Here's how you can pinpoint and reach your ideal customer base when launching an Entrepreneurship career.

Identifying need is perhaps the single most important step of the entrepreneurship journey. If you misidentify a need (or worse: attempt to manufacture a need), you risk wasting years of productivity and unknown quantities of capital. Many say to use your own personal pain as a starting point. I believe this leaves much of the world with unmet needs. Instead, look towards inequality as a symptom of unmet needs. To build a business that meets a need and reduces inequality is to have successfully fought the uphill battle that is entrepreneurship. At Coldrays, we identified that only 8% of people living in the world's hottest climates have access to air conditioning. On a warming planet, that represents a massive need for cooling.

Customer engagement is truly the key to unlocking the mysteries of their needs. It's like you're delving into their minds and hearts to understand what makes them tick. By listening actively to their thoughts, desires, and grievances, you can gain a deeper understanding of their pain points, which can then inform your product or service development. This personalized approach not only allows you to tailor your offerings to their specific needs but also fosters a sense of connection and trust that can help build long-term customer loyalty.

Identifying needs is more than market research; it’s about deeply understanding your customers’ challenges and aspirations. By truly listening and responding, you create meaningful connections, foster loyalty, and craft solutions that resonate and inspire.

Focusing solely on identifying customer needs can limit innovation. While understanding customer pain points is crucial, Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." True innovation often comes from anticipating needs before customers realize them. Engage with customers to gather insights, but don't be afraid to think beyond their current expectations. Innovate boldly, and you'll create solutions that redefine the market.

Creating detailed customer personas is essential for understanding and targeting your ideal customers effectively. At Jelloow, we developed semi-fictional characters representing different market segments based on thorough research. These personas included demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits, which helped us tailor our marketing efforts, product development, and overall business strategy. This approach enabled us to resonate with each segment's specific needs and preferences, fostering stronger connections with potential buyers and enhancing our market success

Crafting customer personas can sometimes create a false sense of understanding. Personas are helpful, but they risk oversimplifying the diversity of your customer base. Steve Jobs never relied on customer data to drive innovation; he focused on creating products people didn’t even know they needed. Use personas as a guide, but continually validate and update them with real-world feedback. Stay adaptable and responsive to actual customer behavior to stay ahead.

Crafting a value proposition goes beyond stating benefits; it’s about articulating how your unique solutions transform lives. By clearly communicating your impact, you build trust, inspire loyalty, and create lasting relationships with your customers.

Your value proposition is the promise you make to your customers, highlighting the unique benefits and features of your product or service. At Jelloow, we clearly and compellingly articulate our value proposition by focusing on how our tailored marketing agency matching service uniquely addresses small businesses' specific needs. This clarity helps us stand out in the market, explaining why customers should choose us over competitors. It's not just about what we offer, but how our service improves their marketing efforts and solves their challenges, ultimately making their lives easier.

A strong value proposition goes a beyond a simple price to performance ratio. Value is the combination of any or all of the following: - Simplicity & Usability - Aesthetics & Design - Sustainability & Durability - Trust, Reliability & History - Ethics & Morality - Knowledge & Skills - Social Capital - Safety & Security - Innovation & Excitement Think hard about the above areas where competing products or services fail to provide real or perceived value in your market. Are those areas something that customers care about? Are there accessible ways for you to add value in those areas? Much of the job of an entrepreneur is continuously assessing gaps in the thick "value armor" of long established markets.

Marketing channels are more than pathways; they’re bridges to your audience. By choosing the right platforms and crafting engaging messages, you connect authentically, spark interest, and build relationships that turn potential customers into loyal advocates.

Track and locate customers in their Den, find where they are conveying your messages through the channels available. Not all your customers could be reachable, work on ways to convey your message to the world. Create custom messages for each of your segment

Here's how we reached our first 100ish customers for two of our products. I will share the exact channels here! The secret to going forward with marketing channels is to find channels where you can find the right people. The best people to target initially are those people who are willing and open to trying out new products and supporting them. So, if you have a physical product, think of people who are on websites or follow websites like GoFundMe, Kickstarter, Shark Tank, Dragon's Dan, etc. Let's say if you have a digital product, the best platforms are ProductHunt, AppSumo, MyDeal, etc. This is how we have reached our initial customers and you can do the same!

For marketing channels, as for everything, chasing quick wins in favor of long-term compounding growth is almost always a losing strategy. After all, the house always wins. We look at building our channel and content mix as building a long-term investment portfolio. If a channel or a piece of content does not compound over time, it has a much lower net present value in our marketing mix. So how do you find marketing channels that compound their growth over time? You ensure the answer is yes to these three questions: 1. Does the channel have limited ongoing fees? 2. Does the channel have a growing audience? 3. Does the channel favor high-quality evergreen content over the latest trend or fad?

Recently I was working with one of my SaaS clients and they wanted to build a strong feedback loop which they were missing. Here's what we exactly did: 1. Instructed their chat support team to be the first point in the feedback loop. Whenever they get a chat and it is related to any issue in the product, they were supposed to report it in a certain format as per the SOP we created. 2. This input would go to a database which was then observed by the product managers and an AI tool which would give us a daily summary of all the issues reported. 3. Out of the observations, the product manager along with suggestions from the support team would either create a feature request or an update request in a board. Prioritize them by ICE score.

Don't let feedback loops trap you in incremental improvements. While feedback is essential, it can also lead to a focus on minor tweaks instead of groundbreaking changes. As Elon Musk puts it, "Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster." Encourage feedback, but balance it with visionary thinking that drives significant innovation. Aim for transformative improvements that leapfrog the competition.

I believe in the power of community building in reaching out to the target audience. Through communities one can really connect and understand various aspects of how the potential users find your product. This is the most valuable way currently that tech startups are engaging with the audience through creating ecosystems. As an entrepreneur, you can invest some time in either building a suitable community in your space or join other relevant communities and become active in contributing. This gives you a very sustained long term results.

Identifying the right customer base starts with pinpointing the most critical pain points and aligning them with the product's strongest features. For example, if your software excels in streamlining workflows, focus on targeting businesses that struggle with process inefficiencies. This approach helps reverse-engineer the ideal product-market fit.