How to determine your ICP in the early stages

This is not a prescriptive post. Rather, it's a journal of how we're thinking about the early stages of finding our ideal customer profile (ICP). We will get things wrong, we will make mistakes, and we will learn.

First, a little background about the product and myself.

I co-founded Orbiter because it felt like something I would use personally, and use frequently. Turns out, I was right. Orbiter is static website hosting. We're focused on bringing back the ease of getting static websites and web apps online. With a simple upload, you can have a site online in seconds. We also support more programmatic approaches including via a CLI and an API (and this gets into the ICP conversation a bit).

I've been working in and on startups for over a decade now. I've started a few of my own companies, raised money, failed to raise money, bootstrapped, shut down. I've been the first employee at a startup that entered hypergrowth, and I rode the slow growth of a lifestyle company (that ultimately was acquired).

My experience largely dictates how I approach the experimentation, go-to-market strategy, and product development of Orbiter. That said, every business is different, so at the end of the day, we're all just making things up as we go.

With Orbiter, and with many small businesses, it's hard to serve a wide audience. Instead, it's usually better to pick a niche, or a focus area. That's what we're trying to do. Website hosting has totally evolved to a developer-focused task (save for no-code tools like Webflow, etc). That said, there are a lot of people who are not developers who want to host simple websites and apps without having to pay for an expensive no-code tool or a developer.

This means, we have two potential markets to go after: developers and non-developers. Each will find different value props and each will require different marketing strategies. So far we have attracted mostly developers, but my co-founder and I are already part of that audience and know how to reach them. We'd like to see if our product resonates with non-developers to help us narrow down what our focus should be. One strategy we will likely try is AppSumo.

Lifetime deals are scary, but I've heard great things about how passionate and helpful the people are who subscribe to these deals. And they mostly seem to be non-technical or less technical. Might be a good way to test our product in the non-developer market on the road to helping us determine what is best long-term.

Stay tuned.