field note 014
The myth of the broad ICP
2026-05-20
"We sell to mid-market across industries" is the most expensive sentence in your deck. It sounds humble. It sounds true. It also tells your outbound system exactly nothing.
The cost of breadth
A horizontal product has a search space, not an ICP. Treating that space as one undifferentiated blob produces undifferentiated messaging — which produces undifferentiated reply rates, which produces a team that thinks "outbound doesn't work for us."
It does. You just haven't done the search yet.
What to do instead
Pick a vertical. Pick a persona. Pick an angle. Send for two weeks. Read the replies, not the open rates. Kill what doesn't pull. Double on what does. Repeat until the wedge reveals itself.
The wedge is never the average. It's always a corner.