Effortless

How much of that would you have felt comfortable asking of a taxi company before Uber? So yes, by all means, start by asking your prospects what they want, and your customers what made them want to buy—that will help you populate the explicit list of things that they’re looking for.

And with each incremental step on that road, Amazon’s offer became a little bit more obvious. In the same way, investing your resources in creating a more obvious offer will make it easier for you to sell and grow, and harder for your competitors to keep up.

So for a customer avatar to be useful, we have to keep it firmly in the realm of caricature, where the mental picture of your ideal customer is simple enough to give you a clear gut sense about what they will like and how they will behave.

In this example, the red bull’s-eye is your ideal customer avatar. You won’t always hit it, and you can still celebrate the other customers who find their way to you. But you still need that precisely defined bull’s-eye to aim for, because you can’t hit a fuzzy target.

The first mistake entrepreneurs make is selecting a customer avatar that is just way too broad. In an effort to keep the doors open to as many potential customers as possible, the net has been cast so wide that the avatar isn’t specific enough for you to make any useful decisions

So what can they do but start making things up? Almost invariably, the result reads like a much-too-long online dating profile, so overloaded with information that it’s hard to tell the relevant details from the red herrings.

So entrepreneurs overcorrect, going from not enough detail to having way too much.

obvious, resonant, and intuitive are like beauty in that they exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Female Mid-fifties Married with kids Living in a big city Upper-middle-class professional Well-educated, probably holding an advanced degree Politically liberal-leaning Spiritually inclined, regardless of religious affiliation