Find your Persona with Analytics

Identifying ideal customers is among a startup's top priorities.

It helps them invest their resources building for, and supporting the right customers ??

Recently I learned that startups use Analytics to identify their Persona (if you aren't familiar with this concept UX planet wrote this cool article about it).

Here is how startups achieve that ??

. . .

#1. They isolate power users

If anyone can’t spend a day without using their product, then the chances are this is their Persona.

They typically use a power user analysis: the % of active users who use their product up to 7 days / week (up to 30 days / month for consumer app)

#2. They isolate paying users

As crucial as isolating power users, startups isolates their paying users, typically:

• using a track event only paying users triggered, ex: event attached to a premium feature
• by adding a user trait based on their price plan, ex: plan = pro

Paying and Power users are complementary views or who currently pay for their product (paid users), and who enjoy using it the most (power users).

#3. Enrich w/ meaningful trait

Now that they have this list, they seek commonalities between users:

• role
• company size
• industry
• level of expertise
• you name it!

To do that at scale, startups collect information about their users and attach them to the user using "user trait". Trait looks like this and happens when they identify users in their products:

To collect these traits, startups use 3 main methods, they:

• they ask questions during onboarding
• automatically enrich users' data w/ tools like Clearbit
• Check users out on Linkedin (manual)

#4. Find commonalities & Confirm

Once users with their traits are listed, they start grouping users by commonalities.

They use Personas or similar methods.

#5. Put things into perspective

This is where stepping back is critical.

Once startups know whom most benefit from their product, they confirm the persona they target with additional questions, such as:

• market trend/untapped needs
• willingness to pay
• competitive landscape
• product expectation (a proxy for NPS)

. . .

Seeing people using analytics to isolate persona wasn't something I expected and truly feels magical when I saw it the first time ???

Startups frequently use Analytics to find out their persona, and so can you!

Hope this framework benefits you!

if you're getting started with Analytics and Persona check out June the Product-Led Analytics for startups ??

take care

Enzo