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Bullseye Customer Sprint

How to build a Bullseye Customer one-liner

The difference between a customer you can describe and one you can actually find

They were 90 days out from closing their seed round and every investor who asked “who’s your customer?” got a slightly different answer.

The product person had one, the lead engineer had another, the co-founder had a third — none of them were wrong — but they weren’t the same either.

You don’t lose deals because you don’t have an answer. The workflow automation startup was losing them because their answers didn’t match.

They’d released several versions of their product, added features, tested. The work was real. They’d built lean, brought on their first ops hire the month before we started, shipped a more focused product. But the story wasn’t consistent and inconsistent stories don’t close rounds.

So we ran a Bullseye Customer Sprint. Eight weeks, five live customer interviews, whole team watching together. And before any of that, we ran the one-liner exercise.

What got them there wasn’t having all the right answers. It was working through the questions together.

Most teams can tell you what they’re building. Far fewer can say who they’re building it for — specifically enough to actually find that person. That gap is what the Bullseye Customer one-liner closes. It’s the second of nine activities in the sprint and it’s the one I get asked about most.

Without it, you end up interviewing the wrong people, learning the wrong things, building for a customer who exists mostly in your team’s imagination — and who might be a slightly different person depending on who you ask.

Before you write anything

This isn’t a solo exercise. You need to have the right people in the room — whoever on your team is closest to the customer layer. Might be sales, marketing, product, design, and/or engineering. If you have customers, pull in what context you can: support tickets, help requests, sales call notes, cancellation reasons. If you don’t have customers yet, you’ll be working from what the team collectively believes, which is still useful.

The goal isn’t to get it right, it’s to get it specific enough to act on.

The formula

The Bullseye Customer one-liner formula

From left to right: We’re going after [specific role] at [specific place] who [trigger/motivation] and currently [inadequate solution] but need [outcome]. Five slots.

• Specific role. A job title works. So does a situation — “a founder who just closed their seed round” is a role defined by circumstance, not an org chart. What doesn’t work is a category. “Product teams” is a category while “a first-time PM at a 20-person B2B startup” is a person.
• Specific place. Company size, type, industry, stage — whatever makes this person findable. If someone on your team couldn’t use this slot to locate five real places, it’s still too vague.
• Trigger/motivation. The inciting incident. Not what they want in the abstract — what set things in motion. A new hire they can’t onboard, a spreadsheet that crashed and took three hours of work with it — the more specific the trigger, the more useful it is for recruiting.
• Inadequate solution. What are they doing instead right now? Name the status quo. If you can’t, you don’t know enough about the problem yet.
• Outcome. What changes for this person if the problem is solved? Not features. “Can run internal ops without adding headcount” is something a real person said. “Faster workflows” is a guess.

The questions behind the slots

Filling in the blanks is deceptively easy.

Before anyone writes a one-liner, answer these five questions as a team. One person facilitates, everyone answers, one thought per sticky note. Where people disagree is almost always worth paying attention to — that disagreement is the assumption that needs attention first.

“Who is the person feeling this most acutely?”

Not who has the problem on their radar, who is living in it. For the team I mentioned earlier, the first instinct was “ops leader” — broad enough to feel safe. The question pushed it further. A head of ops at a company scaling fast enough that the workarounds are breaking. That’s a person, someone you can find.

“At what stage or size does this become urgent — not just something that can wait?”

This is the question that turns “growing companies” into “20–100 person companies.” Below a certain size, someone absorbs the chaos manually. Above a certain size, there’s a system. The window in between is where the pain is acute enough to act. That’s your specific place.

“What was the moment they went from ‘we should fix this’ to ‘we have to fix this now’?”

Not a general frustration — a specific moment. For this team’s customer, it was scaling fast enough that the stitched-together spreadsheets stopped holding. The trigger is what makes the one-liner recruitable. It gives you a screening question that works.

“What are they actually doing instead right now?”

Not what they wish they were doing, what are they doing today? Stitching together spreadsheets and lightweight tools. Submitting tickets to engineering that never move. Name the workaround, that’s your inadequate solution.

“What does done feel like for them?”

Not features — what changes for this person on the other side? For this team’s customer: running internal workflows without touching code or adding headcount. “Better visibility” is a guess. What gets better? And how does it track to that department or to the larger business?

A useful test

Could you write a screening question directly from your one-liner without adding more detail? If not, you’re hedging.

These sound specific but aren’t tight enough to recruit against: “startup founders who are struggling to get traction,” “product teams trying to improve customer discovery,” “operators who need better visibility into their business.” You can say them out loud, yes they sound like someone. But try to find someone who fits that. You end up finding someone and thinking, That‘s not who I mean…

That’s the gap between a category and a customer.

How to run it

Don’t make just one. Make a handful, more than you think you need. The point isn’t to work with every version — it’s surfacing the range of assumptions on the team.

Let’s look at a couple of examples with recent client work.

Select Bullseye Customer one-liners from work with Karmascore

Then dot-vote. Pick the one that scares you a little. Vague keeps it safe, specific is the only kind of hypothesis you can test.

Once you have your top candidates, bring in AI — not to generate the one-liner, but to find the blind spots. Prompt it with your top-voted options: “What customer behavior or scenario does this miss that we haven’t considered?” This isn’t about AI doing the work, your team thinks through it and makes the call. The AI shows you what you might have missed.

The ones you don’t pick aren’t gone. They become your second, third, fourth customer type. You’re not eliminating them — you’re sequencing them.

What the one-liner gives you

The hypothesis that emerged for the seed-round team: a head of ops at a 20–100 person company who is scaling fast, currently stitching together spreadsheets and lightweight tools, but needs a way to run internal workflows without adding headcount.

Select Bullseye Customer one-liners made for a workflow automation startup

They found five ops leads and talked to them. Same pain, same reasoning, same workarounds — mostly. Different people, same story. The product manager, lead engineer, both co-founders, and the new ops hire all left with the same target and the same roadmap. Later, they had three investors competing on terms because the who and the why finally matched — and now there was evidence.

The questions didn’t just fill in the slots. They got the whole team to the same answer.

A one-liner isn’t a positioning statement. It’s the start of a recruiting brief — the thing that makes the next step possible. Once you have a specific one, you have what you need to build the hypothesis canvas and get into actual interviews.

You cannot recruit a generic person. The questions are how you make sure you’re not trying to.

My name is Skipper Chong Warson and I run How This Works co — a customer discovery practice for funded founding teams that are pre-product-market fit. The Bullseye Customer Sprint is an eight-week sprint built around five live customer interviews with the whole team in the room.

Want to run the one-liner exercise yourself? Sign up for How Might We… to get the DIY guide — the same step-by-step exercise we use in the sprint, with worked examples, and an AI prompt to widen the frame. howthisworks.co/start if you’d rather just talk.