Audience: who exactly is the user.

The shape of a good ICP has four parts: a concrete person (name, age, city, job), an observable behaviour (what they install, what they pay for, where they spend their day), a hot trigger event (the moment last week when the current workaround failed them), and an anti-ICP (the lookalike segment you will explicitly turn away). Without all four, the ICP collapses into demographics, and demographics do not predict purchase.

The cost of a fuzzy ICP compounds. You build a feature for "users" — but Ivan needs sub-second latency for live conversation while Anvar needs accurate technical vocabulary on a four-year-old laptop. You build for both and ship neither well. Picking a wedge ICP is not narrowing your ambition; it is the only way to make the ambition shippable.

The trick is to write the ICP so concretely that a teammate can recognise the person on the street. Not "remote knowledge worker" — that's a census category. Instead: "Ivan, 31, Berlin, fintech backend, Tokyo standup at 09:00 CET, already pays $5/mo for DeepL." That sentence answers product questions; the census category does not.

Every job has three layers. The functional job is the literal task — what gets done when the product works. The emotional job is how the customer wants to feel during and after — usually the inverse of a current humiliation. The social job is how they want to be seen by others — colleagues, audience, peers. Most founders write only the functional job and wonder why their copy lands flat. The emotional and social jobs do the selling.

Christensen's "forces of progress" sharpen this further. There are pushes (the pain of the status quo), pulls (the appeal of the new solution), anxieties (fears about adopting), and habits (the muscle memory of the old way). A purchase happens only when push + pull exceed anxiety + habit. If your product is stuck, you usually have a pull problem — but you fix it by attacking anxiety and habit, not by adding features.

The discipline is to write all three layers as full sentences, in the customer's voice, anchored to a specific moment. Not "save time on meetings" — say "stop being the slow one on the Tokyo standup". The first is a benefit; the second is a job.

The rule has three corollaries. First, never describe your idea before the interview — descriptions trigger compliments, and compliments are noise. Second, ask about specific past instances ("the last time this happened") rather than abstract opinions ("would you use this?"). Third, look for stories, not adjectives. A real pain produces a story; a polite interest produces "sounds cool".

Compliments are lies; commitment is truth. Commitment is when the user gives up something real — time, money, reputation. A user who says "I love it" without giving you their work email is performing. A user who introduces you to a colleague within 48 hours, or pre-pays $5, or screen-shares their current workaround unprompted, is telling you the truth.

Run five interviews before you write a line of code. Then five more after the prototype. The signal is not in any single conversation; it is in the pattern of stories you keep hearing across five users who don't know each other. If three of them describe the same humiliation in their own words, you have a job. If they each describe a different problem, you have a feature wishlist and no product.

Good channels share three properties: high density of the wedge persona, low cost of listening (no paid analyst reports, no gatekept communities), and a culture of behavioural disclosure (people describe what they actually did, not what they think they should do). Reddit, niche Discords, Slack communities and YouTube comment sections beat LinkedIn and Twitter on all three. The signal is in the venting; the venting is the unfiltered job.

The right way to use a channel for discovery is to lurk first, search the back-archive for the exact pain phrasing, then post a single bait question without selling anything ("Anyone on a team where standups go in two languages — how do you handle it?"). Count the qualified replies. Five real stories in 72 hours is enough to validate the wedge; zero replies after two well-targeted posts is a signal to either refine the question or accept that the pain is not where you thought it was.