1. Positioning & Brand Strategy
Understanding Your Audience
Find your believers. Turn early adopters into your loudest champions.
Table Of Content
Audience & ICP Personas Find Your Tribe Core Components Actionable Output & Templates
Audience & ICP Personas
Define exactly who you're building for and why they'll care.
Most teams chase adoption before they understand their audience. They guess, generalize, or aim too broad. Then wonder why no one sticks around.
Effective GTM starts by answering two deceptively simple questions:
Who is it for? What is it for?
Find Your Tribe
Your product isn’t for “everyone.” It’s for the smallest viable group that needs what you’ve built and wants to tell others about it.
The right audience doesn’t just use your product. They identify with it. Adoption becomes expression. Evangelism becomes instinct.
“People don’t just want to use something. They want to stand for something.”
If you find them, build with them, and listen well, they’ll carry the message further than you ever could.
Forget mass adoption. Focus on early believers. When you find your smallest viable audience, they won’t just adopt your solution, they’ll amplify it. Because you’re not just offering a tool. You’re offering a story they want to be part of.
The challenge is turning strangers into ambassadors:
Strangers → Skeptics → Users → Believers
This is how movements begin and how communities become the best GTM engine you’ve got.
“Belief is the strongest growth lever.”
Core Components
ICP Canvas
Start here. This is your ideal customer profile, not a demographic sketch, but a behavioral and emotional snapshot. Start with two truths: Who it’s for? What it’s for? Then move on to Where do you Meet them?
1. What’s it for?
What’s the real-world problem or emotional need this solves? If they tried it and loved it, what would they say it fixed?
Component | What to Define |
|---|---|
Core Problem / Friction | What’s broken or frustrating today? Why hasn’t it been solved yet? |
Job to Be Done | What are they trying to accomplish? What progress do they want to make? |
Desired Outcome | How do they measure success? Time saved? Yield gained? Status earned? |
Product Fit Hypothesis | Which feature, flow, or experience directly maps to their need? |
2. Who’s it for?
Define them by behavior and belief, not just labels. If you showed up in their world, would you fit into the story they already tell themselves?
Component | What to Define |
|---|---|
Motivation Profile | What drives them—learning, earning, building, belonging, flexing, or contributing? |
Behavioral Signals | What have they already done? What chains, tools, or tokens do they use? |
Cultural Signals | What language do they use? Who do they trust? What memes do they share? |
Influence Role | Are they decision-makers, power users, community nodes, or connectors? |
Adoption Frictions | What might they resist or not understand? What gets in the way of trying? |
3. Where do you meet them?
Make distribution as intentional as the product.
Component | What to Define |
|---|---|
Hangouts | Where do they spend time: onchain, online, IRL? |
Channels of Influence | Who shapes their opinions? Which communities or creators? |
Preferred Interfaces | Mobile or desktop? Telegram or Discord? MetaMask or multisig? |
Trusted Voices | Who would they believe if they endorsed you? |
Use this to align product, messaging, and distribution. Don’t build until you’ve mapped at least one clear ICP.
Persona Archetypes
Personas should reflect behavioral realities, not invented backstories. Traditional personas (SaaS marketer, age 35, lives in SF) are nearly useless in crypto. What matters in web3 is:
What they believe
What they do onchain
Where they show up
How they influence others
Here's a sample structure to adapt:
Permissionless Builder Behavior: Forks, experiments, deploys across L2s Motivation: Wants tools that don’t get in the way Hangouts: GitHub, Farcaster, Twitter, hackathons Friction: Hates walled gardens, ignores marketing | Crypto-Aligned Operator Behavior: Coordinates remittances or aid via on/off ramps Motivation: Needs reliability + regulatory clarity Hangouts: WhatsApp, webinars, NGO networks Friction: Mistrusts volatility, unclear KYC flows |
Fintech Founder (Web2.5 Type) Behavior: Exploring USDC, trying to reach new users Motivation: Wants low-friction growth with real UX Hangouts: LinkedIn, podcasts, pitch decks Friction: Fears fragmentation, unclear infra risks | DeFi Degen Behavior: Swaps, farms, bridges, explores & compares Motivation: Seeks alpha + composability Hangouts: Telegram, CT, forums Friction: Overwhelmed by slow UX or legacy finance vibes |
Persona Name | Persona Name |
A single product may serve multiple personas, but your GTM strategy should start with one. The right archetype gives you language, distribution, and product focus.
Actionable Output & Templates
✓ One or more living ICP canvases
✓ Persona profiles grounded in research
↗ Product <> user alignment map: Audience <> Value Match Tool
↗ A market research flywheel that feeds comms and roadmap: Audience Interview + Survey Toolkit
↗ Tool: Mom Test Interview
↗ Target Persona Template
