Identify the community – Revenue Zone

Identifying your community is an important startup activity. This is where you ask, “who is my customer?” or “who do I want to serve?”. This will be the group of people who you will get to know and to understand their needs, or maybe you already know them, and for whom you will develop solutions.

The definition of community here is a group of people having common interests, or forming a distinct segment of society, or who share similarities, or who participate in similar activities. They don’t necessarily need to all know each other or live in the same area or under the same government.

You can identify a community in different ways:

By profession, like “I want to serve authors” or “I want to serve software developers” or “I want to serve freelance graphic designers”
By location, like “I want to serve people who live near rivers and lakes” or “I want to serve people who live in large cities”
By age, like “I want to serve the elderly” or “I want to serve teens”
By life event, like “I want to serve new moms”

Remember that while you need to select just one community right now, you can change it or expand your business to serve additional communities later.

A community can be described as broad or narrow. It’s easy to start with a broad description and then narrow it and narrow it again until you arrive at a very specific community description. A narrow and specific community description helps to stay focused when taking the next step of identifying what that community needs. A broader community description means everyone in that community has less in common with each other. A narrower community description means everyone in that community has more in common with each other. For example:

All humans on Earth (about 8 billion in 2025)
Females (about 4 billion)
Who are English speakers (675 million)
In the United States (173 million)
Who are adults (130 million)
Age 30-44 (34 million)
Who are mothers (25 million)
Who want to start a business (4 million)
Doing home cooking (??)

As you can see, the narrower the community description, the smaller the community but also the more everyone in that community will have in common with each other.

You don’t need to be an expert about this community. It helps to have a link to it, for example if you’re part of it, or if someone in your family is part of it, or someone else you know is part of it. If you don’t have a link to that community, you’ll need to establish one. But all you really need at this point is to have a strong interest in the community and you need to care about it.

Later in the process of starting a new business you will create a solution statement like “I help (who) with (what)”. The “who” placeholder in that template will be filled with the community you select here or with a subset of that community. Continuing one of the examples above, if you want to serve the elderly, your solution statement would start with “I help the elderly with (what)”. For example, “I help the elderly with travel planning”.

For some businesses, it might seem that the market is obvious. For example, if your business is a coffee shop, you might think that your community is anyone in that area or passing through who wants a coffee. But it can be more than that — it can be people who need an energy boost, or people who need a place to do remote work because they have too many distractions at home, or it could be a place where people go to meet friends. You might cater to these different audiences by offering some high-caffeine menu items, free Wi-Fi, and comfortable places for people to sit together. A single business can serve multiple communities, but you need to know who they are so you can start thinking about and asking about their needs.

Compass

After you identify the community, continue to identify their needs.

See more executive activities for startup and revenue activities for marketing and sales and more.