Not all persona exercises are created equal. Two ways to find your target market

Data is all about measurement. But if you measure the wrong things, you will get the wrong data, and if you use the wrong data to make business decisions, your business will fail.I met Laura Klein at the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, where she did a persona exercise as part of her workshop for entrepreneurs. The talk stressed the importance of knowing when to listen and when to measure data from target customers. She explained that one of the best ways to make sure you are gathering beneficial data and listening to the right people for your specific product or service is by building different customer personas. This helps to understand your target market, and can also help in gathering the proper data.The bottom line: Whatever kind of test you are doing, qualitative or quantitative (or some mixture of the two), test the right people.Laura discussed two ways to come up with your persona that you should try.These two personas are a great base for coming up with a quick picture of your users.1. Create and Verify Provisional Personas.Who do you think your ideal client is? Laura discusses the process of creating a provisional persona. Think about who your user might be. Once you have this person in mind, go out and recruit clients based on your created persona. Then, try to sell your product. If you cannot sell your product to 8 out of 10 of those people, then your persona is not predictive; it is descriptive. They might have two hands, two legs, and are probably human, but who you think they are as clients of your product may not be correct.It might help to understand five character traits, behaviors, personality types, or goals regarding your client. See if you can name five things about this person that makes them want to use your product. When you can do that, and know the one thing that person needs, it will be much easier to go out and identify them as product users.2. Create and Understand Aspirational Personas.You can also create aspirational personas, which is your vision of the user after they have used your product. Samuel Hulick of UserOnboard.com explains that “People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.” Think about the future of your client after using your product for three months, six months, or a year, and keep that persona in mind. Like Hulick said, your client isn’t just buying a product, they’re buying better versions of themselves.Laura started using aspirational personas because she believed that the concept holds true – everybody using your product is really trying to become a better self. In order to make an aspiration persona, nail down the type of person, as well as when and where they will need to use your product.Now that you know what type of data to gather from the right people, let’s dig deeper into finding the intent of these target customers.Stop asking “will you buy this,” and find the inciting incident.If Laura could stop one thing, it would be for entrepreneurs to stop asking, “Will you buy this?” She goes into detail about this phenomenon in an article she wrote for Boxes and Arrows blog titled, “Intent to Solve.” Rather than asking the client, “Will you buy this?” ask yourself: What is their story? What is their inciting incident? The “inciting incident” is a screenwriting term that describes the moment or event that sets the hero of the movie on his or her journey. In other words, it’s the catalyst of the journey.Laura encouraged me to look up Christina Wodtke, who uses the analogy of losing weight as an example. The inciting incident in this scenario is the moment in which that person decides, “I’m going to shed these pounds today.”It could be the moment they step on a scale and see a number they’ve never seen, or the day their clothes don’t fit. It may even be the day someone they love is diagnosed with diabetes. People can have a motivation or a goal, but the moment they decide to make the change and achieve that goal is what matters.We all live with problems, but sometimes there is an inciting incident that will make us want to fix things. If you can identify that moment when your target user says, “I need something,” you can be there with your product.When people say “I would totally use your product,” try to find out how they have attempted to solve their problem in the past. Find out how they were able to solve it, and why other solutions did not help. When you are able to identify when they are ready to make the change, and you are there with the right messaging and solution, it can be an incredibly powerful tool.Find their inciting moment, and you can be at the right place at the right time when your ideal client is begging you to have their problem solved. Finding your user’s intent to solve is an easier path to uncovering if they are willing to pay for it, rather than asking them outright.A lot of entrepreneurs think, “Oh, they don’t know they have this problem yet.” However, Laura thinks that this approach is sometimes rooted in laziness.If you think you are solving a problem that people don’t know they have, she challenges you to question the problem that you are actually solving. She shared a tactic talked about by Steve Cohn, CEO of Validately. When speaking about performing validation tests, Steve talks about the question of whether or not you can get someone to pay for something with time, money, or reputation rather than wasting time with, “would you buy this,” “would you pre-order this,” or “would you buy it now.” The idea is that you don’t know whether they’ll buy it until they actually commit time, money, or reputation, right then, to buying it. This concept will also help in your interview arsenal when trying to validate your assumptions about your created personas.So the next time you find yourself in a coffee shop, focus on getting that coffee — don’t waste your time gathering unnecessary data. Develop personas and search for your customer’s inciting incident to give valuable information on why your solution will solve their problems.