I’ve been working with a B2B startup lately that launched with beautifully crafted Ideal Buyer Profiles.
They had the works: detailed personas with photos, fictional names, job titles, goals, pain points, buying triggers.
Six months later, these profiles still make sense, but NEW target buyers have show up. They’ve seen the product, and seen how it can apply to different use cases.
This happens often, because we can’t know what what we don’t know yet.
We create beautifully detailed buyer personas before launch, only to discover we’ve been targeting the wrong people all along.
The problem isn’t having buyer profiles — it’s treating them as fixed truth rather than working hypotheses.
My client initially targeted innovators and change-makers within large established industrial organizations and corporate end users.
But the most excited leads? Surprisingly, they’re coming from industries and sectors no one had considered.
Had they stubbornly stuck to their original profiles, they would have missed their early market entirely.
This disconnect between expected and actual customers isn’t rare — it’s the norm. The history of innovation is filled with products that found success with unexpected audiences:
I referenced Slack yesterday. They first targeted technical teams and developers. But their explosive growth came from marketing departments, HR teams, and non-technical business users who embraced a simple and focused chat interface.
Intriguingly, one of the biggest Slack alternatives has now been emerging out of Discord, a gaming platform. People love that while Slack can be pricey, it does images and video much better — and is basically free.
Twitter was originally conceived for podcasters to find each other. I know plenty of podcasters, and most now hang out on LinkedIn or Bluesky.
And as I talk about in I Need That, Play-Doh was wallpaper cleaner while Viagra was a blood pressure medication.)
The pattern gets clear: Initial assumptions about who will value your product are frequently wrong.
Product Payoff: Pinterest initially targeted women in the American Midwest interested in crafting and home decor. But when they analyzed their early adoption patterns, they discovered unexpected traction with professional designers, teachers, and international users. By quickly pivoting their marketing to include these segments, they accelerated their growth from 3 million monthly users to over 70 million in just two years.
Instead of rigid personas, I recommend my clients use this framework:
- Start with broad hypotheses about 3-4 possible customer segments.
- Create minimal marketing messages targeted to each segment.
- Test simultaneously across all segments, keeping spend deliberately low.
- Measure not just conversion but engagement quality and customer success rates.
- Double down on surprising wins—they often reveal your true market.
The most valuable insights usually come from actual usage data, NOT pre-launch theories.
Action for today: Review your customer data from the past 6-12 months. Who are your best customers? How do they differ from your initial target profiles? Are there patterns or segments emerging that you didn’t anticipate? The answers might completely change where you focus your marketing efforts.
Want to explore how to uncover your product’s unexpected market fit? Tap that reply arrow and let’s discuss how to discover who really needs your product. Or reach out to my team of product launch specialists at Graphos Product.