Creating Personas that help you sell a product

“If there’s no research behind a persona, I prefer a more direct name for it. I like to call it a bullshit persona. You start with a bullshit persona, you do your research, and only then do you have a persona. If you skip research, you’re just left with the bullshit.” - Tomer Sharon, Validating Product Ideas

I’ve spent 16 years of my career focused primarily on sales or marketing. In the early days, I produced customer personas because that’s what I was taught at business school.

After a few years of experience, I realised that after creating a persona document, I never once referred to it.

This all changed in the last couple of years when I read the quote above from Tomer Sharon. As many of us know them, customer personas are BS, but it turns out there is another way to build them. It takes more time, but what you’re left with is something genuinely useful as a tool for creating and selling a product.

Start with the BS
You need a starting point to create a persona, which comes from your assertions of who you’re making a product for. Make general assumptions.

I’m going to use a recent persona I created as an example throughout this piece. We were building a lead generation platform for subcontractors (in the UK, that’s specialist trades, like a roofing company that work for a main construction contractor). The starting point looked something like this:

You can see that there are four sections in the template. One has the persona name that you’ll reference internally (this is useful when you have more than one persona). One section has the demographics, which is pretty self-explanatory. For problems, put down the fundamental problems you assume the persona has regarding the domain you are interested in. Finally, we have the solution, which is essentially the product that you’re planning to build, possibly with the features.

Putting together the BS persona shouldn’t be a big task. You should know the type of person you’re building a product for here. The purpose is to have an idea of the type of person you need to find to conduct qualitative research (interviews).

Finding Interview Participants
Now we move to the research. For the Indie Hacker, we don’t want to waste any time on unnecessary tasks. So, the only research we care about is speaking with real people that we identify as a good fit for our product, the BS persona. You may have created two or three personas, which is fine. Five or six personas would probably be too many.

You want to conduct a minimum of six interviews and a maximum of twelve. You may not have enough material to extrapolate reliable assumptions at any less than six. More than twelve is too much work, as each interview accounts for probably between 3-4 hours of work. You’ll see patterns forming at around four or five interviews and repeated phrases and concerns from participants.

Finding participants can be difficult depending on whether you have an existing network of people that match the BS persona. You’ll need to budget for an incentive. Because it’s such an important task that will have long term benefits to the project, I’d offer a generous incentive to grab attention and ensure people want to turn up - something like a $50 Amazon voucher for a 30-minute interview. The way I see it, I’m happy to spend $500 on getting interviews if it saves me extra hours trying to pull in interviewees.

If you have no network whatsoever, I’d go down the route of advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn. Facebook is better for B2C, LinkedIn for B2B, as you can create relevant audiences on the respective platforms. But, if I’m honest, advertising this way has always been slow going for me. You either want the BS persona to be in your network or accessible via second-degree connections. In that scenario, I’ve managed to get all interviews wrapped up within two weeks of going out.

Screening Participants
You don’t want to reach out looking for interviewees and tell people exactly who you are looking for. When you’re offering a $50 Amazon voucher, there’s a good chance you’ll get people respond that don’t meet your criteria. Plus, you want the respondents to know as little as possible about what you’re planning to build. People naturally like to please, and if they have an idea of the answers you want to hear, they’ll give you them, even if they’re not accurate.

This means you need to create a Screener questionnaire. This short questionnaire will take 1 or 2 minutes to complete. I use Google Forms to make these. When looking for respondents, you send them to the Screener questionnaire before booking them in to ensure that they meet your criteria.

Here’s the structure of the Screener:

List of assumptive attributes.
These don’t go into the questionnaire. They’re for the benefit of the person creating the questionnaire. These are the key attributes that any respondent needs to have to fit our BS persona. For our example, these would be:

• Director of a Limited Company
• Limited company provides subcontractor construction services
• Company is less than five years old
• Clients include Main Contractors or Property Developers
• Lives in the UK
• Under 45 years old

Screener Questions.
Now we need to create screener questions. We don’t want to provide leading questions. We don’t want the respondent to judge what we’re looking for easily. For our example, our screener questions would be something like this:

• Which of the following is most accurate about yourself - I am the Director of a Limited company; I am self-employed; I work for an employer; none of the above.
• Which of the following is most accurate about the company you work for or own: We are a general building contractor; we are a specialist trade contractor (e.g. plumbing, roofing, etc.); we provide building materials; we offer design services; other.
• Please select the type of business that best represents the category of clients you work with: Developers; Main Contractors; Home Owners; Local Government; Retailers; other.
• The company you work for or own is: Less than one year old; Less than three years old; Less than Five years old; Less than eight years old; More than eight years old.
• Select which is true: I live in the UK; I live outside the UK.
• Select your age bracket: 18-24; 25-34; 35-44; 45-54; 55-64; 65 and over.

Then in the Google Form, you’d ask the participant to provide their name and email.

Once they’ve completed everything, you can ensure that you only schedule participants that meet your criteria.

The Interview
I’m not going to write a breakdown on conducting an interview. A section in this article isn’t enough for that. That’s a book in itself. If you’d like to learn about conducting interviews, Interviewing Users by Steve Portugal is a good starting point to learn.

I tend to conduct a 30-45 minute interview on Zoom, which I’ll record. By recording the interview, I don’t have to create notes, which means I can focus on the conversation and ask open questions where the opportunity arises to delve deeper into responses.

Once I’ve conducted the interview, I like to get everything down into a transcript. There are plenty of tools around to do that. I use Descript.

Once everything is down on a transcript, I’ll start breaking up the information into a new document that categorises feedback (e.g. references to specific problems, good descriptions of the problem, wording to reuse in copy, etc.).

Creating the Persona
Once we’ve conducted the interviews, we can now build our final personas. You can do that in the way that works best for you. You could merge respondents into one fictional persona. If one respondent in particular best captures a group, you could lean on that person’s responses to build a persona and just add a few other answers from other respondents to round it off.

For our example, here’s a final persona.

How to use the persona
The first benefit of creating a persona based on real research is setting you in the right direction. With our BS persona, we assumed that the user’s problem was getting sales leads. We were wrong. The persona was getting plenty of sales leads and didn’t need more. What they needed were better sales leads. They needed leads with sufficient information to help them accurately forecast their chances of winning the sale.

This insight was critical. It informed the product we were building (what information do we need to provide with the lead?), and it helped us create relevant copy (address the real problem). It also meant we could use the customer’s voice in the copy, use their words to define the problem and solution.

It’s also tremendously helpful when you’re part of a team. Many of the insights you’ll get from the research seem counterintuitive. If you were to present them as your ‘qualified’ assumption, you’d likely get pushback from people who may well be less qualified than you to make the assumption, but nonetheless, in my experience, everyone thinks they know marketing. When you can present your persona that’s backed up by real research, you don’t get dissenting voices from investors, employers, or clients. They accept the persona and the decisions you need to make on the back of that persona.

You now have a concrete user in mind to build a product, test features, create landing pages, and write ads.

I appreciate this has been a long post, but if you’ve got this far, I hope you found something useful in it.

I’d love your feedback. I’m in the process of putting together a marketing newsletter that I want to be genuinely useful.

If there’s anything that you would like to see me expand on in this post, or any other areas of specific marketing questions that you have, please let me know in the comments or connect on LinkedIn and message me there.