Why multiple ICPs is literally an oxymoron
The framing Rob Kaminski uses at Fletch is disarmingly simple and difficult to argue with. "The concept of having multiple ICPs is sort of an oxymoron," he said on Youroast Ep1. "It's kind of like it can't be true. Like you can't have multiple things that are the ideal, right? It's like you know, a really silly analogy is like you have one true love, you can't have multiple true loves, right?" [Youroast Ep1, 4:10]
The logic is not that secondary segments do not exist or that you cannot serve them. It is that the ideal - the customer for whom your product is the most specific, most obvious, most valuable answer - can only be one profile. Everything else is secondary by definition. Marketing resources, positioning decisions, homepage messaging, and sales playbooks built around the ideal are more effective than the same resources spread across a set of profiles that are each a partial fit.
The practical problem most SaaS founders have is that multiple early customers who are paying feel like multiple valid ICPs. The fact that two different company profiles are paying does not mean both are ideal. One of them is likely a better fit for the product, stays longer, refers more, and is cheaper to acquire. That one is the ICP. The other is a secondary at best.
The parabolic view: when broad is right and when narrow is right
Rob is not absolutist about narrow ICP focus at every stage. He describes what he calls a parabolic view: broad experimentation is legitimate at the very earliest stage, narrow focus is mandatory once signal exists, and expansion is legitimate again at significant scale.
"When you're really early and you don't really know who your ideal customer is, there's an argument to be made where you should actually be pretty broad," Rob said on Youroast Ep1. "Let's try multiple. Let's throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. You know, I'll pitch it to you, I'll pitch it to that person, and just sort of see where you're really looking for signal." [Youroast Ep1, 5:00]
The critical qualification is mindset. "Your mindset should not be, hey, I'm trying to maximize the effectiveness. Your mindset should be, I'm trying to figure out who the ideal one is." [Youroast Ep1, 5:15]
Once signal exists - once you can identify which customer type converts fastest, stays longest, and refers most consistently - the experimental phase is over. "From like five hundred K to even like ten million, I think you should be really at least eighty percent focused, if not one hundred percent focused on that one ICP in where you're putting your marketing and sales spend." [Youroast Ep1, 5:40]
The premature expansion mistake and what it costs
The most common version of the ICP mistake Rob sees is not companies that never found their ICP. It is companies that found a working ICP, saw adjacent opportunities, and expanded before they had genuinely dominated the core.
"We just see companies prematurely scaling beyond their core where there's so much more room for growth to truly dominate in an ICP segment space," Rob said on Youroast Ep1. "But while they're doing that, they see all these silver edges of opportunity at the fringes and they start chasing them way too early." [Youroast Ep1, 6:00]
The cost of premature expansion is not just missed revenue in the expanded segments. It is degraded positioning in the core segment. When messaging starts accommodating multiple ICPs simultaneously, the hero becomes vague enough to speak to everyone and specific enough to convert no one. The sales team starts pitching to different buyer types with different objections, different use cases, and different competitive sets - and the sales playbook that worked for the original ICP stops working because it is being adapted in real time for buyers it was not designed for.
"You're far better off, in our opinion, to have a dominant ownership over that one ICP," Rob said. "Like everyone truly in that space should know who you are, should understand your product. You should be owning ten, twenty percent, if not more of that market share before you think about truly expanding." [Youroast Ep1, 6:20]
When multi-segment is actually right
Rob is clear about the conditions under which pursuing multiple segments genuinely makes sense. The threshold is resources: specifically, the resources to play multiple games simultaneously without degrading the execution in any of them.
"The only time where really multiple segment ICP comes into play is when you have the resources to play multiple games," Rob said on Youroast Ep1. "These are companies, in our opinion, that are doing well over ten, twenty million. Often what we see, the ones who come to us, they're doing much more than that. They're over a hundred million in revenue." [Youroast Ep1, 7:00]
At that scale, companies have the budget, the team, and the organizational structure to maintain distinct positioning, distinct messaging, and distinct sales motions for multiple segments simultaneously. Startups rarely have any of those three. Running multi-segment GTM with a lean roster and a low budget is, in Rob's words, "kidding themselves."
The uncomfortably narrow rule
Rob's practical advice for founders who know they should narrow but find it uncomfortable is specific. "Be uncomfortably narrow and just truly own that niche," he said in the closing advice section of Youroast Ep1. "There's no reason why you can't build a million dollar business in a very micro niche. That was our thesis when we started Fletch. And it's just like just think one ideal customer, one avatar, one channel, one tactic, like just really focus." [Youroast Ep1, 29:00]
The discomfort of narrowing is itself a signal. When a positioning statement starts to feel uncomfortably specific - when adjacent segments start to think "that is cool but it is not quite for me" - you are probably close to the right level of specificity. Most founders stop one step before this point because the narrowness is uncomfortable, not because the market is too small. The ICP that feels too narrow is usually the right one.
What this means for your homepage
A homepage designed for multiple ICPs is a homepage that converts none of them well. Every section that tries to speak to two buyer types simultaneously makes a compromise that weakens the message for both. The hero claim gets vaguer. The proof blocks get more generic. The CTA becomes less urgent because it is not addressed to a specific person with a specific problem.
A homepage designed for one ICP - the buyer who your product solves the most specific problem for - earns more demos from that buyer and creates enough adjacent recognition that secondary segments self-select in without being explicitly targeted.
If your current homepage has two hero variants, three different use cases in the hero subheading, or a "built for X, Y, and Z teams" structure in the first section, the ICP has not been decided. Read website redesign prerequisites for the team survey litmus test that surfaces ICP alignment gaps before a design sprint begins.
What to do next
Run the team survey Rob describes in Youroast Ep1. Ask everyone who will give feedback on your next design sprint or launch campaign to write down separately: what does the product do, who is it for, and what problem does it solve? Compare the answers. If you get different ICP descriptions from different people, the ICP has not been decided - and any marketing spend or design investment made before that decision is compounded with risk.
If the ICP is clear, confirm that your homepage hero speaks specifically to that buyer and no one else. Then read why SaaS product launches are overrated and the 2D homepage versus the 3D sales conversation for the downstream implications of a locked ICP on launch strategy and homepage design.
Watch the full episode: Youroast Ep1: Is your positioning ruining or powering your virality strategy?.
