Choose Your Segment
A one-week course that turns “our audience is SMBs” into a segment defined by a causal criterion — one you can defend to your team, your board, and your ad budget.
Every downstream decision — pricing, roadmap, channels, copy — inherits the segment choice. Getting it causally right is the highest-leverage decision a product makes.
What's inside
1. False vs real segmentation
50 min · 2 interactive exercisesDemographics and firmographics describe who's easy to target, not who buys. The three-question test that separates a real segment from a convenient one — applied live to five real segmentations, including one that raised conversion 40% when fixed.
Result: Your current segmentation scored with the three-question test, pass/fail
2. Segment by Jobs
55 min · 2 interactive exercisesThe causal criterion: people who are in the same situation and after the same outcome buy for the same reason. How to derive segments from Job evidence instead of from the CRM's dropdown fields.
Result: Your segment candidates rebuilt on causal criteria — who buys for the same reason
3. The five segmentation mistakes
40 min · 1 interactive exerciseThe five recurring ways teams cut a market wrong — each shown on a real case, each with the repair procedure.
Result: Your segment map checked against the five failure patterns
4. Quant validation: how big is it
45 min · 2 interactive exercisesA segment you can't size is a story. How to check size and importance with a survey panel and arithmetic — before the roadmap bets on it.
Result: A survey plan that sizes the segment in numbers before the roadmap bets on it
Who it’s for
- Your segmentation is an industry × company-size table, and campaigns built on it perform like random.
- Two customers in the same 'segment' churn for opposite reasons, and nobody can explain why.
- You're pre-launch and about to pick a beachhead — and you know a wrong pick costs quarters, not weeks.
- You inherited a 'target audience' slide and can't tell whether it describes buyers or hopes.
What you leave with
By the end of the week you have your customer base (or interview set) cut into segments by what causes purchase, a three-question test each segment either passes or fails, and a one-page defense of the choice that survives a hostile exec review.
- Your segment map with causal criteria — who buys for the same reason
- The three-question test applied to each candidate segment, pass/fail
- A quant-validation plan: how to check the segment's size in numbers before betting the quarter
Artifacts run on your product and are submitted in the LMS — an artifact about your business, not a certificate of completion.
What your agents get
You learn the method; your agents in Claude Code and Codex get the same algorithms as installable skills. The team that learns is you plus your agents.
Runs the segment-derivation algorithm on your market: candidate segments, causal criteria, and the riskiest assumption in each — in your repo, reviewable like code.
Format
4–6 modules, 3–6 hours of content — done in one working week alongside your job. Exercises run on your own product; artifacts are submitted in the LMS as you go.
What it’s built on
The method behind this course is public. This course packages these canon pages into a playbook with exercises:
What you’re probably worried about
“We already have a segmentation — I'd be paying to redo work.”
The first exercise runs the three-question test on your existing segmentation. If it passes, you've spent an hour confirming a foundation. Every one we've tested in live workshops needed repair — but the point is you'll know, on paper, either way.
“My market is too small / too weird for standard segmentation.”
The causal criterion doesn't care about market size — it's derived from your customers' situations, not from an industry template. Niche and 'weird' markets are where demographic segmentation fails hardest and causal segmentation pays fastest.
“What if the data says my current segment is wrong?”
Then you found out for $399 in a week — instead of from a quarter of flat growth. The course includes the local-vs-global framing for deciding what to do with an inconvenient answer.
Take the task off your plate this week
One working week, on your own product, artifact at the end. $399 — one prevented wrong sprint pays for it.