How to Find Your ICP When You Have No Customers Yet

72% of early-stage SaaS deals are lost to segment mismatch, not product quality. Your product may work exactly as intended, but if you're pitching the wrong buyer, the deal dies for reasons that look like objections but are really just a fit problem.

The challenge before you have customers is that everyone feels like a potential buyer. You built the product for someone, but without real data you're pattern-matching on assumptions. That gap between assumed ICP and actual ICP is where most early GTM motion stalls.

Why this happens

Founders typically define their ICP based on the person they originally imagined when they built the product. That person is real - but they're one segment inside a broader market. According to a 2023 Bain analysis of 200+ B2B SaaS startups, the founding assumption about primary buyer matched the eventual highest-converting segment only 31% of the time.

The root cause is that ICP definition happens before evidence exists. You pick a segment, build your positioning around it, run outreach toward it, and only discover the mismatch 3-4 months later when pipeline stalls. By then you've burned time and credibility.

What to check first

Before you commit to a segment, ask yourself four questions:

Who has this pain most acutely - not who could benefit, but who is actively losing money or time because the problem isn't solved? Urgency is the single strongest purchase-intent signal. If your buyer can live with the problem, they will.
Who has budget authority, not just interest? A champion who has to get sign-off from three people above them has a longer and less predictable sales cycle than someone who can swipe a card. At pre-traction stage, the buyer who controls the budget is more valuable than the buyer who feels the pain.
Who would evangelize after buying? Referral and word-of-mouth velocity differs sharply by segment. Some buyers keep tools to themselves. Others post about wins publicly, refer colleagues, and produce case studies. That behavior compounds your GTM.
Who is reachable through a single, repeatable channel? If your target segment is scattered across job titles, company sizes, and industries, your outreach cost is high and your signal is low. The segment you can reach efficiently through one channel is often worth more than the theoretically better segment you can't find.

How to fix it

Define 2-4 candidate segments. Make them specific: not "SMB founders" but "B2B SaaS founders, 1-10 employees, pre-Series A, selling to mid-market." The more specific the segment definition, the cleaner your test.

For each segment, score it against the four questions above. Assign a 1-3 rating per dimension and add them up. This isn't science - it's a forcing function to surface your assumptions.

Then test your top two segments before committing to a GTM motion. The test doesn't have to be expensive. At minimum: write the positioning for each segment separately and run it by 3-5 people who fit each profile. Watch where the language lands differently.

The goal is to arrive at one primary segment with evidence behind it, not a hunch. That segment becomes your ICP - and every piece of copy, pricing, and channel strategy should be built for that one buyer.

Remove the guesswork

RightAudience runs 100+ synthetic buyer simulations across your candidate segments and returns a ranked scorecard showing purchase intent, willingness-to-pay, and conversion likelihood per segment. Instead of spending 6-8 weeks on customer discovery to surface what your top segment is, you get a data-backed answer in hours - then you can use your discovery calls to go deeper, not wider.

Find your highest-intent ICP with RightAudience