ICP here means "ideal customer profile" not "Insane Clown Posse"
Are you saying I can't get 10x more customers than I expected by targeting Juggalos?
I thought about "Internet Computer"[1] (yet another cryptocurrency that was supposed to fix everything), and it made me curious since I didn't think it would bring any customer.
Ideal customer profile makes much more sense.
[1] https://internetcomputer.org/
Hey, now people won’t have any reason to click through.
This is the most under appreciated principle for building a business, the one that’s most easy to relax and the one that requires most amount of self discipline and self control for CEOs and founders.
I was a contractor at a consulting company once who decided to follow this approach. They decided their ideal customers one who wanted a lot of butts in seats, so stopped doing training unless the client also agreed to contracting, and stopped taking small clients.
I had a training gig for reasons to complicated to explain. All they had to do was send out the class notes and bill the customer for three times what I got from teaching the course.
They refused to do it because it did not fit their ideal customer profile.
It took about a year for the company to go under.
It’s possible for a company to completely misidentify their ICP, typically because it’s what they want their ICP to be rather than who it is. It sounds like that happened in your case: they wanted to target a customer that either didn’t exist or who their contracting services were a shockingly poor fit for.