I recently learned of the “Dream Customer List” approach to sales and marketing, and I love it.
The idea behind this list is simple: you think about who your best possible customer is, and you add a hundred real-world examples of them to a list. And by best customer, I really mean “dream big”: if you run a SaaS that renders movie end titles, you want to sell to Pixar or the Legendary Pictures. Maybe you run a video effects software business, so you’d put Mr. Beast and his team on that list.
What this exercise allows you to do is to contextualize the product as if you already had these customers.
And that has massive benefits, which I will share with you today. Including who is on my list, and why.
So, let’s talk “Dream Customer List.”
I’ll start with mine.
I recently realized something about Podscan, my media monitoring software business: the “time to value”, getting a new trial customer to their “a-ha! moment,” depends entirely on how quickly they can find their first mention in a podcast. If it takes a few days for the first mention to trickle in, that’s quite some time for them to wait — and I can’t assume everyone to be this patient.
But Podscan isn’t just alerting: I just recently transcribed my 5-millionth podcast episode. And the full text of those conversations lives in several databases, ready to be searched and analyzed.
That’s what made it obvious to me: if I ever wanted to attract my dream customers, I needed to start tracking their mentions long before they signed up. And for that, I need to understand who they are. Not just as a nebulous audience, or even and ICP, but the actual real people I wanted to end up using my service.
I also noticed something else over the last two weeks: my existing big-profile customers love talking about the product. From Jack Ellis of Fathom Analytics who unwaveringly tells his Twitter followers and founder peers about Podscan to Rob Walling who mentioned being a customer on the latest episode of Startups for the Rest of Us and Noah Kagan who brought it up again and again in our conversation on my podcast earlier this week, these amazing and outstanding founders are very happy with a tool that gives them insights into where they, their business, or their friends are being talked about.
In case it’s not abundantly clear yet: this is my ideal customer at this stage. Someone who already is mentioned on podcasts, wants to know when it happens, and has a sizeable audience of other successful founders to share the joys of Podscan with.
And that’s the list I created. I went through my Twitter feed and wrote down every single active amazing founder, creator, and influential person that I followed, knew, and liked.
It’s pretty much a list of all my heroes. From Sam Parr to Rosie Sherry, from Amanda Goetz to Amanda Natividad, Nathan Barry, April Dunford, Jay Clouse, Brennan Dunn — these are just a few of my Twitter friends who I admire and know that they’re mentioned on podcasts all the time.
With that list, I immediately went into my Podscan account and set up individual alerts for each of them. Now, whenever they’re mentioned anywhere on a show, Podscan will quietly note that down and add a record to their account. Over the next weeks and months, these mentions will accumulate, and very soon, I’ll have thousands of mentions gathered up neatly in my database.
And THAT will be my “time to first value” advantage for when I ultimately reach out to every single one of these customers on my Dream Customer List: I will allow them to sign up and immediately import their mentions from the database. I’ll build a “semi-public” page with their mentions, send them a link to that page where they’ll see all the things they have missed in the past, and allow them to register a new account with all their data right from that page.
They’ll hit the ground running with actionable data that was custom-collected just for them.
THAT is the power of a Dream Customer list: targeted preparation at scale.
Its biggest benefit is that you actually have a list of prospects that you can start reaching out to long before they’re customers. Of course, it’s unlikely that your 2-month old SaaS business will land a client like the movie studio that created the most recent Dune movie. But the old adage of marketing —the rule of seven— is also true about getting on someone’s radar long-term: it takes seven (or more) touchpoints before someone considers working with you. And having a list of “future customers” makes this a much more achievable goal.
If you know who you’re going to sell this product to, you also know what the product needs to look like for them.
Let’s get back to Jack, Rob, and Noah who are already using Podscan. With every single one of these amazing people, I had extensive DM exchanges about the usability of the product, missing features, and things that it didn’t do well enough just yet. They have formed the product to suit them better by just talking to me. And I have zeroed in on customer-product fit because I listened.
So why not stick to this group? I know who they are, where they hang out —as I am deeply embedded in their communities— and I have the means to reach them through pre-warmed connections. Clearly, this is a customer segment that it’s worth putting in extra effort for.
And yet, I need to be careful not to dream too big. My Dream list tops out at the celebrity level of Tim Ferriss, who is the biggest name on the list. Tim’s a celebrity who might still be able to go shopping without being hounded by the press. From my data, I know he’s mentioned a few dozen times each day. But that’s still meaningful and manageable data. I am intentionally not aiming higher: no Taylor Swift, no Arnold Schwarzenegger, and definitely no Elon Musk: some people are mentioned way too often and frankly don’t care about that anymore. I’m looking for popular, not famous.
Deciding who is not going to be on my list was just as important as who would make the cut.
That goes for the lower bound, too. Podscan can definitely serve yet-to-be-popular founders and creators who want to explore the wide landscape of podcasts, book placements, and learn more about who appears where. But the culminating use case, the overlapping Venn diagrams if you will, lies with already (somewhat) popular people who I have direct access to.
I learned something from the CMO of Paddle last week: over 30% of successful startups jumpstart their customer base through the personal network of the founders.
Well, that’s what’s happening here.
And the Dream Customer List is the guidebook for it.
So here’s a rundown of creating your own list:
- Define your “overripe” customers so you know who to exclude from the top
- Define your “not ripe yet” customers for lower-bound exclusion
- Start listing the people whom you want to talk about your product
- For each item, add a link to their best social media profile and the name of their brands, either personal or the businesses they work on/in
- Feel free to paste that list into ChatGPT and ask it to fill it up to 100 items when you run out of ideas.
What you’ll end up with is a battle plan for the next months or years. You WILL get to these customers eventually, so take time often to reflect on what you can do today to leverage a positive interaction in the future.
And then, start working on making the dream a reality.
