Most teams can tell you what they're building. Many fewer can tell you who, specifically, they're building it for — specifically enough to actually go find that person.
That gap is what the Bullseye Customer one-liner is how you close that gap — it's the 2nd of nine activities in the Bullseye Customer Sprint (BCS) — and it's the one I get asked about most.
Without it, you end up interviewing the wrong people, learning the wrong things, and building for a customer who exists mostly in your team's imagination — might even be different fictional people. Here’s how it works.
Before you write anything
This isn't a solo exercise. Get the right people in the room — whoever on your team is closest to the customer layer. Sales, marketing, product, design, and engineering. If you have customers, pull in what context you can: support tickets, help requests, sales call notes, and cancellation reasons. If you don't have customers yet, you're working from what the team collectively believes, which is still useful. The goal isn't to get it right. It's to get it specific enough to act on.
The formula
We're going after [specific role] at [specific place] who [trigger/motivation] and currently [inadequate solution] but need [outcome].
Let’s break it down:
Specific role. A job title works. So does a situation — "a founder who just closed their seed round" is a role defined by circumstance, not org chart. What doesn't work is a category. "Product teams" is a category. "A first-time PM at a 20-person B2B startup" is a person.
Specific place. Company size, type, industry, stage — whatever makes this person findable. If someone on your team couldn't use this slot to locate five real humans, it's still too vague.
Trigger/motivation. The inciting incident. Not what they want in the abstract — what set things into motion. A new hire they can't onboard. A founder who’s uncovered a specific problem in the core dataset while on a sales call. The more specific the trigger, the more useful it is for recruiting.
Inadequate solution. What are they doing instead? Name the status quo. If you can't, you don't know enough about the problem yet.
Outcome. What changes for this person if the problem is solved? Not features — "can run internal ops without adding headcount" is something a real person said. "Faster workflows" is a guess.
If you want the full DIY spec sheet — the step-by-step exercise with real examples — reply to this email before I make it a paid product in the next week. I'll send it over.
A useful test
Could you write a screening question directly from your one-liner without adding more detail? If not, you're hedging. These sound specific but aren't tight enough to recruit against: "startup founders who are struggling to get traction," "product teams trying to improve customer discovery," "operators who need better visibility into their business." You can say them out loud but it’s hard to find anyone with them.
That's the gap between a category and a customer.
How to run it
Don't make just one. Make a handful — 3-5 per person. The point isn't coverage — it's surfacing the range of assumptions on the team. Where people disagree is usually specifics.
Then dot-vote. Pick the one that scares you a little. Vague keeps it safe. Specific feels like a bet. It is — but it's the only kind of hypothesis you can actually test.
Once you have your top candidates, bring in AI. Not to generate the one-liner — your team's assumptions are the starting point, not the output. Use it to find the blind spots, prompting along with a few top-voted one-liners something like, “What customer behavior or scenario does this miss that we haven't considered?" Your team makes the call while the AI shows you what you might have missed.
The ones you don't pick aren't gone. They become your second, third, fourth customer type. They’re still there — you're not eliminating them, you're sequencing them.
Open tabs in my browser right now
Reflections Seeded from the I Ching by Mike Parker
The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy - The Atlantic, via Kottke
What this gives you
A one-liner isn't a positioning statement. It's a recruiting brief — the thing that makes the next step possible. Once you have a specific one, you have what you need to build the hypothesis canvas, which is the next activity before you recruit and ultimately interview someone.
You cannot recruit a generic person so start with the specifics to find one.
Meanwhile, elsewhere…
The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver.
Dunford's definition isn't just about demographic either. It's not company size or job title on its own. It's the combination of circumstances that make someone the right fit — the trigger that made it urgent, the workaround that proved the pain, the outcome they'd actually pay to reach. The Bullseye Customer one-liner is how you make that combination specific enough to find.
If you want the full DIY spec sheet before I charge for it, reply to this email and I'll send it over.
Thanks,
Skipper Chong Warson
As only humans buy anything, build for your Bullseye Customer
—
If you’re more a video call type of person than a keyboardy one, book a quick call: howthisworks.co/start