Audience, sized.
Also called: Target market · Addressable segments · Market sizing · Audience definition
Sharpening who the product is for into named, sized segments, a primary and a secondary, with what they pay and how to reach them.
The persona is one person; the audience is the addressable group around them. Name a primary segment and a secondary, put a rough number on each, and state what they will pay and how you will reach them. “Everyone who bakes” is not an audience.
What defining the audience is
The customer persona gave you one believable human. Defining the audience is the next zoom-out: the group of real, reachable people that person stands in for, with a size you can defend and a way in you can actually use. A persona tells you who you are designing for; an audience tells you whether there are enough of them, what they will pay, and how a small DTC budget gets in front of them.
The discipline is to split it. Almost every product has a primary segment, the people the design is optimised for and who buy first, and a secondary, an adjacent group who buy for a slightly different reason. Naming both stops two failures at once: pretending the whole market is your primary (so the product pleases nobody), and ignoring a real second segment that quietly pays for half your launch.
Why “everyone” is the trap
- It feels safe and is the opposite. A bigger claimed audience feels like a bigger opportunity. In my experience it is a smaller one, because you cannot write the listing, price the product, or buy the ad for “everyone”.
- It hides the maths. “All UK home bakers” is a number you can never check. “Serious sourdough bakers in cold kitchens who proof overnight” is a number you can estimate and then test against a real sell-through.
- It breaks the routing. If you cannot name the segment, you cannot name the channel. A defined audience comes with an obvious place to find it; a vague one comes with a guess.
The audience, sized
The clearest way to define an audience is to fill the same few boxes for the primary and then sanity-check the secondary. Here is what that looked like for the proofing box we ran through, so you can see the shape of a real answer rather than a generic template.
Notice the two segments are real groups with a number against each, not a slogan. The primary is who the box is engineered for; the secondary pays at the same price for a different reason, which is exactly why it is worth naming rather than ignoring.
- “Anyone who likes fresh bread.”
- “The UK home-baking market.”
- “Foodies and gift shoppers.”
- No number, no channel, no price logic.
- Primary: ~20,000–40,000 cold-kitchen overnight sourdough bakers.
- Secondary: gift buyers for that baker, same £149 band.
- Reach: Sourdough School list, forums, premium-bakeware adjacency.
- Need: 3,000 of them in Year 1.
The left column cannot be costed, targeted or counted, so it makes every later decision a guess. The right column tells you what to build, what to charge, where to advertise, and when to worry.
How it fits the bigger picture
Define Audience is activity 03.03 in the framework, inside Stage 03 Innovate. It builds on the customer persona from Stage 02 Discover, widening one person into a sized, reachable group, and it feeds straight into technology research (03.04), where what the audience will pay and tolerate sets the bounds on what you are allowed to engineer.
What it can do
It turns a single persona into a market you can size, price and reach. It forces a primary and a secondary into the open, so the product is optimised for someone specific instead of diluted across a crowd, and it hands the channel plan its starting list of where those people actually are.
What it can’t do
It can’t prove the numbers are right. A rough size is a working estimate, not a measured fact, and the real test is sell-through once you launch. Nor does it choose the technology or the price; it sets the constraints those later activities, and Stage 04 Evaluate, have to satisfy.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Take your persona. Write the group that person represents in one sentence, then put a rough number on it, even an order-of-magnitude one, and say where you got it. Now name a second, adjacent segment that buys for a different reason. For each, write what they will pay and the single most concrete place you could reach them. If you cannot name the place, the segment is still too vague.
Want a guided first pass? The Free Sprint asks who the product is for and how you would reach them, which is a starter version of this activity. Start the Free Sprint →
Your audience checklist
Project notes: sizing it from Stockport
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
Sizing the proofing-box audience with Dan and Anna Hartley in Stockport, and the moment “everyone who bakes” became 30,000 real people.
3 min read · click to open
Dan’s first answer to “who is this for?” was “anyone serious about sourdough.” Anna’s was “people like us.” Both true, neither useful. I asked them to do the unglamorous thing: put a number on it.
How we got to a defensible figure
We started from the bottom, not the top. The Sourdough School audience and the bigger UK sourdough forums and subreddits gave us a real, countable population of engaged bakers. We pushed it down hard: only those who proof overnight, only those in genuinely cold kitchens, only those who had already binned a loaf to a failed prove and felt it. That triple filter took a vague “hundreds of thousands” down to a primary we were willing to defend at roughly 20,000 to 40,000 people.
Against a Year-1 target of about 3,000 units, that mattered. We did not need a tenth of the primary segment to buy. That is a very different feeling from needing to convert “everyone”, and it changed how Dan talked about the launch.
The segment we nearly missed
Anna spotted the second one. Her sister had bought her a banneton from Lakeland the previous Christmas, not because she baked, but because Anna did. Gift buyers, we realised, would pay the same £149 for a display-worthy object, judging it on how it looked on a counter rather than on holding 26°C. Same price band, different reason to buy. We worked it into the listing photography and parked a gift-message option in the V2 backlog.
What the sizing changed
- Channel. The reach list wrote itself: Sourdough School first, forums second, a premium-bakeware adjacency for gifts. No paid spend chasing “all home bakers”.
- Confidence. 3,000 out of a 20,000-plus primary is a believable ask. “Some of everyone” never was.
Half a day of honest counting in Stockport, and the audience stopped being a hope and started being a number we could plan against.
— Innovate stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Innovate → Technology research