Write down who it is actually for

You may have arrived from the six questions, in which case you already know the diagnosis. Most people put nearly all their effort into the thing and almost none into anyone finding out it exists. Usually the thing was fine and nobody was ever told. This step is the first move against that, and it will feel like admin.

Independent retailers who need better systems. People who run events. Landlords with two or three properties. Each of those reads like an answer because it has a noun in it, and each of them is a category rather than a person. Write one down, then go looking for somewhere to stand in front of those people. You will find nowhere at all, because categories do not gather. Rooms are what gather, and nobody has ever joined a group called landlords with two or three properties.

So everything stalls at the first move. The description was not wrong. It was unusable, which is worse than wrong, because wrong gets corrected and unusable just sits there looking sensible for a year.

I think the vagueness is deliberate. A narrow description closes doors you have not walked through yet, and leaving them open feels like keeping the business alive. It is not that, it is keeping the work invisible while feeling responsible.

The rules

One person, not a segment. Somebody you could recognise across a room. A role, a situation, a moment in the week when the problem bites hardest. The full argument for one person rather than a market is made in ship-an-app-without-a-dev-team, step 1, and it holds here without change. What this step adds is the test in the next rule.

A description that names no place is not specific enough. This is the test and it is most of the step. If you cannot name three places your person already goes, you have written a mood instead of a description. Rewrite until places appear. They appear the moment the description gets narrow enough to feel slightly awkward.

Say what the problem costs, not what your thing does. What goes wrong for them on a Tuesday afternoon. What they redo, what they lose, who they have to apologise to. A problem with nothing attached to it is a preference. Nobody goes looking for the solution to a preference, and nobody forwards one to a colleague either.

Narrow is not smaller. Narrow is findable. Cutting the description down does turn away people who would have paid you. That is a real cost and pretending otherwise is silly. It is still the right trade, because a hundred reachable people beat a hundred thousand you have no route to, and you have no route to any of them today.

Write down who it is not for, and mean the last line. Three entries, starting with the people who want the cheap version of this. People who want it to do the other thing as well. People who have the problem, recognise the problem, and have quietly decided to live with it forever. That last group is the largest and it will drain a year out of you.

Do it now

Open a file called who.md and fill in this shape. Keep the whole thing under a page.

Person:
Problem, in their words:
What it costs them:
Where the problem bites (day, moment, trigger):
Three places they already go:
  1.
  2.
  3.
Not for:
  -
  -
  -

The person line takes one sentence. The problem line takes their language, not yours, so write it as something you have heard a person say out loud. If you have never heard anybody say it, write that down as a note to yourself, because it matters more than the rest of the file.

Then do the three places. A place is somewhere with a name you could type into a browser or walk into. A forum, a subreddit, a trade body, a local meetup, a supplier's comment section, a newsletter with a reply address, a Facebook group, a WhatsApp group somebody would have to add you to. Name each one specifically. Write the actual name, not the type of thing.

If the third place took more than a few minutes to find, cut the description narrower and look once more. Do that twice at most. If a third place has not appeared by then, write down the two you have and stop. Two named places is a finished step.

A worked example

Say you built a simple booking-and-reminders app for independent hairdressers. It works. Three people use it, and you knew all three before you started. Your first draft of the person said small salons. That named no place at all, so you cut it narrower twice.

This is who.md after the second cut.

Person:  A self-employed hairdresser renting one chair in somebody else's salon
Problem, in their words:  Clients forget, don't turn up, and the chair sits empty on a Saturday
What it costs them:  A lost fee per no-show, and Friday evenings spent texting reminders by hand
Where the problem bites:  Saturday at ten, first client missing, after a Friday too busy to send reminders
Three places they already go:
  1. Chair Renters North, a Facebook group for self-employed stylists
  2. Solo Stylists Board, a web forum for hairdressers who work alone
  3. The comments under Kettleby Hair Supplies' weekly how-to video
Not for:
  - Stylists who want the free version, whatever it leaves out
  - Stylists who want payroll and stock control in the same app
  - Stylists who hate no-shows and have decided to live with them

It feels narrow. It is meant to.

The failure you will hit

You will widen it the moment it feels small. Two days after writing something usefully narrow you will add an "and also" clause, then another, and the places will stop being findable again. The widening always arrives dressed as commercial sense. Watch for the second noun. One clean person with one clean problem survives contact with the next four steps. A composite of three people survives nothing, because there is no room anywhere that contains all three of them.

Not for you if

You sell to whoever walks past and you are fine with that, in which case narrowing will only cost you trade. Come back when you need a route to people who have never heard of you.

Step 2 takes the places you named and turns them into somewhere you actually turn up. The Vault is the paid library.