Imagine you have built a tool that helps businesses manage bookings. A salon can use it, a tutor can use it, and so can a consultant or a fitness instructor. When someone asks who it is for, “any business that takes appointments” feels like a reasonable answer. You can see how useful it could be in each of those businesses, and choosing only one may seem like limiting an opportunity you have worked hard to create.
Then you begin making the decisions needed to take it to market. The salon wants to coordinate several staff members, while the tutor needs recurring lessons and the instructor needs to manage spaces in a group class. Each conversation gives you another feature to consider, another benefit to explain, and another kind of customer to reach. Before long, you are trying to accommodate several different situations without knowing which one gives people the strongest reason to choose what you have built.
A product can have many possible uses, but that alone gives you very little direction. To decide where to focus, you need to understand whose situation it improves, how much that improvement matters, and what would make them change from whatever they already do. Whether you are preparing to launch or reconsidering an established offer, working through those questions helps you connect the business you want to build with the people you hope will choose it.
Look beyond the audience description.
You may already have a description of your audience that includes age, location, income, or business size. Those details can be useful when they affect what people can access, afford, or make decisions about. However, two people with similar backgrounds can have very different reasons for buying the same product, just as two businesses in the same industry can need different things because of how they operate. The description becomes more useful when it helps you understand the situation behind the need.
For our booking tool, “salon owners” gives you a group to consider, but it still leaves a lot unexplained. An owner working alone may be comfortable managing a few appointments on a phone, while someone coordinating six stylists may spend much of the day checking availability and resolving clashes. If you focus on owners who manage bookings across several staff members, you can begin asking questions that reveal how the work happens, where it becomes difficult, and whether the difficulty matters enough for them to consider another approach.
As you describe your own audience, try to explain what they are dealing with in terms another person could recognise. “Small business owners who value convenience” could describe almost anyone. “Owners who lose time coordinating appointments across staff and want a reliable way to see who is available” gives you something you can investigate. You still need to find out whether that understanding is accurate, but you now know whom to speak with and what you need to learn.
The circumstances creating the need also deserve attention. Someone may have managed comfortably with a familiar process until the team grew, responsibilities changed, or the cost of mistakes became harder to absorb. Understanding what prompted them to look for help can tell you more about the buying decision than a profile built around personal characteristics alone.
Give yourself a useful place to begin.
Choosing a more specific group can feel uncomfortable when you need customers and know that other people could benefit from your offer. You may worry that narrowing your focus means turning away opportunities before you have had the chance to explore them. That concern is understandable, but you still need a basis for deciding which needs will guide the work. Otherwise, every enquiry can change your priorities, and you may end up building a little for several groups without serving any of them particularly well.
For the booking tool, beginning with salons that coordinate several staff members would give you a more manageable set of questions. You could learn how appointments move between customers, receptionists, and stylists, then investigate whether your approach makes that process easier. A tutor might still find the product useful, but you would have a reason for prioritising staff availability over lesson planning while you test the initial direction. If what you learn points elsewhere, you can reconsider the focus with a clearer understanding of why.
When comparing possible groups, look at how often the problem occurs, what happens when it remains unresolved, and how people currently respond to it. Consider whether you can reach them, whether they can make the commitment your offer requires, and whether you have the ability to serve them well. Some answers will come from evidence you already have, while others will remain assumptions. Keeping that distinction visible helps you choose where to investigate without pretending that you have already settled the question.
If you run an established business, your current customers can give you a useful starting point. Look beyond who has bought from you and examine where the relationship has worked well, including which customers received the value they expected and what their situations had in common when they approached you. Where the work repeatedly became difficult, consider whether the cause was the offer, the way you delivered it, or a mismatch in expectations. Those patterns can help you refine your focus without discarding what already works.
Understand everyone involved in the choice.
As you investigate a particular group, you may discover that the person using the product is not the person paying for it. In our salon example, the owner could approve the subscription, the receptionist could manage the bookings, and the stylists could rely on the schedule throughout the day. Customers encounter another part of the experience when they choose an appointment or receive a confirmation. Although these people are connected to the same service, each has a different responsibility and a different reason to care about how it works.
The owner may want fewer booking errors and a clearer view of staff availability, while the receptionist needs to make changes quickly without losing track of who has been informed. A customer may simply want confidence that the chosen time is available and the appointment has been confirmed. If your sales message reassures the owner but the system creates extra work for the receptionist, the purchase may never turn into consistent use. Understanding the relationship between these needs helps you see where the experience must hold together.
This also makes the distinction between a target market and a target audience more practical. Your target market describes the customers or organisations you intend to serve, while the audience for a particular communication consists of the people you need to reach. Within the salon market, you might speak to owners about the value of changing their booking process and provide staff with guidance on using it during a busy day. Both communications support the same offer, but they have different jobs to do.
For your own business, identify who experiences the problem, who looks for a solution, who approves the purchase, and who has to live with the decision afterwards. One person may carry all those responsibilities, or they may be spread across several people. What matters is understanding enough about each role to avoid designing the entire offer around only the person who signs off on it.
Learn what they already do.
When you introduce an offer, you are entering a situation that already exists. People may be using another product, relying on a member of staff, keeping records in a notebook, or managing a problem they have become used to. Even when the current arrangement is frustrating, it may have advantages that are easy to overlook from outside. Familiarity, trust, cost, and the effort of changing can all influence whether someone sees your alternative as worthwhile.
A salon owner might agree that bookings through WhatsApp become confusing, yet still value how easily customers can ask questions and arrange appointments there. Staff already know the process, and customers do not have to learn something unfamiliar. If your tool improves scheduling but makes that relationship harder to manage, the owner has a trade-off to consider. You need to understand enough about the existing arrangement to recognise what your offer should improve and what it should preserve.
The most useful conversations often begin with something that actually happened. Ask someone to talk you through the last time they handled the task, then follow the details that reveal how they made decisions. If a booking was missed, find out how they discovered it, whom it affected, and what happened next. If they tried another tool and stopped using it, explore what led to that decision. You can ask about the time or money involved where relevant, but allow room for consequences such as embarrassment, uncertainty, or additional work for someone else.
Try to stay with their experience long enough to understand it before explaining your solution. When you introduce the product too early, the conversation can become a discussion about whether they like your idea, and you may miss the circumstances that would determine whether they use it. Someone saying that the current process works well is also useful information. Understanding why may reveal a group you should not prioritise, an advantage you have overlooked, or an assumption you need to reconsider.
Move from conversation to a real decision.
Once you understand enough to propose a response, give people an opportunity to do something that helps you test it. A positive conversation can tell you that an idea is understandable or appealing, but it leaves questions about effort, payment, and actual use unresolved. The next step should depend on which of those questions matters most to the decision you are trying to make.
If you need to know whether people understand the offer, a clear page and a discussion about what they took from it may help. If you need to understand whether staff can complete a task, you can observe them using a prototype. When the uncertainty concerns willingness to commit time and money, a clearly scoped paid pilot gives you evidence that a signup or an encouraging comment cannot provide. Each approach helps you learn something different, so choose the test around the uncertainty rather than treating every response as proof of demand.
For the booking tool, you could run a limited pilot with a small number of salons and observe how it fits into real working days. Explain what is available, what is still being tested, what support you will provide, and what the pilot costs. Before it begins, decide what you need to examine, such as whether staff keep the schedule updated, whether customers complete bookings successfully, and whether owners want to continue at the proposed price. You will then have a clearer basis for interpreting the result.
Pay attention to what your own involvement makes possible during the test. If you spend hours correcting records or reminding people to use the tool, that support is part of the experience they are responding to. Recording it helps you understand what the product can currently deliver and what still depends on you. A small pilot can give you valuable direction, but you will need further evidence to know whether the same pattern holds with more customers and under ordinary operating conditions.
Recognise what this tells you about product–market fit.
Choosing an audience gives you somewhere to focus your learning. Product–market fit goes further, concerning how well the product meets demand in that market. You could understand a group’s problem accurately and still build an offer they do not choose because the price, experience, timing, or value does not work for them. That is why a convincing audience description has to be followed by attention to what people actually do.
For products intended for regular use, continued use and retention can help you examine whether the value lasts beyond initial interest. Michael Seibel discusses this distinction in The Real Product Market Fit, cautioning against treating early customers or growth as sufficient evidence that a business has reached it. The practical implication is to keep investigating the relationship between the product and demand, even when the first response is encouraging.
The evidence you look for should reflect how your offer is meant to work. A salon booking tool should remain useful as appointments continue, whereas someone buying an occasional professional service may have no reason to purchase again the following month. In that case, you would examine whether the service delivered its intended value and whether similar customers continue to choose it when the need comes up. You also need to understand whether you can deliver that value reliably at a price that sustains the business.
When the response is weak, trace where the difficulty appears before deciding what to change. People who understand the offer but do not see a reason to try it present a different question from people who pay, begin using it, and then leave. Their reasons may reveal a need that is less important than you thought, an experience that makes the benefit difficult to reach, or expectations your communication did not prepare them for. Looking closely gives you a better chance of addressing the actual problem instead of adding features or rewriting messages without understanding what went wrong.
Carry the understanding into the design.
What you learn about your audience should influence the decisions people eventually experience. Suppose the salon pilot shows that staff coordination matters more than advanced reporting, while customers prefer to keep arranging appointments through familiar channels. That would give you a reason to prioritise a clear daily schedule, straightforward updates, and a way of working that accommodates those booking habits. It would also affect what the website explains and what a new customer needs help setting up.
Rather than leading with a long list of features, the website could show how the owner and staff keep track of appointments together. Onboarding could begin with adding staff, working hours, and existing bookings, because those steps make the tool useful in the situation you have studied. A message such as “Manage bookings across your team in one place” would give visitors a concrete benefit to consider, provided the product can deliver it. As the offer develops, the language should continue to reflect what people can reasonably expect.
The same thinking applies if you sell a service, a physical product, or another kind of experience. Understanding the circumstances behind a purchase can influence what you include, how you explain the value, what information you request, and what support people need afterwards. A clearer message may help someone recognise the offer, but the experience has to support the understanding that brought them to you.
At Femigrey, this is part of understanding what necessitated the need for the design. Before deciding what should be created or changed, we need to understand the business, the people involved, and what the work is meant to help them achieve. That gives direction to the identity, language, digital experience, and other touchpoints we develop, while helping us recognise where a design response can contribute and where the business needs to make a wider decision.
Make your understanding useful enough to act on.
You can begin bringing these ideas together on a single page. The aim is to record enough about your chosen group to guide a conversation, a test, or a design decision, while leaving room to correct what you do not yet understand. Work through the prompts below using evidence where you have it and clearly identifying assumptions where you do not.
Describe whom you want to understand first. Name a recognisable group and explain the situation creating the need. Include characteristics such as location or business size when they affect how you would reach or serve them.
Explain what they need to achieve. Describe the task or outcome in their terms, including what makes it important now and what happens when the current approach falls short.
Record how they manage today. Include the tools, people, workarounds, and compromises involved. Note what they value about the existing arrangement as well as what causes difficulty.
Identify the people involved in the decision. Consider who uses, chooses, pays for, approves, or influences the purchase, and what each person needs to understand or experience.
State the improvement you believe you can provide. Make it specific enough for someone to examine. Explain what would become easier, clearer, more reliable, or more useful, and what changing to your offer would require.
Choose what you need to learn next. Separate what you have observed from what you currently believe, then select an important uncertainty and a practical way to investigate it.
As you complete the page, pay attention to the language you use to describe the evidence. “We believe owners will pay to reduce scheduling problems” records an assumption. If three owners have paid for a pilot and two have continued at the regular price, record those events and the circumstances around them. Keeping the distinction clear allows you to learn from what happened without giving a small result more weight than it can carry.
Use the page to decide your next action, whether that means speaking with people who fit the situation, reviewing the behaviour of existing customers, or preparing a limited test. When you learn something new, return to the decisions it affects. You may need to refine the offer, change how you explain it, improve part of the experience, or reconsider whom you should focus on. Over time, that connection between understanding and action gives you a more grounded way to build than trying to accommodate everyone who could possibly use what you offer.
