Episode 773 | How to Find Your Early Customer Profile (ECP)

90 snips

May 6, 2025

Maja Voje, an expert in go-to-market strategies for B2B SaaS, shares her insights on identifying early customer profiles (ECPs) and why they can be more vital than ideal customer profiles at the start. She discusses scrappy marketing tactics for effective customer acquisition and the significance of authenticity in community building. Maja provides practical advice on overcoming common pitfalls and adapting strategies based on real-world feedback, making it clear how important early engagement is for startup success.

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INSIGHT

What Go-to-Market Means

Go-to-market (GTM) encompasses pricing, positioning, packaging, and customer strategy to reach product-market fit.
It's not just marketing or sales but a holistic approach to finding a market and sustaining growth.

INSIGHT

Understanding Early Customer Profiles

Early Customer Profiles (ECPs) are distinct from Ideal Customer Profiles and represent paying early adopters.
ECPs tolerate higher risk and help startups build initial traction and references needed to move upmarket.

ADVICE

Avoid ECP Mistakes with Validation

Validate and prioritize your customer segments before scaling to avoid feature chaos and mismatched focus.
Research channels where your target customers hang out and avoid default launches on irrelevant platforms.

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In this episode, Rob Walling and Maja Voje, author of Go to Market Strategist, dive into early customer profiles (ECPs) and why they matter more than ideal customer profiles (ICPs) early on. They explore practical, scrappy marketing tactics for B2B SaaS founders and share real-world advice on customer acquisition, community building, and staying authentic while growing.

Episode Sponsor:

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years and whenever I set up a new account, I'm reminded why traditional banking feels stuck in the past.

When our previous bank faced solvency issues, we needed to spin up new accounts quickly that could handle millions in funds across multiple businesses. Mercury had us up and running almost immediately.

I manage half a dozen different Mercury accounts across a wide range of companies – from my personal, single-member LLC to MicroConf, our 7-figure global events and education platform, to TinySeed, our venture fund and accelerator. Mercury easily handles them all.

The interface is elegantly simple for daily banking, paying invoices, and sending and receiving international wires, yet powerful enough to handle the multi-step approval processes we needed to put in place when funding founders with large transfers.

Anytime founders ask me who they should set up their accounts with, I send them to mercury.com.

Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Topics we cover:

(3:02) – What Go-to-Market actually means for bootstrapped founders
(7:14) – Early Customer Profile (ECP) vs. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
(10:30) – Common mistakes founders make when choosing their ECP
(13:48) – Real-world B2B SaaS examples of successful ECP launches
(18:29) – Why GTM actions must come before GTM motions for scrappy startups
(21:52) – Warm outreach and fishing in the right forums: practical tactics for early traction

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If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!

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