ICP here means "ideal customer profile" not "Insane Clown Posse"
Are you saying I can't get 10x more customers than I expected by targeting Juggalos?
I thought about "Internet Computer"[1] (yet another cryptocurrency that was supposed to fix everything), and it made me curious since I didn't think it would bring any customer.
Ideal customer profile makes much more sense.
But how do magnets work?
Hey, now people won’t have any reason to click through.
This is the most under appreciated principle for building a business, the one that’s most easy to relax and the one that requires most amount of self discipline and self control for CEOs and founders.
I was a contractor at a consulting company once who decided to follow this approach. They decided their ideal customers one who wanted a lot of butts in seats, so stopped doing training unless the client also agreed to contracting, and stopped taking small clients.
I had a training gig for reasons to complicated to explain. All they had to do was send out the class notes and bill the customer for three times what I got from teaching the course.
They refused to do it because it did not fit their ideal customer profile.
It took about a year for the company to go under.
There is a big difference between targeting your product and messaging and turning away business. If you are having to turn away business, you may have the wrong ICP.
You turn away business because of the opportunity cost, not because of the profile. If you are turning away customers because you are busy servicing better ones, you are not going out of business.
It’s possible for a company to completely misidentify their ICP, typically because it’s what they want their ICP to be rather than who it is. It sounds like that happened in your case: they wanted to target a customer that either didn’t exist or who their contracting services were a shockingly poor fit for.