Your end-user profile tells you who your end users are,
but your persona makes your target end-user
tangible, unambiguous, and concrete.
It is much easier to focus your mind on one person, then
many people all at once.
if you build a good persona, your team and you
will be able to see your customer very, very clearly,
and the results will create better alignment
amongst all the people on your team.
The persona should be a real person,
not a composite, not an abstract.
It should be someone you know and you have interviewed
in the context of your startup and you can remember.
By choosing an actual end-user as your persona,
your persona becomes concrete and there's
no room for second guessing.
Rather than debating who the potential customer is,
what they might want, what you need
to focus on, what you shouldn't do.
It's absolutely 100 times easier to get it
if you have a real customer.
In Raffa's case, the end-user profile
is a woman in her 30s or early 40s, who spends a lot of time
browsing the web on her iPad at night and does couch shopping
and likes daily deal websites.
This we know.
But what other apps does she have on her iPad?
What does she buy when she couch shops?
Is she a Mac user or is she a PC user?
What's her preference?
Does she preferred to do her email on her laptop,
as I do, instead of the iPad, or does she
preferred to do the iPad?
Which version of the operating system
does she have on her iPad?
Is she married?
What does her husband do?
Does her husband send her a lot of emails?
Is her husband a priority in the email chain?
Does she have children?
Do they send her a lot of emails?
How many children does she have?
How old are they?
What presents does she loved on her birthday?
What does she do in her spare time?
What clothes does she wear?
What perfume does she wear?
We can debate these questions internally
'til the cows come down, but if you have a real persona,
there's only one right answer and it's pretty easy
to find it.