Stop Building for Everyone: How to Find Your Ideal Users
One of the biggest mistakes I see developers make (and I’ve definitely been guilty of this too) is building a solution before truly understanding the problem. We get a cool idea, fire up our favorite editor, and start coding. But a week later, we realize we aren’t actually sure who would use the thing we just built.
This is why audience research is the absolute foundation of marketing. If you try to talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one. Your messaging becomes generic, your features get bloated, and your project loses its focus.
The trap of building in a vacuum
Think of audience research as "requirements gathering" for your marketing. Just like you wouldn't start a large-scale enterprise project without a spec sheet, you shouldn't start a marketing campaign without knowing who your ideal user is.
When you know your audience, you stop guessing. You know exactly which subreddits they hang out in, what kind of jokes they find funny, and most importantly, what kind of problems keep them up at night. This saves you hours of wasted effort on platforms where your users don't even exist.
Simple tools for getting inside your users' heads
You don't need a massive budget to get insights. Since we are technical people, we can use tools to gather data and turn it into a strategy.
Social Listening Before you build or post anything, go to where the conversations are already happening. Search Reddit, X, or specialized Discord servers. What are people complaining about? If you see ten people in a week asking "How do I do X with React?", you have just found a potential audience.
Analytics If you already have a blog or a landing page, tools like Google Analytics or privacy-focused alternatives like Plausible are gold mines. They tell you which of your pages people actually care about and where they are coming from. If 80% of your traffic comes from LinkedIn but you are spending all your time on TikTok, your data is telling you to pivot.
Surveys and Conversations Sometimes the best way to understand people is to just ask. A simple Google Form or a "What are you struggling with today?" post on Dev.to can give you more insight than any algorithm ever could.
Building your user persona
In the marketing world, they call this a customer persona. For us, it is basically a profile of your ideal user. Instead of saying "My project is for developers," try to be more specific.
Maybe your persona is "Freelance Web Developers who struggle with CSS Grid." Or perhaps it is "Junior Pythonistas looking for their first job."
When you have a specific person in mind, your writing becomes much more natural. You stop writing "technical documentation" and start writing "helpful guides for a friend."
How empathy drives better campaigns
At the end of the day, marketing is an exercise in empathy. It is about being able to look at your project through someone else’s eyes.
When you have empathy for your audience, you stop shouting "Look at my cool feature!" and start saying "I know this specific thing is annoying, so I built this to make your life easier." That shift in perspective is what turns a random viewer into a loyal user.
Wrapping up
Understanding your audience is the "pre-work" that makes everything else in this series possible. Once you know who you are talking to, you can figure out what to say to them.
In the next article, we are going to dive into Content Marketing Basics. We will talk about how to create stuff that people actually want to read, watch, and share.
I have a quick question for you: If you had to describe the "ideal user" for your current project in just one sentence, who would they be? Let's talk about it in the comments.
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