How to find your startup’s target audience: A step-by-step guide

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You’ve spent months building what you think is the perfect product. You launch, and… nothing. No customers, no excitement. What went wrong?

In most cases, it's because founders don’t know who their product is really for. You can build the most amazing thing in the world, but if you don’t know who’s going to use it, no one will.

Finding the right audience can make or break your startup. If you try to build something for everyone, you’ll often build something for no one.

But when you focus on the specific group of people who really need what you're building, are willing to pay for it, and will become loyal users, you set yourself up for success.

So how do you find that group? In this guide, we’ll walk you through this process, with examples of startups that have done it successfully.

What is a target audience

A target audience is the group of people who are most likely to need, use, and pay for your product.

These people usually have something in common. It could be their age, income, location, or even their habits and values. Your target audience isn’t the whole world, but rather the people most likely to become your customers.

Here are a couple of examples:

  • A fitness app might target young adults who are health-conscious and tech-savvy.
  • A B2B software startup could focus on small and medium-sized businesses struggling to manage customer service.

When you know your target audience, you can focus your marketing efforts and build a product that fits their needs. This means less wasted time and money, and better chances of success. Here’s how to do it.

How to find your startup's target audience

Here's a simple step-by-step process you can follow to define your startup's target audience

1. Start with the problem

The most important question to ask yourself is: What problem is your startup solving?

This might sound simple, but many founders jump ahead, thinking about the product or the audience without really nailing down the problem first.

The problem defines your audience. The people who experience that problem are the ones who need your solution.

Take Dropbox, for example. Dropbox wasn’t built for everyone who uses the internet, even though millions use it now.

Drew Houston, the founder, was solving a very specific problem—he was frustrated by how hard it was to manage files across different devices.

Dropbox was designed for people like him, people who needed a simple way to store and share files across computers. That group was their initial target audience. From there, they grew.

If you start with the problem, you can narrow your focus to the types of people who need your solution.

For instance, if you're building a budgeting app, your target audience might be cash-strapped university students trying to manage their spending. The more painful and urgent the problem, the more eager your audience will be for a solution.

2. Define the people impacted by the problem

Once you've identified the problem, it’s time to think about who is experiencing it. And importantly, who has the most to gain from using your product.

This is where you can start to break down your target audience using three main categories:

  • Demographics: Things like age, gender, income, and location.
  • Psychographics: Their interests, values, and lifestyle.
  • Behaviours: Where they spend their time, what they buy, and how they behave online.

For example, when Airbnb first launched, they targeted budget-conscious travellers who were attending conferences and couldn’t find affordable hotels.

Their audience was defined by age (millennials), income (low to medium), and behaviour (tech-savvy and willing to stay in strangers’ homes).

Over time, Airbnb expanded to families and business travellers, but in the early days, their focus was much narrower.

To really understand who you're targeting, create customer personas. A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on real data and interviews.

You can use free tools like HubSpot’s Persona Builder to help you map out these details.

The better you know your audience, the easier it is to build something that fits their needs.

3. Talk to potential customers

You’ve figured out who you think your audience is. Now, it’s time to talk to them.

Talking to potential customers is the fastest way to validate your assumptions. You don’t need fancy research tools—just honest conversations with real people.

Find 5 to 10 people who fit your audience profile and ask them about their problems. How do they solve the problem now? What frustrates them? What would make their life easier?

When Joel Gascoigne had the idea for Buffer, he didn’t jump straight into building the product. Instead, he created a simple landing page that explained what Buffer was.

The page had a "Sign Up" button, but when people clicked it, they were told the product wasn’t ready yet, and they could leave their email address to be notified.

Joel reached out to everyone who signed up, asked them about their social media challenges, and used their feedback to refine the product before he built it.

This is a great example of validating your audience and idea without wasting time or money.

By talking to people, you’ll gather valuable insights that will help you refine both your product and your audience.

Ask open-ended questions like, “What’s the biggest challenge you face in [problem area]?” or “How do you currently solve this problem?” These conversations will guide your next steps.

4. Use data to refine your audience

Once you have some users, start gathering data on them. This will help you understand which segments of your audience are most engaged with your product.

Tools like Google Analytics can show you who’s using your product, how they’re using it, and which features they like. This is where early-stage data is incredibly valuable.

For example, when Instagram launched, it wasn’t the photo-sharing app we know today. It started as Burbn, an app for checking into locations, like Foursquare.

However, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger noticed that users were much more interested in sharing photos than checking in at places.

Based on this data, they pivoted and turned Instagram into a simple photo-sharing app, which became wildly successful.

If you notice certain features or types of users are driving more engagement, focus on those. Use the data to refine your target audience and your product.

5. Experiment with narrowing and expanding

There’s often a tension between narrowing your focus and expanding your reach. Narrowing your audience makes it easier to build a product they’ll love. But if you narrow it too much, you risk limiting your potential growth.

Take Facebook, for example. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook only for Harvard students. After proving it was successful there, he expanded to other Ivy League schools, then to colleges across the U.S., and eventually to the whole world.

By focusing on a small, specific group at first, Facebook was able to fine-tune the product before scaling. But the key was that it didn’t stay small forever. It expanded once the product had proven its worth.

On the flip side, narrowing too much can be risky. If your audience is too small, you might struggle to scale.

That’s why you should always experiment with different messaging and different audience segments.

Run small marketing campaigns targeting different groups and see who responds best. Your audience will likely evolve as your product grows, and that’s okay.

Final thoughts

Finding your startup’s target audience isn’t something you do once and forget. It’s an ongoing process of refinement.

Start by identifying the problem you're solving, define the characteristics of the people who need your solution, and talk directly to potential customers to validate your assumptions.

Then use data to refine your audience, and keep experimenting with narrowing and expanding your focus.

Your product doesn’t need to be for everyone, and that’s a good thing. The most successful startups start by solving a specific problem for a specific group of people, and they build from there.

Your job is to find that group and build something they’ll love.