Lesson 05: Define Your Target Customer
Things to do before spending your first dollar on ads — why narrow, specific targeting beats broad targeting every time.
Written for Axiom Pathways.
Jack Haldrup built Dr. Squatch around one precise customer — men in their twenties and thirties frustrated with harsh commercial soap — and rode that specificity from $5M to $100M in revenue before Unilever’s $1.5B acquisition. The piece uses that story alongside CB Insights data (43% of startup failures trace to poor product-market fit) and Facebook’s Harvard-only launch to argue that vague customer definitions are functionally useless, and that research even shows “this isn’t for everyone” messaging converts better than broad appeals. It closes with a concrete method: find someone whose problem drove them to a failed solution, then talk to them before spending a marketing dollar.