#112 - Finding Your Best Customers with Andrew Michael, CEO at Avrio

#112 - Finding Your Best Customers with Andrew Michael, CEO at Avrio

Author: User Interviews December 21, 2022 Duration: 35:17

Finding your dream customers can be tricky, and knowing which customers aren’t a good fit is important. That’s where customer profiles come in handy. In this episode of Awkward Silences, Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio, discusses the importance of ideal customer profiles. Andrew draws upon his experience and shares insights on creating customer profiles, customer research methods, and tips on how to get started.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • The role of the ideal customer profile (ICP) in an organization
  • Using thermographic and demographic properties to create an ICP
  • Creating personas and segmenting audiences
  • Conducting studies and collecting data about your customers
  • How teams get ICPs wrong
  • Tips and best practices for developing and using ICPs

Highlights:

  • [00:06:03] The benefits of ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and who uses them
  • [00:08:15] Andrew discusses the details of how they developed ICPs at Hotjar
  • [00:11:34] Anti-ICP: Ruling out a large portion of your audience
  • [00:24:08] Andrew details how to discover criteria that reveal insight
  • [00:25:40] Tip: Don’t overcomplicate ICP, three or four defining characteristics are enough
  • [00:29:19] Anti-ICP: How to communicate with customers that you don’t want
  • [00:32:16] An effective ICP contributes to retention, alignment, and customer satisfaction
  • [00:35:44] Andrew's final piece of advice: ICPs “needs to be a company-wide initiative”

Sources mentioned in the episode:

About our guest

Andrew Michael is the CEO at Avrio – a software development research platform – host of Churn.FM, and Founding Member of Startup Cyprus. Andrew is also a teacher and speaker featured at the How to Web Conference 2022 and Advancing Research 2022. Before joining Avrio, Andrew worked at Hotjar, where he held leadership roles in marketing, management, and experience design. 


Awkward Silences is a conversation about the human side of building things. Hosts Erin May and Carol Guest, both VPs at User Interviews, don't just talk about theory-they get into the messy, real-world practice of talking to users and making sense of what they say. Each episode pulls back the curtain on the craft of user research, featuring candid chats with the practitioners who do this work every day. You'll hear stories about navigating tricky interviews, the weight of interpreting qualitative data, and how genuine understanding directly shapes better products and smarter business decisions. This isn't a dry lecture; it's a geeky, relatable dive into the questions and quiet moments that define UX research. The Awkward Silences podcast lives in the intersection of technology and business, focusing on the people and processes that connect them. Listen for practical insights, empathetic strategies, and the occasional shared laugh about the inevitable fumbles that come with trying to understand anyone. It’s for anyone who believes that building effectively starts with listening well.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

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