---
title: How Michelle Zak Validated Her ICP Without Time, Budget, or Data
description: How Michelle Zak validated her ideal customer profile using creative & resourceful strategies without the luxury of time, budget, or extensive data.
image: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:875/1*uCQfyCJvuwEXZA8yRFFqqA.png
---
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May 02, 2025
# How Michelle Zak Validated Her ICP Without Time, Budget, or Data
 [Nitin Kartik](https://cariboustrategic.com/blog/author/nitin-kartik)
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When you’re an early-stage tech startup, the pressure to choose the right customer is intense. But what happens when you don’t have the luxury of time, a big marketing budget, or a large sample of customer data to inform your decision?
That’s the real-world dilemma Michelle Zak faced when she joined *InCommon* — and it’s the story she shared with me on *Product Marketing Maestros: Tales from the Front Lines *brought to you by **Caribou Strategic**, where we help tech scaleups stand out and succeed.
Michelle, a seasoned product marketer and founding team member at multiple startups, walked into a familiar challenge: two plausible ICPs and no clear way to pick one. There weren’t enough customers to find a statistical trend, and the company lacked a large enough email list or social following to A/B test messaging at scale.
So what did she do?
# She ran parallel tracks.
1. **Discovery Interviews:** Michelle tapped into her network and startup communities to run targeted conversations with both ICP segments. She asked traditional product marketing questions — but framed them to compare the two audiences head-to-head.
2. **Cold Email Experiments:** At the same time, she wrote email sequences tailored to each ICP and launched them to tightly segmented audiences. Even though cold email was a new channel for the company, it allowed her to test resonance in-market, fast.
What made this approach work was the **balance of qualitative insights with real buyer behavior**. By keeping the segments and messaging tightly defined, she was able to see who engaged, who converted, and where the traction really lived.
The outcome? A clear, stage-specific ICP focused on growth-phase companies — and an early outbound playbook that scaled into multichannel campaigns across email, LinkedIn, and the website.
For founders and CEOs of scaleups, this episode is a reminder: You don’t need perfect conditions to make a strategic leap. You need clarity, velocity, and a willingness to test forward.
—
🎙 *Wisdom From Wizards* is brought to you by [**Caribou Strategic**](https://cariboustrategic.com/), helping tech scaleups stand out and succeed.
📈 If you’re a CEO who refuses to plateau, join a [Caribou Strategic Mastermind](https://cariboustrategic.com/masterminds-for-tech-ceos-by-caribou-strategic?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pmmaestros&utm_content=michelle_zak).
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