Max Massengill · A note on how I'd approach demand
ICP and segmentation are usually steps one and two. But the more granularly you segment, the more you have to build and, harder still, keep alive. So the real first question is how granular you can actually afford to go, given the budget, time, and people you have.
This isn't a strategy recommendation; I don't have the context to make one. It's the step I'd run before any of that work, because it quietly shapes everything after it.
Step zero
Say the audience is software developers at US mid-market companies, roughly 6.1M people. Reaching them is the dominant cost, and it scales with how many of them you take on. Every vertical you add is more people to reach and another campaign to build, run, and maintain.
So you're balancing three things: your budget, how much audience you take on (which drives the cost of reaching them), and how tailored the messaging gets (which drives how much you build). Target everyone with one message and it's cheap to build but blunt; tailor by vertical and it sharpens but multiplies the work. Step zero is finding the combination you can build and keep alive. Move the controls and watch where it tips.
Why it matters
The output was never a dollar figure. It's the decision that keeps the whole program shippable.
The failure I see most often is a segmentation framework too complex to actually execute. It looks great in the deck, and then you can't ship it, or worse, you build it once and can't maintain it, when the entire point is that it stays living and always-on. Right-size it up front and the campaign holds together. Get it wrong and it falls apart later, no matter how good the strategy looked on paper.
The real payoff is alignment. Run this first and you can walk into product marketing, sales, and growth and say: given our actual constraints, here's the granularity we can launch and keep alive, so let's not chase a hundred segments, let's nail three. Everyone then does the ICP and messaging work with those constraints already baked in.
Vertical is only one lens, too. You could scope by company-size tier, or by signal, say the accounts whose leadership is publicly talking about AI transformation, sourced and scored in a tool like Clay. The feasibility math doesn't care which lens you pick. It just tells you how many slices you can afford to serve well.
Numbers are illustrative and the verticals are normalized to sum to 6.1M. The point is the shape of the trade, not the precision.
Media comes straight from my audience thresholding model: about $1.29 per person over a six-month flight to reach the audience at working frequency across a LinkedIn, programmatic, and CTV blend. The full 6.1M runs about $7.9M; pushing frequency or richer channels takes it toward $9–13M. Media scales with audience size, which is why audience scope is the main lever.
Content & campaign build is the secondary lever. The first track carries the full foundational build, a floor near $0.35M: messaging platform, creative system, landing experience, webinar program, nurture, sales plays. Each additional vertical reuses that foundation, so it costs a fraction (~$0.22M, shrinking as you scale). Sub-linear, not tracks × one campaign.
Verdict compares required against budget: comfortably under is room to test and keep things optimized; within ~15% is at your limit; over means the scope is too granular, so narrow the audience, add budget, or simplify.
Built by Max Massengill as a working illustration. Figures illustrative.