What is ICP, and how to actually write yours

ICP (ideal customer profile) is a description of the specific kind of customer who buys quickly, gets real value, and sticks around — not a demographic slide, and not “everyone who could theoretically use this.”

Most founders think they have one and actually have a vague paragraph that could describe half the market. A real ICP answers three questions plainly: who they are, what problem makes them go looking for something like you right now, and what tells you a prospect is a good fit versus a bad one before you waste a call on them.

Write it as a short file — ICP.md — and be honest about the boring parts: company size, budget, how they currently solve the problem badly. The value isn’t in sounding sophisticated; it’s in being specific enough that a cold-outreach draft or a landing page can be written against it instead of written generically and hoping it lands.

Once you have it, every outreach and positioning workflow gets sharper — Claude can write to a specific person instead of guessing at one. See the cold-outreach playbook for exactly how it plugs in.