hi my name is henry and in this video i'll show you how to create user personas but before we get started please make sure to smash the like button to help with the youtube algorithm now let's get started what are user personas user personas are customer profiles that list out the customer's background pain points discovery channel and evaluation process user personas are helpful in informing your messaging and your go to market plan you can use user personas to refine your messaging to speak to specific customer segments as for the go to market plan you can use user personas to find the best channels to reach your customer segment now how do you build user personas there are two approaches there's the qualitative approach and a quantitative approach for me i like to start with the qualitative and then validating it using the quantitative but the first thing you can do is you can look at your existing user base and see if there are patterns or similarities between your users and try to create your initial user personas based on that let's say my product is an online data science bootcamp and i can start by looking at my existing user base or students and i find that there are three groups of students there are students with a phd background there are students with an engineering background and then there are students with a business background then i can go ahead and create my initial personas the academia which are students with a phd background the engineering persona which are students with the engineering background and then finally the analysts which are students with an accounting finance or consultant background once you've created your initial personas the next step is to reach out to five to six people from each of your personas when you reach out to them ideally you should get on a phone call with them for at least 45 minutes each and during the phone call try to really understand their backs around like how did they get to where they are today their pain point what led them to decide to pursue your product or think about your product their discovery channel how did they go about researching the solution or product and then finally the evaluation process what were the criteria that they used to pick out the product that they did so for example let's say i'm speaking with someone from the academia background on the phone i want to know how did they end up in graduate school why they are looking to leave graduate school to pursue data science how they research about data science or learn about data science and what led them to decide to pursue a boot camp versus self learning and from this i can really understand a the background how they ended up in graduate school to their pain point what made them unhappy about graduate school or what made them excited about data science three discovery channel what were the ways that they used to discover data science this could be youtube reddit and then finally evaluation process what do they look for in a data science bootcamp is it the mentorship is it the curriculum is it something else once you've spoken to five to six people from each persona then you can start creating a detailed customer profile listing now the background the pain point the discovery channel and the evaluation process the next step after this is to validate your personas using a quantitative approach and the approach here is to create a survey and send it out to the rest of your user base to see if they can self-select themselves into one of the user personas that you created and in the survey make sure you have an other option so that you can see if there is another user persona that you haven't discovered ideally you will want to have 90 of your respondents self-select themselves into one of the user personas that you created and that in a nutshell is how you build user personas you start with a qualitative approach by looking at your existing user base coming up with initial user personas based on patterns and then speaking with people on a phone call and then the second step is to validate all of that using a quantitative approach if you enjoyed this video please make sure to give it a like and drop a comment below to let me know what kind of videos you want to see next and also make sure to check out the description for more product marketing resources until next time see you [Music]