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How Puzzle defined a buyer persona and built around it

Feb 12, 2024

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Each month, we speak to a team enrolled in PostHog for Startups about the way they work. This time, we spoke to Puzzle, an accountancy platform for early-stage startups, about how they define and use their buyer persona.

Building a persona for your ideal or target customers is one of the most challenging but essential steps for growing your product. Not only will it help you make product and pricing decisions, it also clarifies your value proposition and dictates how you judge successes and failures.

We’ve previously documented how we defined our personas, but not all companies approach the task in the same way. So, we spoke to Puzzle's Scott Cormnier, Head of Product (Growth & Monetization) about how the team defined their persona, what impact the definition had, and what recommendations they had for others...

1. Collect both qualitative and quantitative data

A persona is, fundamentally, a snapshot of your ideal customer based on a broad understanding of many customers. To define your persona you must start by speaking to your existing users directly and building an intuitive understanding of their needs.

Once you’ve done that, says Scott, you need to pair that intuitive understanding with quantitative data, so you can understand if these behaviors exist in isolation or at scale.

“We’re constantly standing next to founders at each stage of the startup journey interviewing and learning about their experience,” says Scott. “But it’s one thing for a customer to say they want, need, or plan to do X, Y, or Z — and another thing if they actually do it. That’s where quantitative data is useful. You need both to create your persona.”

Putting it into practice: It can help to define a small number of reference customers. Spend time with them to gather subjective data, while using a tool such as PostHog to collect hard facts.

2. Understand how your users feel

Armed with this qualitative and quantitative data, you can start to establish your value proposition.

For Puzzle, this was critical for differentiating them from other products in the market. Every company needs an accounting platform, but not all founders feel the same about this need. By focusing on users’ unaddressed needs, Puzzle can identify a strong, unique position for the product.

“More often than not, founders aren’t signing up to Puzzle because they’re excited to do their accounting,” says Scott. “They sign up because they know they need to be tax compliant, gain a deeper understanding of their company’s finances, and be ready for things like investor reporting. While the needs of founders often change or mature at each stage of their journey, what’s common is that they care about compliance, efficiency, and accuracy.”

All of this is reflected in Puzzle’s messaging, with language which directly addresses founders ahead of accountants and emphasizes how the product integrates with the other tools founders already use.

Putting it into practice: Have a structure for user interviews, but leave room to flex. If users go off on a tangent during an interview that could give you vital insights to their actual feelings!

3. Build pricing around user segments

Next, you can delve into the quantitative data by segmenting users based on criteria such as size or industry. Puzzle used this information to structure its pricing model differently for early-stage founders versus mature startups, for example.

“On our pricing page we make this pretty clear,” says Scott. “We have a plan for formation-stage founders, a plan for startups who have raised a little funding, and an automation plan for companies which are a little more mature and prioritize efficiency, accuracy, and not waiting weeks to close their books."

Each plan also reflects the pain points a user would deal with at that stage too and addresses it with a product feature. Monthly compliance checklists in the free plan, for example, help formation-stage founders get started quickly — but give way in the Automation plan to AI and streamlined workflows.

Putting it into practice: If you aren’t using tiered pricing plans then it can still be helpful to think of your broader pricing principles. Ask yourself: how do these principles work for your different user segments?

4. Reinforce your persona to internal teams

As you grow, it’s important not to drift from targeting your persona or to let teams’ understanding of it become corrupted. You need to constantly remind everyone in your company who you are building for and how your product meets their needs — otherwise you risk diluting your offering.

“When I joined Puzzle I was very happy to hear people talking about our target persona,” says Scott. “While there were still debates about some of the finer details and who some of the buyer personas may be, it was clear that our target persona was our guiding light.”

At PostHog, we’ve solved this issue with a public handbook which documents who we are building for — but Puzzle took a different approach.

“We reinforce who we're building for constantly," says Scott. "We bring it up in all-hands regularly, for example, and will often reference it in other meetings. Internally, we're always trying to be clear that we're building primarily for founders."

Putting it into practice: There are lots of ways to disseminate information internally, from intranets to incorporating it into employee onboarding. Whichever route you take though, the key is consistency.

5. Once you start, don’t stop

Once you’ve created your buyer persona you must constantly maintain it. You need to always be speaking to users, working to understand their concerns, and analyzing the data behind their usage. In doing so, you can find new segments to target, new needs to address, and new product improvements to make.

“While we knew we had some drop-off within our onboarding funnel, we wanted to ensure that we weren’t bringing high-intent new customers into a ‘leaky bucket’. We needed to ensure that people who completed onboarding could quickly see the value of Puzzle and activate. After digging into our data in Posthog we could see that our activation rate wasn’t what we needed it to be”, says Scott. “We reached out to these users directly and talked to them. We had to try and understand their concerns.”

Scott’s team learned that customers were becoming frustrated by delays between completing onboarding and seeing their dashboard. As a result they brought users into the app as it was loading so they could quickly see what they were waiting for. This reduced time to value dramatically and was a clear example of an persona-informed change which had an immediate impact on overall activation.

Putting it into practice: Data gathering and user interviews should be on-going processes for many teams. Otherwise how else can you know if your new interface design is a good idea, or if your upcoming changes will be well received?

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