Customer Identification

Excerpt: A structured worksheet for identifying your first 100 potential customers by type, count, and estimated spend — the foundation of a credible bottom-up SOM.

What This Is For

Your SOM — the slice of the market you can realistically capture in the next 12 to 24 months — is only as credible as your ability to describe the actual customers inside it. Not a category. Not a demographic. Actual people, businesses, or organizations you could call, email, or walk into.

This activity asks you to get specific. You're going to identify your first 100 potential customers by type, estimate how many of each type exist within your reach, and estimate what each would pay. When you multiply those numbers out, you have a defensible, bottom-up SOM — one you can explain in 60 seconds without a single industry report.

Use this worksheet before you finalize your market size numbers for a pitch, offering page, or investor conversation. It's also a useful gut-check if your top-down TAM feels disconnected from your day-to-day business reality.

Where to Find Your First 100

The most common block at this stage isn't motivation — it's not knowing where to look. Here are the most accessible sources for identifying customer types and estimating their counts:

• U.S. Census Bureau — County Business Patterns (census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html): Gives establishment counts by NAICS industry code, down to the county level. If your customer is a type of business, start here.
• SBA Small Business Profiles (sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/small-business-data): State-level data on business counts by sector and size.
• LinkedIn Company Search: Filter by industry, company size, and geography. Not precise, but fast — useful for estimating how many relevant businesses exist in your target region.
• Industry Association Member Lists: Many trade associations publish member directories or member counts. Search "[your industry] association" + your state or region.
• Your Own Phone and Inbox: The Campaign Gold Book is right about this one — the people already in your network who fit your customer profile are your highest-probability first customers. Name them first before estimating anyone else.
• Local Chamber of Commerce Directories: For Main Street businesses, local chamber member lists are often free, searchable, and more accurate than national databases for your actual geography.
• Yelp, Google Maps, or Industry-Specific Directories: Search your customer type in your target geography and count the results. Imprecise, but fast — and it forces you to think about real businesses, not abstractions.

You don't need to find 100 individual names. You need to find 100 realistic slots — types of customers with estimated counts that add up to 100 or more within your reach. The worksheet below walks you through that process.

First 100 Customers Worksheet

Use the interactive worksheet below to build out your customer types. For each row, name the customer type, identify where you'd find them, estimate how many exist within your reachable geography or network, and estimate what they'd pay annually. The tool will calculate a bottom-up SOM estimate as you go.