Defining and Validating Your Ideal Customer Profile with Alicia Carney, ex Deliveroo [Path to Market

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Defining and Validating Your Ideal Customer Profile with Alicia Carney, ex Deliveroo [Path to Market - Seedcamp Podcast]

Apr 11, 2025

In this insightful episode of “Path to Market”, Director Natasha Lytton and co-host Micah Smurthwaite, Partner at Pipeline Ventures, are joined by Alicia Carney, a seasoned product marketing expert with extensive experience at high-growth startups like Deliveroo. Together, they dive deep into identifying and validating Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in pre and post product-market fit stages. Alicia shares her insights on navigating early market fit through to scaling operations post-product market fit.

Here’s what’s covered:

01:01 - 01:36 | Pre-Product Market Fit Strategies
01:36 - 02:30 | Validating Customer Assumptions
02:30 - 03:50 | Effective Customer Interviews
03:50 - 05:04 | Identifying ICP and Pain Points
06:23 - 07:39 | The Importance of Customer Feedback
07:39 - 08:54 | Retention vs. Acquisition Strategies
08:54 - 10:15 | Post-Product Market Fit Tactics

Watch it here or add it to your episodes on Apple or Spotify 🎧 chapters for easy navigation available on the Spotify/Apple episode.

The conversation also covers:

How to align team dynamics to enhance your go-to-market strategy;
How product marketing teams can bridge gaps between sales, engineering, and product teams;
The importance of empathy in customer relations;
Rapid iteration techniques;
Assembling evidence-based messaging;
The importance of ‘niching down’ to find the right audience;
Tools and methodologies for user interviews and pain mapping.

Key takeaways:

Define and validate ideal customer profiles (ICP) through market needs and user research
Be intentional and thoughtful about who you are serving and the value you offer
Focus on empirical metrics and continuous customer engagement.

Learn more about validating your ICP

To learn more from Alicia Carney, subscribe to her newsletter, Customer Focus, where she helps founders and PMMs grow their companies faster by putting customers at the heart of everything. Subscribe for tips, tricks, hard lessons, and free frameworks based on 14+ years in the product marketing trenches. Subscribe here:

Show notes:

Alicia Carney
Natasha Lytton
Micah Smurthwaite
Interview guide link: http://bit.ly/3tJubmC
Establishing an ideal customer profile (ICP) by Notion VC
Market research platforms: userinterviews.com, pollfish.com, gong.io, grain.com

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