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The Marketing Engineer · No. 4 · Sample issue · 6 min

Find what to build:the ICP discovery system

Your ideal customer is a guess until you’ve talked to them. The system that turns the guess into real people, their own words, and booked calls.

Zev UhuruMarketing engineer
Mason the octopus at a microscope over a tray of small figurines dressed as different characters, while a screen beside him shows the one he found, magnified and glowing.
Mason studies a crowd of possible customers under the microscope, and the screen shows the one he’s looking for.

This week I wrote about the trap most builders fall into: building for a fantasy customer, then wondering why nobody pays.

This issue is the fix. It’s the system for finding out who actually has the problem, what they call it, and whether they’ll pay to make it go away.

AI makes every step faster. It can’t do the step that matters most: talking to people. Skip that and AI just takes you further down the wrong road, faster.

How you find your ICP

  1. Write down the guess. One paragraph: who it’s for, the pain, what they’d pay. You write it down so you can prove it wrong.
  2. Collect their words. Have AI read where they already complain and pull out each problem in their own words, with a link to where they said it.
  3. Talk to ten. Ten short calls. Ask about the last time the problem happened and what they did, never “would you buy this?”
  4. Build the avatar. One named person: the trigger, their pains, their objections, the exact words they use, and the quote behind each.
  5. Test the pull, then book. One piece of content and one small ad aimed at that pain. Count replies and booked calls, not likes. Every sales call is another interview.

The call-notes skill

Paste a call transcript. It returns their pains in their own words, the trigger, what they’ve tried, their objections, any sign they’d pay, and where you led the witness.

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Zev

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That’s Mason