Discover 201: Define Your Ideal Customer (ICP)

Most founders don’t fail because of their idea → They fail because they build solutions for problems their customers haven't actually identified as priorities.

If you don’t know exactly who your customer is — and who you are as a company — your product, marketing, and sales won’t land.

This workshop helps you fix that.

• How to differentiate an Early Adopter, an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and a User Persona.
• How to understand your customer’s real motivations and pain points
• How to align who you are with who you’re trying to reach

• Audit Your Assumptions: Map out your current beliefs about who your customer is and pressure-test them against "problem-first" thinking.
• Draft Your ICP Persona: Use a guided framework to build a detailed profile of your highest-value customer, focusing on their specific motivations and barriers.
• Build a Discovery Roadmap: Outline a step-by-step plan to validate your ICP and uncover hidden pain points.
  

By the end of the session, you’ll leave with practical, ready-to-use assets that can be immediately applied to your startup journey:

✔ A clear and usable Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) hypothesis, focused on early adopters and defining who your customer is—and is not.

✔ A concise problem statement and stronger alignment between your customer, product, and messaging, ensuring a solid foundation for future decisions.

✔ An executable next-step plan to validate your ICP, including a commitment to engage with real customers through targeted interviews.

This workshop is designed for early-stage founders seeking clarity and focus before building or scaling their solution:

• Pre-idea or idea-stage founders beginning their customer discovery journey.
• Early-stage founders refining their focus before investing in product development, marketing, or sales.
• Anyone struggling to define their customer or feeling like they’re “building for everyone.”

Date: April 22, 2026

Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Location: In-Person at the Platform Innovation Centre

This workshop was co-created and is facilitated by experienced entrepreneurs who have built and scaled real companies. Their combined expertise ensures the session is practical, actionable, and grounded in real-world founder challenges.

Tracy helps founders and teams build authentic marketing strategies that actually connect with their ideal customers. With over 16 years of experience in marketing, customer experience, and sales, she specializes in helping early-stage founders clarify their message and show up with confidence and clarity in the market.

Margaret helps mission-driven teams build better products by uncovering sharper customer insights, making smarter product decisions, and aligning teams around what actually matters. She has led global product strategy at Poynt (20M+ users, Apple and Google partnerships), driven major growth at Virtual Gurus, and shaped go-to-market strategy at Benevity. She brings deep experience at the intersection of product, growth, and execution to help teams turn ideas into scalable impact.

👉 Start with the right customer. Everything else gets easier.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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