Build an ICP from your website URL: a 30 minute method

Paste your website into a tool that drafts the buyers and the first message, then spend the rest of the 30 minutes checking the draft against your five best customers, narrowing it to one segment and choosing one signal. The draft takes about a minute. The checking is the work, and it is what turns a plausible profile into a usable one.

An ideal customer profile, or ICP, is the most reused document in outbound and the most often wrong. People write it from imagination, make it wide enough to include everyone, and then wonder why messages sound generic. This method starts from what your website already says about who you serve, and tests it against real customers before you send anything.

Why start from the website?

Your website is the one place where you have already written down what you sell, who it is for and how you describe the problem. It is not always right, but it is a faster start than a blank page. Sellinger's free go to market plan tool reads up to 8 pages of your domain, looks at a few competitors and proposes buyers, channels and an opening message, usually in 60 to 90 seconds. Nothing is sent to anyone, and the plan is a starting point written by software from public pages. Check it against what you know of your market.

What are the 30 minutes?

Minutes 0 to 5: get a draft

Paste the address. If the site cannot be read, describe the business in a few lines instead. Save the draft: buyers, channels, first message.

Minutes 5 to 15: test it against real customers

List your five best customers: the ones who paid fast, stayed, and would recommend you. For each, write the role of the person who bought, the company type and size, the region, and what triggered the purchase.

Now read the draft.

• Would it have found these five? Count how many match the draft.
• Do they share something the draft misses? A trigger, a tool they use, a problem they mention.
• Then list three lost deals or bad fits. Would the draft have included them? If yes, add an exclusion.

The gap between the draft and your customers is the value of this step. A tool cannot know that your best clients are all companies that just changed their sales lead.

Minutes 15 to 20: narrow to one segment

Pick the single segment where the draft and your customers agree most. Write it in one sentence: role, company type, size, region. For example: "Operations managers at logistics firms with 20 to 200 staff in Germany."

One segment, because you cannot learn from five at once. The other segments wait their turn.

Minutes 20 to 25: add a reason to care now

A profile says who. A trigger says when. Choose one signal that suggests a need: a hire, a funding round, a post on your topic, a job change, an event. On our own account people who engaged with a relevant post replied at 54.6%, against 37.2% for an untagged list. The source of the signal mattered as much: a tenfold spread in meetings per person between audiences. See intent signals worth acting on.

Minutes 25 to 30: write the exclusions and the first line

Write who you will not contact. The Lamothermic campaign is a good model: the foundry wrote only to US manufacturing buyers who use cast parts, and never to sales, marketing, HR, consultants or other foundries. Exclusions saved time and protected the sender's name.

Then write one observation you could say about a person in this segment. If you cannot write it, the segment is too vague. The go to market strategy template takes this into a full one page plan.

What does a good profile look like?

• Specific: a role and a company type, not "B2B companies".
• Testable: you could find 200 of them this week.
• Tied to a problem: in words your customers use.
• With a trigger: something that happened recently.
• With exclusions: who is out.

What are the usual mistakes?

• Describing your product, not your buyer. "Companies that need AI" is a product statement.
• Several segments in one. Messages for everyone reach no one.
• Using job titles alone. Titles differ between companies. Pair them with what the person is responsible for.
• Treating the draft as the answer. It is a hypothesis. The test is whether people in that segment reply.
• Never revisiting. After four weeks of outreach you know more about your buyer than you did on day one. Update the profile.

What does a worked example look like?

A made up example, to show the shape of the 30 minutes. A small company sells scheduling software for physiotherapy clinics. The tool drafts three buyer groups from its site: clinic owners, practice managers and franchise operations leads.

• Minutes 5 to 15. The founder lists her five best customers. Four are owner managed clinics with 3 to 10 therapists, and the buyer was the owner. One is a franchise, and it took nine months to close. Of the lost deals, two were hospital departments with a procurement process.
• Minutes 15 to 20. The draft and the customers agree on owners of small clinics. She writes the segment: "Owners of independent physiotherapy clinics with 3 to 10 therapists in the UK."
• Minutes 20 to 25. Two of her five best customers had just opened a second location. She chooses that as the trigger: a new location announced in the last 90 days.
• Minutes 25 to 30. Exclusions: hospital departments, franchise head offices, solo practitioners. First line to write about each person: "Saw the new Leeds site, congratulations, running two rooms of bookings is a different problem."

Nothing here needed a tool beyond the draft. The work was a comparison between a plausible profile and five real customers.

How do you know the profile is ready?

Run a short test before you build a list of hundreds.

1. Can you find 200 people who fit this week, with a role, a company and a reason to write? If not, the segment is too narrow or too vague.
2. Can a colleague read the sentence and say who is out? If not, add an exclusion.
3. Does the first line you wrote rely on something you can verify on the person's profile or site? If not, the trigger is too weak.

Which fields should the written ICP hold?

Keep it to one page. If it needs two, it is two segments.

How often should you update it?

After the first four weeks of outreach, and then roughly once a quarter. Replace guesses with what happened: which roles replied, which company sizes booked, which triggers you could actually verify. If the best replies come from a group you did not list, add that group as the next segment to test, and do not mix it into the first one.

What do you do next?

Build a list of 200 people who fit, start with approval mode on, and read every reply. The list steps are in how to build a B2B lead list, and the setup steps in the 12 decisions before your first message. For the definition, see the ICP glossary entry.