How to Become the Ideal Supplier Profile for an Unattended ICP
When a structural change creates a new group of customers, there is a clear ideal customer profile and no ideal supplier profile to match it. Nobody has defined what good looks like, so the first credible provider does not compete for the position, they set it. The work is not being first to notice. It is being first to publish a standard the customer can measure everyone else against.
The asymmetry nobody names
Sales teams talk endlessly about the ideal customer profile: the company size, sector, budget and trigger that make someone a good fit. There is no equivalent term for the other side, and the absence is telling.
For established markets that is fine. When a customer wants accounting software or a plumber, they know roughly what a good supplier looks like, because thousands of suppliers have taught them over decades. The category has a shape.
New economies do not have that shape yet. A few hundred thousand people acquire the same problem within a couple of years, and there is no established idea of who should solve it, how it should be priced, what is included, or what counts as competent. There is an ideal customer profile, obvious to anyone looking, and no supplier profile at all.
That gap is a temporary blue ocean. It closes, and it closes faster every year, but while it is open the economics are unlike anything in a mature market: you are not being compared, because there is nothing to compare you to.
Why first credible beats first
Being first to notice is worth very little. Plenty of people notice.
What matters is being the first to do the thing that makes a category legible: publishing what the standard should be. A checklist, a pricing structure, a definition of scope, a benchmark, a set of terms. The moment that exists, customers use it to evaluate everyone, including the people who arrive later.
This is why small operators can win positions that look like they should belong to large companies. Incumbents will not enter a market of four thousand customers, and by the time it is worth their attention, the standard is already written and it has someone else’s name on it.
The five moves
1. Name the customer before anyone else does
Not the market, the person. “Homeowners with a battery installed by a firm that has since gone out of business” is a customer. “The energy storage market” is not.
Naming forces specificity, and specificity is what makes the next four moves possible.
2. Publish the standard
Write what good looks like: what a competent provider should include, what questions the customer should ask, what warning signs matter, what a fair price range looks like.
Doing this feels like helping competitors. It is, slightly. It also makes you the reference, and the reference gets the enquiries.
3. Serve a narrower group than feels comfortable
The instinct in a new market is to serve everyone, because volume is scarce. It is the wrong instinct. A supplier profile only forms around a defined customer, and if you serve everyone you are describable only as generic.
Narrow enough that the customer recognises themselves in your description immediately.
4. Publish evidence, not claims
New markets are full of assertion and short on proof. Numbers from real jobs, before-and-after figures, what went wrong and what it cost. In a category with no track record, showing your own is disproportionately powerful.
5. Build the vocabulary
Categories crystallise around words. If you name the problem, the stages, the failure modes or the metric, other people adopt your language and you become the origin of the framing. That is a durable position that does not depend on being cheapest.
What this looks like in practice
Say a regulation requires a certain type of assessment for buildings under a size threshold that large consultancies ignore.
The ideal customer profile is obvious: owners of buildings in that band, with a deadline, no in-house expertise and no idea who to call.
The ideal supplier profile does not exist. Nobody has said how long the assessment should take, what it should cost, what should be in the report or how often it should be repeated.
You publish that: a scope, a price range, a sample report, a checklist for choosing a provider. Six months later, other providers are answering questions framed the way you framed them, and enquiries arrive from people who found the checklist rather than found you.
That is the position. It was available because the market was young and too small to interest anyone large.
When the window closes
It closes when comparison becomes easy. Directories appear, review sites index the category, aggregators sell leads, and customers arrive with three quotes.
At that point the position you built is still valuable, but the game changes to reputation and efficiency rather than definition. The businesses that suffer are the ones that never built a position at all and were competing on price the whole time without noticing.
The practical advice is to treat the early period as a land grab for definition rather than for revenue. Revenue follows the position. It rarely works the other way round.
Free: the Fit Checklist
A short checklist for deciding whether an idea fits you before you spend anything on it. It arrives by email and subscribes you to the free Sunday edition.
FAQ
What is an ideal customer profile? A description of the customer a business is best suited to serve: their situation, size, budget and the trigger that makes them buy. It is standard vocabulary in B2B sales.
Is there such a thing as an ideal supplier profile? Not as a standard term, which is the point of this article. In mature markets customers have an implicit sense of what a good supplier looks like. In new markets they do not, and the first credible provider gets to define it.
How do you become the default provider in a new market? Name the customer specifically, publish what good looks like before anyone else does, serve a narrow group, show real evidence rather than claims, and create the vocabulary the category ends up using.
Does publishing a standard help competitors? Slightly, and it is worth it. The reference point gets the enquiries, and later entrants end up answering questions framed the way you framed them.
How long does the window stay open? Until comparison becomes easy, which usually means until directories, review sites and lead aggregators enter the category. It is shorter than it used to be, which is an argument for moving on definition early rather than perfecting the offer.
Why can a small operator win these positions? Because large companies ignore markets too small to move their revenue. By the time the market is interesting to them, the standard exists and belongs to somebody else.
Free: the Fit Checklist
A short checklist for deciding whether an idea fits you before you spend anything on it. It arrives by email and subscribes you to the free Sunday edition.
