In the Series B Trap I've talked about the need to properly segment and define your audience.
I don't want to go into detail on a lot of the obvious methods of segmentation (age, wealth, language etc.) but some of the variables I mentioned in that article have a nuances to them, and you might be unfamiliar with others so I thought I'd take some time to detail them as a strong audience definition is core to establishing your Mission Statements and avoiding the Series B Trap.
These are written from a B2B perspective although there is no reason why they can't be applied to consumer facing products and services as well.
On the face of it very simple.
High level categories might include things like:
Travel and Hospitality
Telecommunications
Agriculture
Fast Moving Consumer Goods
Shipping
However these represent very broad slices of 'industry', so broad that they don't have a great deal of use as targeting parameters.
Many of theme can be broken down into smaller segments however:
Travel and Hospitality
When using Industry to define a market segment make sure you are specific enough for it to be of use. Find the intersection between repeated patterns in solution requests and market size can help you understand when you've reached the right level.
As well as challenges with granularity some of these segments might overlap i.e. Airlines vs. Aerospace. Whatever industry segments you choose make sure you understand who is it that is really experiencing the problem/best placed to implement your solution and then make sure to sufficiently define who is, and is not, included in that segment.