You’ll finish this lesson convinced that working without an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is reckless. By seeing how three well-chosen ICPs make marketing and sales dramatically easier, you’ll feel the cost of operating blind—and you’ll be ready to define your own in the next section.

Why an ICP Isn’t “Nice to Have” but Mission-Critical

Early on it feels sensible to “help anyone who needs analytics.” Reality: you spend evenings on demos that stall, rewrite proposals four times, and still close at random. The missing ingredient isn’t hustle; it’s a concrete ICP.

When I began freelancing in data, any analytics project...