📖 Business
Customer Slicing
"If everyone is your customer, nobody is." Before talking to customers, you must slice — narrow your focus to a specific, reachable segment that is experiencing the problem acutely enough to take action. Fitzpatrick argues that most failed customer development efforts fail not because of bad questions, but because of bad audiences. When you talk to a broad, heterogeneous group, you get contradictory feedback that is impossible to act on. When you talk to a well-defined segment, patterns emerge within five conversations. Customer slicing is the practice of choosing who to talk to before deciding what to ask them.
2
Minutes
2
Concepts
+45
XP
1
How It Works
- A good customer slice has three properties: (1) specific and reachable — you can find them and they will talk to you, (2) experiencing the problem acutely — not mildly annoyed but actively suffering or actively spending time/money on workarounds, (3) currently investing in solutions — they have already tried to solve the problem, which proves it is real
- The "who-where" pair: define WHO your customer is (specific enough to visualize a single person) and WHERE you can find them (specific enough to go there this week). "Small business owners" is too broad. "Etsy sellers doing $5-20K/month who manage their own shipping" is a slice
- Signs your segment is too broad: after 5 conversations, you are hearing contradictory needs. One person wants simplicity, another wants power features. One has the problem daily, another has it once a quarter. Slice thinner
- Signs you have a good slice: after 3-5 conversations, you hear the same problems, the same workarounds, and the same language. You can predict what the next person will say before they say it
- Slicing is iterative. Start with your best guess, talk to 5 people, assess whether patterns are emerging, and re-slice if they are not. Each round of conversations should sharpen your understanding of who the real customer is
- Do not slice by demographics alone. "Women aged 25-35" is not a useful slice. Slice by behavior: "People who have tried and abandoned at least two budgeting apps in the last year"