---
title: "Personas and market sizing for a venture-backed startup | antedote"
description: "Personas and national market sizing for a venture-backed startup: digital ethnography, focus groups, a national survey and a rollout to every team."
url: "https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/building-one-customer-picture-for-a-venture-backed-startup/"
author: "antedote"
---

# Defining the customer for a new consumer category

A new category has no ready-made customer. For a venture-backed startup creating one, we combined qualitative research and national sizing into personas built with its team, then took them to every part of the business.

**Client**
Venture-backed tech startup

**Industry**
Consumer services

**Market**
North America

**Kind of work**
Segmentation

**Our role**
Persona research, national market sizing and a company-wide persona rollout

## What happened next

In the company’s own account, its first persona-led campaign generated many times the booked appointments of earlier campaigns.

## The question

The startup’s category was new to most of the people it hoped to reach, so it had to work out who its customers would be.

That picture had to be precise enough for marketing, sales, customer experience and product to share, right down to whom sales should approach and what to say.

## Our approach

We started close to people, with digital ethnography, immersions and focus groups in the startup’s target market.

From that work came the first personas, each with its own decision journey and an early read of how messaging and film came across.

Alongside it, a national survey sized the market and tested the personas, so the people the business would plan around were counted as well as understood.

We then shaped the final personas together with the company’s team, and agreed which to prioritize, with the reasons written down so every function could see why.

## What the team came away with

We delivered the personas and a national market-sizing model, then took the personas to every function in the business, with next actions for each team.

Matched to the company’s customer database, the personas gave sales and marketing the same people to work from, and every team one shared picture of the customer.

> “antedote’s project has been foundational to our entire business. It has shaped our national go to market strategy, clarified how we market and sell our product in existing regions, and become the ‘North Star’ in every Marketing and Product decision we make.”

*Chief Marketing Officer, venture-backed tech startup*

Who we heard from

People in the startup’s target market, in digital ethnography, focus groups and a national survey

## Related work

[View segmentation case studies](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/?work=Segmentation#library)

- Travel and leisure

    ### [Deciding where a travel brand’s fleet should go, years ahead](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/where-a-travel-fleet-should-go/)

    The company went on using the segmentation for targeting, tracking and planning, and part of the fleet later ran seasons the itinerary research had assessed.

- Home services and energy

    ### [Choosing which home-heating customers to prioritize](https://antedote.com/explore-our-work/home-heating-customer-segmentation/)

    The segments went into use: the client’s media agency planned around the priority segment, and the company read its next proposition test through them.

**What we do**
[Customer segmentation](https://antedote.com/what-we-do/customer-segmentation/)

## Working out which customers to build for?

We’d be glad to talk it through with you.

[Talk to us](https://antedote.com/talk-to-us/) · [hello@antedote.com](mailto:hello@antedote.com)

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