A developer's guide to why talking to "everyone" is the fastest way to learn nothing
There's a saying in the startup world: startups don't starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas — you have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything and make progress on nothing.
Chapter 7 is about the antidote: customer segmentation. Choosing who to focus on so you can actually learn something useful instead of drowning in mixed signals.
Outline
In this post, I'll break down Chapter 7 into the following sections:
- Segmentation: Why Starting Broad Kills You — How Google, Paypal, and Evernote all started narrow, and why you should too.
- Babies or Body Builders? — A real-world example of what happens when you try to serve everyone with one product.
- Big Brands or Mom & Pop? — Fitzpatrick's own painful lesson of choosing a customer segment that was way too broad.
- But What Does It Mean? — Why "students" or "advertisers" aren't real customer segments, and what happens when you treat them like they are.
- Customer Slicing — A practical step-by-step technique for narrowing down your segment until you know exactly who to talk to and where to find them.
- Talking to the Wrong People — The three traps that lead you to waste time on the wrong conversations.
Segmentation: Why Starting Broad Kills You
When we look at the big tech successes, they seem to serve the whole world. Google lets anyone find anything. Paypal helps anyone send money anywhere. Evernote backs up everyone's notes.
But here's the thing — they didn't start there.
In its early days, Google helped PhD students find obscure bits of code. Paypal helped collectors buy and sell Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies more efficiently. Evernote helped moms save and share recipes.
Every one of them started with a tiny, specific group. They nailed it for that group, then expanded. If you try to start with "everyone" as your customer, three things go wrong:
- You get overwhelmed by options and don't know where to start
- You aren't moving forward but can't prove yourself wrong either
- You receive mixed feedback and can't make sense of it
The feedback from a Fortune 500 CFO and a freelance designer will be wildly different — even if they're both technically "potential customers." If you're talking to both at once, their conflicting needs cancel each other out and you end up paralysed.
Rule of Thumb: If you aren't finding consistent problems and goals, you don't have a specific enough customer segment.
Babies or Body Builders?
Fitzpatrick shares a brilliant example. A woman had developed a powdered condiment — sweet like cinnamon brown sugar but packed with the nutrition of a multivitamin. An all-natural superfood you could survive on indefinitely.
She said it had countless uses: moms could sprinkle it on breakfast to trick their kids into being healthy, restaurants could leave it on tables as a sugar alternative, bodybuilders could mix it into protein shakes.
Sounds like a huge market, right? Wrong. She was running in circles. The bodybuilders wanted one thing, the restaurants wanted another, and the moms needed a third. Making one group happy always disappointed the others. She didn't know how to start. Even simple decisions — like what colour to use for the label — were impossible to answer because every group had different preferences.
The fix? She had to choose. She focused on moms with young kids who were already shopping at health food stores. Now she knew who to talk to, where to find them, and what they cared about.
Her next move was clever: she went to small, independent health food stores and asked them to place a few bottles of her condiment beside the breakfast foods. This was a great commitment to ask for — it gave her real shelf space and helped distinguish between stores that were just being polite and ones that were genuinely interested. She'd return in a week to check if the product sold and to talk to store owners about their experience.
Choosing a specific segment felt like losing all the other options. But it was the only way to actually make progress. As Fitzpatrick puts it: before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.
Big Brands or Mom & Pop?
Fitzpatrick shares his own painful lesson here. In one of his startups, he was thrilled that his customer segment was "advertisers." Everyone advertises somehow, so the market was practically infinite!
He talked to mom-and-pop shops, e-tailers, big brands, creative agencies, SMEs, music labels — anyone who spent money on advertising. And the result? Complete chaos.
Everything they tried sort of worked. Everything was somewhat promising. Some people were talking about paying $10,000/month while others scoffed at $10. Every new feature was moderately popular. But if they tried to cut any feature, someone would scream because it was their favourite part.
The fundamental problem: they couldn't prove themselves right or wrong. They were paying attention to so many customer types that there was pretty much always someone who liked a new idea. But making a so-so product for a bunch of audiences isn't the same as making an incredible product for one.
Eventually they noticed unusually strong signals from creative agencies who wanted to be edgy. They ignored everyone else, cut a bunch of features, and were finally able to get a clear picture of what was working and what wasn't.
But What Does It Mean?
This section is one of the most eye-opening in the entire book. Fitzpatrick describes two founders who were doing everything right — asking good Mom Test questions, pushing for commitments, using every sales meeting as a learning opportunity. And yet they were still completely confused.
After 20 conversations, they had 20 different must-have features and 20 separate must-solve problems. The more people they talked to, the more confused they got. What was going on?
Their customer segment was too broad, but in a sneaky way. They were building something for "students." Sounds specific enough, right? But think about what "students" actually means:
- A PhD student at a research university
- An ambitious teenager at a prep school
- A homeschooling parent who wants to use it with her kid
- A child in a rural Indian village self-educating through a shared computer
- A student in Africa running the app off a shaky cellphone connection
All are technically "students." But they have completely different needs, workflows, devices, budgets, and goals. These founders weren't having 20 conversations with their customers — they were having one conversation each with 20 different types of customers. That's why the feedback was so inconsistent.
The same thing happens with segments like "small businesses," "developers," or "sales organisations." They sound specific but contain enormous variation underneath.
Customer Slicing
So how do you narrow down a broad segment into something useful? Fitzpatrick introduces a technique called Customer Slicing. It's simple but powerful.
Start with a broad segment and keep slicing it into smaller and smaller sub-sets by asking these questions:
- Within this group, which type of person would want it most?
- Would everyone in this group buy/use it, or only some?
- Why does that sub-set want it? What is their specific problem?
- Does everyone in the group have that motivation, or only some?
- What additional motivations are there?
- Which other types of people have these motivations?
You repeat this process until you end up with a segment that is specific enough to find and reach in the real world.
Here's Fitzpatrick's example: Say you're building a high-end fitness gadget for busy professionals. Your first instinct might be: "finance professionals, age 25-35, living in a major city." That sounds specific, but it's actually useless — it doesn't help you make product decisions and it doesn't help you find them.
Slice further: finance professionals in London who are currently training for a marathon. Better! Now slice again: the sub-sub-subset who go to the gym during their lunch hour. Now you know exactly where to find them — at a gym in London's financial district during lunch time. You can have all the customer conversations you want for the price of a gym membership.
The key test: if there isn't a clear physical or digital location where you can find your customer segment, it's probably still too broad. Go back and slice it into finer pieces.
Once you have a bunch of "who-where" pairs, decide who to start with based on three criteria:
- Profitable or big — Is this segment worth pursuing financially?
- Easy to reach — Can you actually find and talk to these people?
- Personally rewarding — Do you enjoy working with this group?
Don't overthink it. Spend a few minutes to reach a concrete initial segment, find a few of them, and start learning. You can always broaden your segment later once you've nailed it for the first group.
Fitzpatrick adds a personal note that I really appreciate: the third factor — personally rewarding — matters more than people think. This stuff is hard work, and it can become a real grind if you're cynical about the people or the industry you're serving. Choose customers you admire and enjoy being around.
Rule of Thumb: Good customer segments are a who-where pair. If you don't know where to go to find your customers, keep slicing your segment into smaller pieces until you do.
Talking to the Wrong People
Even with good segmentation, you can still end up talking to the wrong people. Fitzpatrick identifies three ways this happens:
1. Your segment is too broad and you're talking to everyone
We've covered this extensively. If your feedback is all over the place, you're probably mixing multiple customer types together. The fix: slice your segment narrower.
2. You have multiple customer segments and missed some of them
Sometimes it's obvious — if you're a two-sided marketplace (like Airbnb), you clearly have hosts and guests as separate segments. But sometimes it's sneakier. If you're building an app for kids, you need to understand both the kids AND their parents. If you're building for public schools, you need the teachers, the students, the administration, and potentially even the parent-teacher association and tax payers.
You'll also need to worry about important partners — whether for manufacturing, distribution, or promotion. If your business relies on them, you need to understand their goals and constraints just as well as your customers'.
3. You're selling to businesses with complicated buying processes and have overlooked some stakeholders
This is the B2B trap. Don't fall into only talking to the most senior or impressive people you can find. You want to talk to people who are representative of your actual customers, not the ones who sound impressive on your status report.
Fitzpatrick admits making this mistake himself: when building interactive advertising products, he spent lots of time talking to executives and none talking to the kids who were supposed to actually love the products.
If you're in a multi-sided marketplace, yes, you need to run customer conversations separately for all the various segments. But hopefully that isn't as scary now that you know how to keep conversations casual and efficient.
Key Takeaways from Chapter 7
Startups drown, they don't starve. Too many options is the real killer. Segmentation is your life raft.
Every big company started small. Google, Paypal, Evernote — they all began by serving a tiny, specific group before expanding to the world.
"Everyone" is not a customer segment. If your feedback is inconsistent, your segment is too broad. Slice it down.
Use Customer Slicing. Keep asking "within this group, who wants it most?" until you have a who-where pair — a specific person you can physically go find and talk to.
Choose segments that are profitable, reachable, and personally rewarding. Don't just pick the biggest market — pick one you can actually serve and enjoy serving.
Watch out for hidden segments. Multi-sided marketplaces, products for kids (parents are the buyers), B2B with complex buying processes — make sure you're talking to all the relevant groups.
Don't over-plan. Spend a few minutes choosing an initial segment, go talk to them, and adjust as you learn. You can always broaden later.
This is part of my series where I break down each chapter of The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. If you're building a product and talking to customers, this book is essential reading.
Previously: Chapter 6 - Finding Conversations
Next up: Chapter 8 - Running the Process
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