Find your customer
Pick a niche, define the ideal client, and use public data and signals to find who needs you before they ever ask.
Write one sentence: who exactly is this for, and what is already going wrong in their business that you can see from outside.
Your learning checklist
0 of 7 steps marked · opening your workspace
Start here: write down your ideal customer
A written ICP (ideal customer profile) with a 'who not to chase' list keeps every later step honest.
templateIdeal customer profile guide with free template (Cognism)
Five steps plus a copy-and-paste worksheet with fields for industry, size, budget, pain points and decision makers. Vendor blog.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
templateIdeal Customer Profile ebook and worksheet (HubSpot)
Free worksheet on defining an ICP from your existing customer data. Needs a form to download.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Understand the job your customer hires you for, and the signals that say 'now'
Jobs-to-be-done tells you why people buy. Buying signals tell you when.
articleKnow Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done' (Harvard Business Review)
The core idea: understand the task a customer is trying to get done, not just who they are. HBR may limit free reads.
- Cost / access
- unknown
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
articleNew book: Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done
Intercom's practical take on applying JTBD; the post links to a resource page for the book. Whether the book is free was not stated.
- Cost / access
- unknown
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
articleWhy hiring is a buying signal (lemlist)
How to read job postings as a sign a company is about to spend, and how to act within 48 hours. Vendor blog; treat stats with care.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
articleHiring signals in B2B sales (Autobound)
Which kinds of job postings predict which purchases and how to write the first line. Notes that many postings are backfills. Vendor blog.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Count businesses with Census data
Census tables tell you how many businesses of a type exist in a county or ZIP, so you size a market before you chase it.
datasetCensus Bureau API datasets
Index of the free APIs: ACS, County Business Patterns, ZIP Code Business Patterns, Economic Census and more. A key may be needed; see the key request page.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
datasetCounty Business Patterns
Annual count of establishments, employees and payroll by industry and area. Good for 'how many of these exist near me'.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
datasetData.gov catalog
Search engine for 535,000+ U.S. government open datasets.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Find licensed businesses and active projects in state and city portals
Licensing and permit records are public and show who is licensed, active or building right now.
datasetTDLR - All Licenses (Texas, via Data.gov / City of Austin)
Listing of all Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation license holders in CSV/JSON; shows what a state board dataset looks like. No license terms are stated on the page, so read the source's terms.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
datasetDOB Permit Issuance (NYC Open Data via Data.gov)
Daily-updated construction and demolition permits. Only covers the older system; newer permits sit in a separate DOB NOW dataset.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
docsSocrata Open Data API
Many city and state portals run on Socrata, so one query pattern reads many permit and license datasets.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
siteFlorida DBPR public records and license search
Example of a state board lookup. The page shows a search tool and a records-request route, not a bulk file; use it to check a license, and read the terms before any bulk use.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Use federal public files for health, finance and regulated industries
CMS, SEC and FDA publish open files that name providers, companies and products.
docsSEC EDGAR APIs
No-key JSON APIs for company filings and financial data. Follow SEC fair-access rules and use bulk files for large pulls.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
datasetopenFDA
Open APIs and downloadable JSON on FDA data; useful for regulated-product and facility signals.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Map local businesses with OpenStreetMap
OSM tags let you pull every shop, office or business in a city without paying for a list.
docsOverpass API (OpenStreetMap wiki)
Read-only query API for OSM data. Public server asks for light use: identify your app, no parallel scripts, back off after errors.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
toolOverpass Turbo
Browser tool to write, run and see Overpass queries on a map.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
docsOpenStreetMap copyright and license
Data is under the ODbL: you must credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
Segment a big file and read it for patterns
Raw files are huge and messy. These tools clean them, slice them and show what stands out.
toolDuckDB
Free SQL database that queries big CSV and Parquet files directly on your laptop. MIT license.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
toolOpenRefine
Free tool to clean messy data and merge near-duplicate values such as 'Joe's Salon' and 'Joes Salon'.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
courseKaggle Learn: Data Cleaning
Short free course on cleaning data before you trust it.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
docsNIST Exploratory Data Analysis handbook
Plain reference on how to look at a data set before drawing conclusions: graphs first, then numbers.
- Cost / access
- free · Service usage, hosting, or model access may be separate.
- Setup
- Follow the linked provider’s current instructions; check account and runtime requirements.
You have made a start when…
- You have a written ideal client profile.
- You have a list built from a public data set, not guesses.
- Each name on it has a reason you can state.
Take this into your assistant.
Additional curriculum comes from the supplied AI Frontiers playbooks. Resource descriptions and cost labels are source guidance, not a fresh verification of pricing, compatibility, or results. Open the official instructions before using a tool. Checklist marks are your own progress notes.