/where-your-customer-lives

name: where-your-customer-lives
description: Given a product utility and ICP, researches the internet to find the specific channels. Where your customer actually lives, ranked by reachability with a full per-channel playbook. Returns evidence that your ICP is there, one entry tactic, one content angle, and specific anti-patterns per channel. Use when asked where my customer hangs out, what communities should I post in, where is my ICP, find channels for outreach, what forums does my ICP use, where should I spend time for distribution, or which communities are right for my product.

Where Your Customer Lives

Given a product utility and ICP, trace real ICP pain posts back to their source communities. Layer in competitor discussion signals. Discover Slack/Discord/newsletter/podcast/conference channels via DuckDuckGo. Score every channel by ICP signal count, size, activity, and competitor presence. Output a ranked playbook: evidence, entry tactic, content angle, anti-patterns -- one per channel. No guessing. Signal-traced channels only.

---

**Critical rule:** Every channel name in the output must exist in either the Reddit API response or DuckDuckGo search results from this run. Every member count must come from the `about.json` API or a search snippet -- never estimated. Every ICP signal count must match the raw data. If a channel type returns 0 results, report 0 -- do not fabricate channels.

---

Common Mistakes

| The agent will want to... | Why that's wrong | |---|---| | Recommend generic channels ("LinkedIn", "Twitter") | Every channel must be specific with a name, member count, and URL. "LinkedIn Group: DevOps for Enterprise Teams (45K members)" -- not just "LinkedIn". | | Use the same channels for every ICP | Signal-trace is ICP-specific. A DevOps ICP and a Finance ICP produce entirely different channel lists. Run the script fresh per ICP. | | Invent member counts or community names | Every channel name must come from DuckDuckGo results or Reddit API. Every member count must come from the API or a search snippet. If unavailable, write "member count not found". | | Skip the competitor layer | Where competitors are discussed = your ICP is evaluating alternatives = hottest outreach context. Always run competitor search even if the user did not ask. | | Write entry tactics that are product pitches | "Post about your product in r/devops" is not an entry tactic. Entry tactics name the specific thread type, content format, and community norm. | | Treat Reddit as the only channel type | The output must include at least 3 channel types. If only Reddit is found, explicitly search DuckDuckGo for Slack/Discord/newsletter/conference before stopping. |

---

Step 1: Setup Check

echo "GITHUB_TOKEN: ${GITHUB_TOKEN:-not set -- competitor layer runs at 60 req/hr unauthenticated}"
echo ""
echo "Data sources this run will use:"
echo "  Reddit public JSON   (no auth, signal-trace)"
echo "  Reddit about.json    (no auth, subreddit metadata)"
echo "  HN Algolia API       (no auth, signal-trace)"
echo "  DuckDuckGo HTML      (no auth, channel discovery)"
echo "  GitHub API           (${GITHUB_TOKEN:+authenticated, }optional for competitor enrichment)"

If `GITHUB_TOKEN` is not set: continue. All core channel discovery works without it.

---

Step 2: Parse ICP

Collect from the conversation:

• `product` -- what the product does (one sentence)
• `icp_role` -- who the ICP is (e.g. "technical co-founders", "DevOps engineers at Series A")
• `icp_pain` -- their primary problem (e.g. "customer acquisition", "alert fatigue")
• `category` -- market category keywords (e.g. "startup gtm sales", "devops monitoring")
• `competitors` -- optional competitor names (e.g. "Clay, Apollo, HubSpot")

**ICP cascade:** 1. If the user's prompt contains product + icp_role + icp_pain: extract them directly and proceed. 2. If the prompt is thin (only category or only product name): check `docs/icp.md` for a saved ICP profile. Merge with prompt details. 3. If still insufficient (missing icp_role or icp_pain): ask these 3 questions, one at a time:

• "What does your product do in one sentence?"
• "Who is your ideal customer? (role, company type, team size)"
• "What is their primary problem before they find your product?"

4. Save the final ICP to `docs/icp.md` so other skills can reuse it.

Save ICP file if docs/icp.md does not already contain this product:

python3 << 'PYEOF'
import json, os

icp = {
    "product": "PRODUCT_HERE",
    "icp_role": "ICP_ROLE_HERE",
    "icp_pain": "ICP_PAIN_HERE",
    "competitors": ["COMP_1", "COMP_2"],
    "category": "CATEGORY_HERE"
}

os.makedirs("docs", exist_ok=True)
with open("/tmp/wcl-input.json", "w") as f:
    json.dump(icp, f, indent=2)

# Update docs/icp.md
icp_md_path = "docs/icp.md"
new_block = f"""## {icp['product']}
- **ICP role:** {icp['icp_role']}
- **ICP pain:** {icp['icp_pain']}
- **Competitors:** {', '.join(icp['competitors']) if icp['competitors'] else 'none'}
- **Category:** {icp['category']}
"""
existing = open(icp_md_path).read() if os.path.exists(icp_md_path) else ""
if icp['product'] not in existing:
    with open(icp_md_path, "a") as f:
        f.write(new_block)
    print(f"ICP saved to {icp_md_path}")
else:
    print(f"ICP already in {icp_md_path}")

print(f"Product: {icp['product']}")
print(f"ICP role: {icp['icp_role']}")
print(f"ICP pain: {icp['icp_pain']}")
print(f"Competitors: {', '.join(icp['competitors']) if icp['competitors'] else 'none'}")
PYEOF

---

Step 3: Run the Standalone Data Collection Script

Check if the script exists:

ls scripts/fetch.py 2>/dev/null && echo "script available" || echo "not found"

Run channel discovery:

GITHUB_TOKEN="${GITHUB_TOKEN:-}" python3 scripts/fetch.py \
    "$(python3 -c "import json; d=json.load(open('/tmp/wcl-input.json')); print(d['category'])")" \
    --icp-role "$(python3 -c "import json; d=json.load(open('/tmp/wcl-input.json')); print(d['icp_role'