someone in mind, even if nobody wrote it down. Often it's the founder, or someone they watched struggle. "I have no customers, so I can't know my customer" isn't true. The customer was there when the idea was.
Describe them as a person. How they think, what frustrates them, what they've already tried, where they spend time online, who they follow, how they talk about the problem. Job title and company size can break a tie, nothing more. When Plastic Bank looked at who actually signed up, the job titles in its plan predicted nothing. Shared personality traits predicted almost everyone.
Narrow until it feels uncomfortable. "SaaS founders" is a market. "Solo founders who shipped in the last three months, have fewer than ten users, and post their progress in public" is a person. Narrow wins because people who match most of the description recognise themselves in it, and the rest aspire to it. Speak to one person and more people hear you.
Find the five in a hundred. Most of any market isn't ready to buy right now. Describe what the ready few are doing this week that the others aren't.
Write the one-line test. One sentence a stranger would understand. Picture three people from your description hearing it. If any of them would ask "what do you mean?", the sentence or the description needs work.
Output
The person: <a short paragraph, specific enough to feel uncomfortable>
The one-line test: <the pitch>. The right person says yes without asking anything else.
How they describe the problem, in their words:
- "<phrase>"
What the ready few are doing this week: <one or two sentences>
Who looks right but isn't: <one or two sentences>
Where to look for the first one: <two or three places>
Rules
- Use the customer's words, not the founder's category.
- Don't invent customers or evidence. If you don't know, say so and ask.
- If the profile could describe half the internet, it isn't finished.
- Treat it as a first rough block of marble. Real conversations and real customers do the carving. Rewrite it as soon as they show you who actually says yes.
A quick check
How fast people get it is the tell. With the right person and the right words, conversations are quick and simple. If every conversation needs a long explanation, it's the wrong person or the wrong message.
With MyPip (coming)
When the MyPip MCP is live, this skill will be able to start from the profile MyPip built from your website and from who has actually said yes to your introductions.