|
|
Ollie Aplin
3 x Founder | Fractional Head of Growth for DTC & Shopify Brands
|
How Well Do You Really Know Your Customer?
If you’re a founder, you’ll probably say you know your customer. You can tell me their age range, where they live, and roughly how much they earn. You might even have a “customer avatar” slide sitting in a deck somewhere. And yet your ads don’t land, your emails don’t convert, and your brand feels flat. Then comes the frustration. The product’s good, so why isn’t this working?
More often than not, the issue isn’t the channel or the product. It’s the depth of understanding underneath it.
Most founders know the basics. Real understanding goes deeper. It means knowing:
- What’s prompting them to look for a solution
- What hasn’t worked for them before
- What they don’t fully trust yet
- What almost put them off
- What change they’re really hoping to see
When that depth is missing, it shows up everywhere. Ads talk about features while customers care about outcomes. Emails push urgency when customers want reassurance. Brands sound polished when customers want to feel understood.
What actually changes when you know your customer?
Real customer understanding isn’t a fictional persona with a stock photo. It’s a working reference. You should be able to answer why this product now, what alternatives they were considering, the words they use to describe the problem, and what success actually looks like for them. If your customer avatar can’t help you write an ad hook, an email subject line, or a homepage headline, it’s not finished.
This is something we got right at MindJournal. We didn’t just know who our customer was. We knew things like:
- What they loved about the product
- What they disliked
- Where they were in life when they found us
- How they were feeling day to day
- What outcome were they really buying
We spoke to customers constantly through emails, DMs, questionnaires, and conversations. Over time, patterns became obvious. Their language became our language. Their scepticism shaped what we said and what we deliberately avoided. That understanding became our north star. When something didn’t land, we didn’t guess. We went back to the customer.
This is where good intentions often fall short. Insight gathering stops too early, questions stay surface level, and clarity gets mistaken for simplicity.
If you want to build a customer avatar that’s actually useful, focus on a few fundamentals:
- Talk to five to ten real customers properly
- Ask what was happening in their life before they bought
- Ask what almost stopped them
- Read reviews, support tickets, DMs, and refund reasons
- Use their words in your ads, emails, and site copy
- Pressure test everything by asking whether your customer would actually care
The groundwork most brands skip
Building a successful brand is rarely down to one thing. Channels matter. Tools matter. Timing, team, and execution all matter too.
But none of it works if the foundations are weak.
Understanding your customer is the groundwork everything else sits on. If it’s shallow, whatever you build on top starts to wobble. Ads lose relevance. Emails disconnect. Brand drifts. You end up investing in products customers don’t want, content they don’t read, and campaigns that never quite land. Over time, things quietly crumble.
That’s why this work can’t be a one-off. As the landscape shifts, your customers’ needs and expectations shift with it. If you’re not staying close, you lose sight of who you’re building for.
Done properly and maintained, it sharpens decisions every day. Get that right, and everything you build on top has a far better chance of holding.
