My Most Loyal Customer Wasn't Real

Somewhere in a course workbook I once paid for, there’s a woman called Hannah.

She’s thirty-two, drinks French-press coffee, has two children and a meticulously documented Tuesday. The exercise was simple: visualise your ideal customer in as much detail as you can. Give her a name, a lifestyle, a postcode.

So I did. Then I built products for her.

Hannah never bought anything. Because Hannah wasn’t real.

Visualising your ideal customer, when you have no customers yet, isn’t research. It’s creative writing. You always invent the one who’d obviously love your work — she’s built backwards from the product you’ve already decided to make. Of course she wants it. You designed her to.

That's the first thing every course I took told me to do: imagine her. Every exercise points back at you — your values, your story, what you want to be known for. One course even has you write a letter from your ideal customer to yourself. You can’t validate a letter you wrote yourself. You can only believe it.

The other way it’s taught is better, and worth taking seriously.

It tells you to stop imagining and go and find real people. Start from a problem someone already has, and be disciplined about how you ask. Don’t ask your mum; she’ll tell you what you want to hear. Don’t ask “would you buy this” — people say yes to be kind. Ask about the last time the problem came up. Ask what they currently spend to make it go away. If they’ve never tried to solve it, it likely isn’t a problem. And if you want the truth about whether they’ll pay, ask for the deposit, not the opinion.

That’s real. You’re not inventing a customer — you’re describing one who already exists.

For a long time I thought that was the answer: stop imagining, go and ask. Then I tried to run it on my own business, and every question fell flat. Because this method assumes a problem. And a desire business doesn’t have one.

Where the better method breaks down

Go back to those research questions for a moment. Every one of them only works if the problem is already there. “Talk me through the last time that happened.” “How are you solving it now?” “What have you tried?” They all assume the customer is already in motion — already annoyed, already searching, already paying for a worse version. If the problem is a leaking tap, they wanted a plumber before they’d ever heard of you.

But I wasn’t selling a plumber. I was selling a calendar with fruit on it.

Nobody needs a calendar with fruit on it. Nobody has a fruit-calendar problem. Nobody is searching. There’s no “last time this came up,” because it never comes up.

Because desire isn’t uncovered. It’s created.

A problem exists before you arrive. A desire doesn’t — not in the same way. You start a desire business with a feeling you’re trying to express in a product. That feeling is real. What you don’t know is whether anyone else shares it. Picture someone scrolling past a dozen calendars and stopping on yours. They didn’t know they wanted it until they saw it. You could never have found that person by asking what they use to track the months; the want didn’t exist until the product did.

That’s why you can’t find them in advance. You can’t interview someone about a want they don’t have yet, and you can’t research a feeling that only exists once they’ve seen the thing. Your customer isn’t out there waiting to be found with the right questions. They’re whoever turns out to feel what you were trying to make them feel.

Which is why both ways of finding a customer fail here. You can’t invent her — that’s just Hannah, a paragraph that always loves your work. And you can’t interview your way to her — there’s no problem to ask about. Both methods assume she already exists. For a desire business, she doesn’t. Not yet.

How the customer actually shows up

You don’t identify your customer. Your customer identifies themselves — but only if you’ve put something real in front of them to react to. The feeling you built the product around either lands in a real person or it doesn’t, and the only way to find out is to let one see it.

You can’t ask about a desire that doesn’t exist yet. You can only make the smallest real version of the thing you are trying to sell and watch what happens. One sample. One good photograph or reel. A market stall on a Saturday. A single post the right stranger sees. Then you watch — not for compliments, because compliments are free and your friends hand them out all day — but for behaviour. Who stops. Who picks it up. Who turns it over to find the price. Who actually pays. Who DMs you, unprompted, to ask where they can get one.

That last person is your customer. Not Hannah. The real one who saw the real product and reached for their wallet before you’d finished explaining it.

I spent fifteen years inside desire-based businesses before I tried to build one. At an established brand, the customer already exists — decades of her, revealing herself through every purchase and every waitlist. Nobody on the product team has to invent her; she’s been identifying herself for fifty years. Build from scratch and none of that exists yet, so the instinct is to fill the silence by inventing her. To write a Hannah. It feels like progress. It’s still just a paragraph.

You don’t guess the tribe and go hunting for it. You put the object into the world, see who reaches for it, and then — only then — write the description.

By that point it isn’t a description. It’s a record of who showed up.

What this means for what you build

The customer isn’t someone you describe before you start. They’re someone who shows up after you do.

I spent over £500 making products for a woman I invented. I could have spent a fraction of that putting one real sample in front of real strangers and watching who reached for it.

Hannah was the most loyal customer I ever had. I wrote her myself.

The real customer, however, won’t come from a workbook. And if you want to know who they are, make the smallest real thing you can, put it where strangers will see it, and let them raise their hand.