Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at Google Ventures)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You have done 30 years of work and iteration and refinement. You're here just to tell us, here's the most important thing you need to know, here's how to do it, based on all that time I've spent. Help us understand, what is a bullseye customer?

**Michael Margolis** (0:09)
Every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody, but it doesn't start there. Amazon started just selling books, or Facebook was just profiles for college students. So a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
Why this of all the things that you can focus on of a startup journey?

**Michael Margolis** (0:31)
It helps you get really deep in understanding who are those people and understanding what they need. It helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting, and it just gets everybody as a team much more aligned on what are we doing and what are we doing first.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
You have this bullseye customer sprint that your book describes. You basically give people a plan for how to figure this out in a day, which sounds like a dream.

**Michael Margolis** (0:52)
The basic formula, the way I think about it, is five and three in one. So, it's five bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes. And then we conduct those interviews in one day, while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about what are the key big takeaways at the end of that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:07)
Where do you start?

**Michael Margolis** (1:08)
So, step one is...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:14)
Today my guest is Michael Margolis. Michael has been a UX researcher at Google Ventures for almost 15 years, where he's worked with over 300 companies to help them get unstuck, move faster, and build something that people want. He helped develop the design sprint method made famous by the book Sprint, and more recently wrote a book called Learn More Faster, How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product, which essentially helps you identify and refine your ideal customer profile in a single day. I've said many times on this podcast that one of the biggest mistakes founders make and product teams make is not being very clear and very narrow with their initial target market, and I've been looking for a book and a guide to help people figure this out. This book is that. And also this book is completely free and available online as a PDF. Michael is not looking to sell books or drive leads to Google Ventures. He generally simply wants people to avoid pain and avoid wasting time building something that nobody needs. In this episode, we go step by step for how to identify your bullseye customer, how to interview people, how to recruit people, and how to refine your idea to build something that people actually want. This episode is both for founders and also for product teams at larger companies who want to avoid building something that nobody cares about. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Michael Margolis.
Michael, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

**Michael Margolis** (2:44)
Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:46)
We're going to be going really, really deep on how to very clearly and also just very quickly, identify your bullseye customer, which some people refer to as ideal customer profile or ICP. There's differences there. We're going to touch on that. But you wrote a whole book about this very specific topic. I have it right here. It's called Learn More Faster, and the subtitle is important, How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Find Their Perfect Product. Interestingly, this topic has actually come up a bunch on recent podcast episodes, so I've been telling guests, hey, we're going to have a whole podcast episode about this very specific topic, which I'm very excited about. Michael, again, thank you for being here.

**Michael Margolis** (3:24)
Thank you, Atan.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:26)
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