Using “Mandatory Peculiarities” to Find Your First Customer Segment

As I’ve been writing the book on everything I’ve learned running Tacklebox, one thing has become blindingly clear - we spend a ton of time on customer segments but most people still mess them up.

I think it might be a framing problem. I’ve been testing out a clunky phrase with new founders that seems to help: Mandatory Peculiarities.

Here’s an example:

If you’re building an AI tool that’ll ingest data about people’s toddlers and help their parents build a customized sleep schedule, your customer segment is tougher than you might think. Do you go after parents in Brooklyn or parents in Brooklyn who have another kid and know the pain of not sleeping or first parents in Brooklyn or parents on specific Reddit threads? Or, are the kids themselves most important - ones with allergies who struggle to sleep or who have night terrors or sleep in a room with their sibling?

A good way to start whittling this down is through “mandatory peculiarities.” Living in Brooklyn isn’t a mandatory peculiarity, but maybe living right next to the bridge where there’s an enormous amount of noise is.

While they’re a mouthful, I chose both words deliberately.

Mandatory means the thing isn’t optional. Paying taxes isn’t optional, losing weight before a vacation is.

Peculiarity means the normal solutions don’t work. The customer says this sentence all the time - “I’d love to use <x common solution>, but I can’t, because of <y peculiarity>.”

“I’d love to use Baby Wise to sleep train my toddler, but we have to wake him up to give him an insulin shot so that doesn’t work” is an interesting sentence for an entrepreneur.

When you start a business, you’ll need to generate trust. The fastest way to do that is by describing mandatory peculiarities.

“You’d love to just sleep train your kid, but you can’t because you have to wake them up to give them shots. We’ve built a sleep tool as a reaction to your schedule.”

When you find a group of people who share the same Mandatory Peculiarities - that’s a customer segment.

Mandatory Peculiarities. Horribly clunky phrase (let me know if you have a better one I can use for the book), ridiculously important framing.