Item — HN Reader

> there are two separate personas that you need to “create”: The user persona and the buyer persona.

Even more important: stop using personas, start using actual people. I've experienced many startups make unforced errors by conflating people into personas. A better way is to tag people with attributes, such as specific interests, explicit concerns, tasks to be done, usage goals, learning preferences, and the like.

When you switch from personas to actual people, it opens up many more product experiments-- many of which are surprising and may even feel counter-intuitive to founders. Increase your startup chances of success by carefully connecting with your actual users.

3 comments

Wholeheartedly agree.

Personas are useful for developing a general character that you can refer to. But you still have to be able to say "Alice Robertson, who is a demand-gen marketer at $CUSTOMER, is a prime example of this persona and someone we should talk to during product research." If you can't speak to an actual human and validate your ideas, then you are at risk of creating a fake persona who sounds just plausible enough to convince you to make wrong decisions.

Definitely - but those are normally called "development partners" in B2B, right?

Those two personas were very helpful to me in my previous life as a technical marketer; they helped me learn when to leave a job. Any time a company I have worked for told me they're shifting emphasis from talking about our product with the actual users to talking about "solutions" for the buyers, I knew it was time to start sending out resumes because the product was about to stall and the work climate was about to get insufferable.