4 User Segmentation Wins Your Business Needs

While ferocious Nazis make for a better film, the US Air Force also faced a lesser-known enemy in the 1940s: air accidents. In 1944, a typical year, the rate of fatal accidents was 6 per 100,000 flying hours - 150x higher than modern aviation. A study investigating the causes made a surprising discovery. Cockpits were designed to fit the average man. Yet after measuring over 4,000 pilots, not a single one fit the average in every dimension. There was no average pilot. Cockpits designed to fit the average pilot actually fit nobody. This same trap, the myth of the average user, is easy to fall into when building a product. Building for just one type of user risks alienating huge parts of your userbase. User segmentation lets you understand who the different groups of people using your product are. I'll stop short of calling it a superpower, which is joining the likes of ninja and rockstar as a startup cliché. Even so, it brings a deep user understanding. As the case studies below show, you can leverage this to drive better results across your business. There are many types of segmentation and goals it can help you achieve, so it's hard to know where to begin. In this post I'll cover how to segment users in four ways, and how early-stage SaaS businesses can take advantage of these to:

User segmentation is dividing your users into groups based on their characteristics or behaviours. There are different segmentation types:

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