3 builders who never spoke to each other

Write personas you can defend, then retire them

Hold yourself to a handful of segments, justify every field you include, and cut the list by journey and value rather than by firmographics alone. Put the refresh on a calendar with a named owner, because a stale persona is worse than none: it manufactures the feeling of understanding your buyer.

The method

1. 01

   Hold yourself to a handful of personas and justify every demographic field you include or leave it out.

2. 02

   Cut your customer list by journey path, by how much value each customer extracts, by who churned fast and by how long the decision took, not just by firmographics.

3. 03

   Ask whether your current customers are who you wanted or merely who your old targeting caught.

4. 04

   Put the persona refresh on a calendar with one named owner: performance review each quarter, light interviews twice a year, a full add-merge-retire pass annually.

5. 05

   Score candidate segments against each other on size, how contested they are, fit with what you sell and how easily you can reach them.

What it returned

• Amanda Natividad finds most businesses land on two to four primary segments, with complex B2B companies going further, and insists each detail earns its place by answering why it is there.

• Amanda Natividad notes enterprise buyers in her experience always ran much longer than small and medium businesses because more departments had to approve, so the two are different audiences rather than one.

• Amanda Natividad calls this out as recency bias, and pushes for looking hardest at the customers who do not fit the profile yet succeeded anyway.

• Amanda Natividad argues a stale persona is worse than none because it manufactures a false sense of understanding, and suggests adding a persona impact section to campaign reports to keep them in view.

Sources

• What affects customer motivation?Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · What affects customer motivation? · undated
• When you're building a product, whose opinion should you listen to?Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · People are complicated · undated
• So you want to start a side hustle? Do these 4 things first.Justin Welsh · justinwelsh.me · Priority 2: Who, exactly, are you solving it for? · 2024-06-22
• How to Find (Not Guess) Your Target Audience: A Data-Driven Approach - SparkToroAmanda Natividad · sparktoro.com · Create Audience Personas · 2025-04-09