How An Early-Stage Video Feedback Company Zeroed In On an ICP Worth $5-6M in Serviceable Obtainable Market Size
$5-6m
Revenue potential unlocked
First PMM
Role in the company
Contract Length
3 Months
INDUSTRY:
Productivity Tech / Creative Collaboration Tech
COUNTRY:
United States
COMPANY SIZE
Niching down and optimizing resource use for the best-fit ICP
Listen to an audio summary of the case study by NotebookLM
10 Employees
GROWTH TYPE
Founder-led Sales
THE TARGET AUDIENCE
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Agency owners
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Agency Account Managers
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Brand teams
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Vendor management teams
PRODUCT MARKETING SKILLS:
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Persona Research
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Positioning
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Market Sizing
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Website Content Creation
At the time (2024-2025), the company I was consulting was a creative collaboration tool that enabled a reviewer of any kind of creative asset to record their feedback on video instead of writing comments against timestamps or over email. With highlighting options, it was much easier to point at specific areas of the creative to which the feedback applied. The benefit of using this method of providing feedback was that it could be recorded on the spot so the reviewer's thoughts were fresh, it avoided vagueness about what the feedback pointed to or meant, and it could be shared even if the receiving party did not have an account.
It started out as a tool for sports coaches to teach their students how to correct their form in a visual way. Based on preliminary research by the founder, it was also useful for multiple other customer segments, such as video producers, UX designers, product designers, creative freelancers, founders, VCs and agency owners.
However, each segment had different requirements. The challenge I diagnosed was that the targeting was too widespread for the resources the company had for product development or go-to-market support.​
My Role
As the first fractional product marketer at the company, my role was to look into each customer segment and determine whether or not it was the right Ideal Customer Profile for the company. Additionally, I represented the company at a couple of events they had sponsored.
The Goals
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Find the right customer segment for the company to focus their resources on
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Understand the language of the ICP and position the product for that segment​
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Represent the company at sponsored events and speak about the product's features, value and benefits
The Stakeholders
The Founder
The Founder was focused on defining the go-to-market strategy. As the one leading sales conversations directly with prospects, he needed a clear signal on which customer segment to focus limited resources on.
The COO
The COO was the reporting manager for this engagement and, alongside the Founder, treated Serviceable Obtainable Market size as the deciding factor in choosing an ICP. His goal was a validated, revenue-quantified segment the team could start prospecting against immediately. He was also leading sales.
The Discovery
The Thinking + Decisions
The Actions
Understanding the product from the Founder and Engineering
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I requested product walkthroughs and discussions with the founder about how the sales conversations had been going for him
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The engineering team also provided some context into how they were thinking about the product
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Combining product (founder + engineering) and sales (founder) perspectives, it seemed that the following product features were considered differentiators as compared to the solutions that existed:
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voice feedback instead of text feedback that could be delivered anytime, anywhere
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the paint-like interface that allowed reviewers to free-form draw around areas they were giving feedback about​
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the privacy angle. None of the data was stored in the cloud, everything was local
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the reviewers did not have to make an account with the product, which reduced the resistance for customers to get their clients to adopt
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the summary and timestamped action items that were generated at the end of the review
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Discussing the company's goals, challenges, and journey with the founder
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Had exploratory discovery meetings with the founder to understand what the company had already been marketed as, who the biggest customer segment was at the moment, and where the go-to-market was stuck
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Based on these initial conversations, I prepared a 30-60-90 day plan with expected outcomes that I presented to the founder. The main goals were:
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30 days - to do market sizing and conduct secondary research on the customer segments with the outcome to determine the ICP
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60 days - find participants and conduct primary research to find use cases and pain points with the outcome to construct the positioning
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90 days - act on the positioning by creating assets that the company could use on digital channels
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Finding the eligibility criteria that qualified certain customer segments into the ICP
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To narrow down on the ICP, I needed to first figure out how to qualify prospects or accounts as the best fit for the product.
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I wanted to focus not only on the market size but also how quickly revenue could come in and future expansion possibilities
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To do so, I considered the following:
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the size of the Serviceable Obtainable Market - the most important factor for the founder and COO,
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which segment cares most or gets the most benefit from our product,
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the amount of time it would take to acquire a customer in that segment and how quickly they would switch (sales cycles and churn rates)
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the path to expansion to a wider target audience over time (which industries, markets or types of customers could each segment connect us to later on)
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the audience we had the most access to (who the founders knew)
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Defining Total Accessible Market, Serviceable Addressable Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market
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Since the founders already had customers in US and Brazil, I broke down the TAM, SAM and SOM in the following ways:
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TAM - Number of [customer segment] companies in the world. E.g.: Number of production companies in the world, Number of ad agencies in the world, Number of creative freelancers in the world, etc.​
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SAM - Number of [customer segment] companies in the US and Brazil
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SOM - Number of [customer segment] companies in the US and Brazil that were small to mid (had a company size of up to 250 employees)
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Conducting primary and secondary research to find the market size, market characteristics and pain points for all 4 segments
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The 4 segments I decided to research were movie and tv production companies, media companies, ad agencies, and Indie Filmmakers, Podcasters, and Individual Video Creators and Editors (a.k.a Freelancers and Indie Media/Film producers)
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Using pivot tables and advanced excel modeling, I analysed the product usage and customer data
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The resources I used to find the TAM, SAM and SOM were statistic websites such as IBISWorld, Statista, and more. I cross-verified across sources and took conservative estimates based on the number of companies in that segment I was seeing
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To calculate the potential revenue from each market at the TAM, SAM and SOM level, I multiplied the number of companies with the yearly price the founder had set. This way, if the founder or COO decided to raise or reduce prices, they could plug and play to find the updated potential revenue numbers.
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I also added market charcteristic details such as trends, how their workflows or processes worked, whether or not they were adopting AI, industry-wide challenges, and how often they switch vendors
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A couple of customers and people from each segment that I had run into at sponsored events were also willing to sit down for interviews. I asked them questions around their challenges, workflows, current tools,personal and professional goals, jobs to be done, and channels they referred to with buying intent
Findings from the research
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One of the biggest discoveries during this research process was that:
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if there weren't too many reviewers or team members involved in the making of an asset,
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if the project was relatively short, such as a regular social media post or
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if the creative lived in a software the organization already used for feedback and liked, like Figma,
the prospects did not see any value in the product because the problem wasn't painful enough for them
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The value was most seen and quick with large ​scale creative projects such as long-form ads or projects that had multiple creatives to review
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The 'aha' moment was when the free-form drawing feature was demonstrated because it made feedback so much clearer
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Text reviews did not seem to have the nuance that was possible with video reviews, especially for creative teams
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​The biggest value of the clearer feedback and a recording that could be rewatched multiple times was that there were fewer review cycles and fewer reworks
The Final ICP: Agencies
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Based the eligibility criteria I had narrowed down to, I created a table-based view to compare each segment to the other
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Adding in the insights from the research, I also defined the ICP to have large-scale video projects and at least 2-3 reviewers giving feedback
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Ultimately, weighing all the criteria, ad agencies seemed to win out on sales cycle length, expansion opportunities to other industries, founder network and SOM, even though churn rates were slightly higher than the rest.
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I created an ICP document that detailed all these factors so it was easier for the founder to make prospecting lists and start reaching out
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I discussed the findings and the ICP definition with the founder and COO and they agreed that for the moment, agencies seemed like the best target audience
Positioning and Messaging the Product and Applying it to Website Content
​Competitive Intelligence + Positioning
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Now that we had defined the ICP and we knew what they found valuable, I conducted some competitor intel to guage how they had positioned themselves
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Most solutions were make-shift strings of email back-and-forths with some zoom calls sprinkled in while others who lived in the Adobe environment used Frame.io that only allowed text feedback in comments on timestamps
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Our product was clearly differentiated from both these solutions:
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the voice feedback allowed reviewers to add the nuance and record raw thoughts on their phone or tablets. They did not have to be in front of their laptops.​
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the feedback lived on one tool and did not require much back-and-forth
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Messaging + Webpage Copy
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Based on these insights, I created an agency webpage with the header that led with the value 'Say goodbye to endless reworks with video feedback' and I added proof points such as '30% faster review cycles' (a metric we received from our customer) in the subheadline
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The webpage also included details such as the freeform drawing tool, the nuance that video feedback adds and that reviewers could provide feedback on-the-go
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Before going live with the webpage, I also tested this messaging at a sponsored event where I presented the product as a solution to agency owners and could see people nodding along and having visceral reactions when I spoke about the never-ending review cycles and reworks
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I also interviewed our biggest agency customer and created the company's first case study. ​
The Impact
Unlocked $5-6M in revenue potential based on the segment's Serviceable Obtainable Market Size
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We discovered that the agency market the company could reach out to to was worth $5-6M in potential revenue
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By the end of the engagement, the COO (who was leading sales) had used the ICP framework to book a few meetings with agency owners. These were early conversations that helped validate audience fit, giving the company real-world signal on the segment.
