Are we the right example for the archetype of customers that would buy our solution?

When analyzing and defining our customer segments we have used an analogy with the character sheets in role-playing games, where we model each customer segment according to a pattern or archetype which includes not only quantitative data but also their "story" regarding the problem and their motivations to solve it. An important confusion may arise here if we ourselves are members of that segment and we base our model in our own characterization to extrapolate it to the whole segment, without asking ourselves this previous question: are we the right archetype for the customer segment we are modeling?

This case may happen when the origins of our motivation to launch an entrepreneurial project are based on a problem that we experience directly and personally, and for which we identify a solution that, if it existed, we would immediately buy. If these are the foundations of our idea, we must design our validation experiments with some extra care, as we might take for granted some "facts" about a collective that we just know about ourselves (although we may consider ourselves members of that segment), and therefore they are just hypotheses still to be validated.

That extra care when creating experiments should lead us to include some elements specially designed to test every possible behavior or need that we are inferring from our personal motivation. Thus, the goal should be to verify whether those factors are common in our targeted customer segments and whether others perceive the problem with the same frequency and seriousness as we do.

If we finally found big differences we could conclude that, far from being the right archetype for the customer segment of our interest, we are just a mere a "subsegment" with much less representativity or "critical mass" for our proposal to be viable, and that the collective that really interests us as customers perceives the problem in a totally different way and has other priorities (which, in any case, could be new opportunities to be explored inside our "focus").

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