04 - Time to get personal with AI-driven persona mapping
The surprising reason some startups explode while others stagnate (it's probably not what you think)
š Hello! Iām Jon, founder and builder. I share my journey of building a company with AIāhelping you learn about the latest tools & workflows to use in your life.
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As builders, itās so easy to get stuck in the building.
Just one more feature, letās improve this UX-flow, etc.
Then, the users will come.
But, will they?
When we see failed startups, we often think they got beaten on the technology by a competitor. They had more features, a better product. But thatās not the case.
A large part of startup success isnāt product. As the quote goes:
"Every startup has a product, but not every startup has customers.ā
Thereās a reason second time founders focus 80% of their attention on distribution, rather than product.
A great product matters. Tremendously.
But if youāre not clear on who youāre building it for, it probably wonāt be a great product.
And you wonāt know what your customers want, what reservations they may have, and where you can find them.
What sets great startups apart from failed ones, is an obsession about the user.
A great place to start is with defining the audience into a niche (the more focused, the better) and creating personas youāre building for.
How? Iāll show you how itās very easy, using some handy ai-tools. ā¬ļø
Welcome, my fellow builders! Thank you for being a part of the build crew.
A warm welcome to the 12 new subscribers since the last Sunday!
In todayās update:
š Audience definition in BuildPad
š„ User personas
š± Social Media Trials
šļø This week in startup & AI news
š ļø Free access to my tested tools
š Memes!
Update 4 - 5 Feb, 2025
š¤ How am I feeling?
5/5 today! You may have noticed the image above has slightly changed - I think its more clear with good āol smiley faces. :)
Feeling great! Very excited to actually start building the MVP, but still have to look into the audience / ideal customer profile (today) and then the market / business side of it - then build & validate quickly!
Had some great conversations this week with fellow founders & AI enthusiasts!
On a personal note, I am heading back to Japan in some days - but Iāll try to keep this updates coming regularly.
Missed the last one?
In the last edition ā¬ļø, weā¦
Did ideation and some visualisation
Discussed validation
Gave away free access to my list of tools
Whatās next? Audience definition & user personas
š Audience definition in BuildPad
If youāve been following along since the start, you know I love BuildPad for structuring my steps, and to prevent myself from diving directly into building.
The next step in the program was to define the audience.
BuildPad started with this gentle description what was the aim of this step: to define a specific target audience and create a detailed user persona.
Now, I am a designer and therefore quite familiar with user personas. They are useful in the process, but what I am mostly interested in is certain aspects of the audience: where can I find them, what are their main problems and main reservations.
We defined our target audience being mostly 25-35 but generally anywhere from 18 to 40. Of course this may very well vary, but itās good enough as a general rule of thumb. Old enough to be both a legal user and already experimenting with different tools, but young enough to still be open for new solutions, as well as digitally native.
(No age-ism, love you boomers. Exceptions will apply š).
Then BuildPad asked me the best question yet. Who will we target, specifically.
It already knew most of the information from its memory of the last few steps.
Yet, it was critical. Would any type of founder do? I also played around with the idea of āanyone that works online and needs a toolā - which in my mind made sense, too.
I explained all of it to BuildPad.
I wanted to focus on solo founders, non technical, because I think they would benefit most from it - in my mind the more ātechā tools would mostly be some kind of coding co-pilot like Cursor or Windsurf (more on them next time!).
BuildPad helped me niche down more and exclude the freelance / online workers group.
š” The more you scope down your audience, the easier it is to target them, write good messaging, close them and build for them.
Though now looking back, I think the monetisation play is companies that want to have access to the data this platform will generate in the longer term, but more on that later.
Hereās what BuildPad said about the audience:
āI would recommend focusing primarily on non-technical solo founders/bootstrappers in the initial phase, for several reasons:
It's a more focused niche that aligns perfectly with your value proposition
These users have the most acute pain point (they need to handle multiple aspects of their business)
They're likely to be active community participants (fitting your social aspect)
They often have purchasing decision power
While marketers and other online workers might need similar tools, I'd suggest positioning FounderStack.ai primarily for founders while naturally allowing it to expand to other audiences through.ā
Then, we discussed where our audience could be found. My main interaction with the audience so far was on Reddit, on subreddits like r/startup, r/indiehackers, r/ai, r/sidehustle and r/SaaS.
I then used ChatGPT o3-mini for deepening this and it came up with some great extra places, which I then verified:
Makerpad (great site and potentially similar to what I want to build - got acquired by Zapier in 2021)
Social Media (X groups around hashtags and Spaces), LinkedIn groups
Product Discovery & Launch platforms (Product Hunt (duh), Hacker News - Y Combinator), personally Iād add: Theres An AI For That (TAAFT)
Medium & Substack for writers & readers
I then fed this information back into BuildPad, who approved.
Next up: which problems and pain points are we solving. It already recommended a couple itself, based on our previous talks. I copied the list, added my own points, and dropped that into o3-mini to expand on it. Then pasted back the results.
BuildPad then came back with the following list of pain points, sorted by Primary Goals and Business Goals, which I then altered into:
1. Primary Goals (when selecting tools):
- Find reliable tools that will grow with their business
- Minimize time spent on tool research and implementation
- Build an efficient, integrated workflow
- Avoid costly mistakes in tool selection
2. Business Goals (what they want to achieve with the tools):
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Scale their business efficiently
- Grow faster than the competition
- Focus on core business activities instead of tool management
- Reduce employees required by handing more off to tools & agentsAlmost there, now last question: what would be the main objections the audience would have to using our solutions. Again, it already provided some to start with and was sufficiently critical.
We came to the following objections, which seem fair. Not only do I need to solve these objections with how I build and market the product, but theyāll help in a sales conversation too.
š„ User personas
Okay, with all that research and talking done, hereās the final output.
A ready-made user persona!
I said I didnāt like the first one, though I did, just to see what would happen. Out came another one.
Meet Alex and Sarah!
I think these are pretty useful, tho by no means perfect - they seem to have take just a couple of objections, pain points and goals from the long lists weāve created together. But not bad!
And pretty clean, visually.
If you want to know the full list of pain points, objections, goals, and audience data, you can check out this notion page.
š± Social Media Trials
Then, Iāve been playing around with social media.
I used Later for scheduling and automated posting on LinkedIn & X. I didnāt love post-bridge and Social Bee so far, and I donāt really love Later either.
The user interface of all of them isnāt great, they seem like old-school SaaS tools aimed at an older generation of social media manager.
Iāve asked this question before on socials, but if you know any good tools, let me know.
Ironically, I am constantly I need of good tools, and the best way so far still seems to be asking others.
Iād like to:
Schedule posts
Connect at least LinkedIn, X, Threads and Instagram
Be able to actually link (@People on LinkedIn for example) and use hasttags
As well as media
Some form of media storage, and AI generation would be great (copy)
Any recommendations? What do you use for social media management?
This week, I am to dive more into socials - I got access from a friendly guy on Reddit to his platform called Directonaut, which is all about marketing for Founders.
šļø This week in AI & startup news
Want to know more about the nitty-gritty behind the new o3-mini models? Thereās an actual white paper on it by OpenAI. Some other interesting comparisons with DeepSeek R1, for the fellow nerds among us:
Why employeeās smuggle AI into work (BBC)
I discussed what I called Ghost AI, or Underground AI use, in a recent LinkedIn post. We all want to work smarter, but do we also want to get higher productivity metrics?
Apple raises concern over first p*rn app on iPhone under EU rules
Sounds like the EU made a p*rn app, but itās actually the EU anti monopoly laws that force Apple to allow for certain apps to exist in their AppStore. This one wasnāt on my 2025 bingo list!
Organic audience drops of major platforms. Why? AI gives the answers, not their help pages. Whatās next after SEO - LLM Optimisation?
AI spending is heating up and shows no sign of stopping (Bloomberg)
Tired of actually sitting behind your laptop in Zoom calls? This guy solved it.
He talks, an AI avatar of him acts out the right movements. The others in the call have no idea. Soon, it will just be a bunch of bots pretending to have people meetings.
OmniHuman-1 video generator released.
We came pretty far since the spaghetti-eating video of Will Smith. Out of China recently came OmniHuman-1. You can watch some example work here. Itās pretty good, but also it made by ByteDance and their website is full of atrocious ads. Youāve been warned. š
š ļø Free access to my tested tools!
I mentioned this last week, but hereās a reminder: I decided to keep track of all the tools & agents I use and test on this journey. I regularly update it.
As a thank you for being a subscriber, you can access them all for free here, no login or anything required!
š
Bonus: Memes
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoy AI Builds a Business, Iād really appreciate a share - I rely heavily on word-of-mouth of you, the reader! š¤
Iām a founder, undercover nerd & padel-addict - writing about building FounderStack.ai in public. Iāve launched multiple start-ups since 18, and bootstrapped CORE Global to high six figures. I share my favourite tools, my founder journey and other curated research here, on AI Builds a Business.
Thanks for reading! With love from Barcelona,
Jon āļø