About Profyl
I built Profyl because I didn't know my customers — and paid the price for it.
Profyl exists because understanding your audience shouldn't require a marketing agency, a research budget, or years of trial and error to figure out.
The origin story
Jason Nichols
Founder, Profyl
Entrepreneur, business coach, and the founder who once told my business coach that my target customer was “everyone who drinks coffee.”
When I started my first business — New Kings Coffee — my business coach kept pushing me on one question: who is your target customer?
My answer was confident and, as it turned out, completely wrong: “Everyone who drinks coffee.” My coach disagreed. I needed to develop a customer persona. But beyond guessing, I had no idea how to do it.
I looked at Google Analytics and social media insights for clues. These tools told me the age and location of my buyers. They didn't tell me what those buyers valued, how they made decisions, or what kind of brand they actually wanted to buy from. And even if I'd managed to build a persona from that data, I wasn't sure what I'd do with it. It felt like a theoretical exercise — a box to tick for my coach — rather than something that would change how I ran the business.
A couple of years later, everything changed. A marketing professional I was working with told me she needed customer personas to do her job effectively. So she did the research — desk work, data analysis, customer interviews, a bit of informed guesswork — and created three personas for New Kings Coffee.
It materially changed the business. Suddenly we understood who we were talking to, what those people cared about, and how to reach them. Campaigns became more focused. Product decisions became easier. The personas weren't a theoretical exercise anymore — they were something the whole team used every week.
The problem was the process that got us there. It had been slow, expensive, and largely inaccessible to any founder without the budget for a marketing professional to lead it.
The bigger picture
200+ entrepreneurs later, the same problems were everywhere.
After selling New Kings Coffee, I moved into business coaching — working with over 200 entrepreneurs across industries. I started to see the same pattern everywhere I looked.
Most founders hadn't created a customer persona at all. Those who had usually kept a vague mental version — never written down, never shared, never consistently applied. The few who had gone through the effort of documenting their personas had typically filed them away after the exercise, never to be looked at again.
Hardly anyone was actively using persona intelligence in their marketing, their sales conversations, or their product development. The work was being done in isolation from the decisions it was supposed to inform.
To understand how widespread this really was, I surveyed 52 entrepreneurs directly about their experience with customer personas. The findings confirmed what I'd been seeing:
52
entrepreneurs surveyed
87%
describe their personas as basic or undocumented
50%
never update their personas regularly
31%
don't actively use personas in their marketing
Only 23% of the entrepreneurs I surveyed said they use personas regularly. The rest were either using them inconsistently, not using them at all, or operating with personas they knew weren't good enough.
The gap between “having a persona” and “actively using it to make better decisions” turned out to be the central problem. The research pointed at the same root causes I'd experienced myself: it's hard to gather accurate data, difficult to keep it current, and unclear how to translate persona profiles into practical marketing action.
Profyl is my answer to that problem. A platform that makes collecting psychographic audience data as simple as creating a quiz — and then does the work of translating responses into the audience intelligence founders and marketing teams can actually act on.
How we work
What guides us.
Insight over data
Data that doesn't change decisions isn't useful. We build features that translate quiz responses into clear, actionable intelligence — not dashboards full of numbers that require interpretation.
Simple by design
Understanding your audience shouldn't require a research team or a six-figure budget. Profyl is built to be fast to set up and easy to run — a quiz live in minutes, insights arriving from day one.
Honest about where we are
Profyl is an early-stage product. We're in beta, learning alongside our first customers, and building in response to what they actually need. We'd rather be transparent about that than oversell.
Built for founders and marketers
Our users are founders, marketers, and brand teams — not data scientists. Every feature we build has to be immediately useful to someone running a real business without a dedicated research function.
Where we are
MVP in beta. Built in public.
Profyl is currently in beta with a small group of early-access brands. The core platform is live — quiz creation, psychographic scoring, Audience Snapshot, and AI-generated Marketing Insights all work and are being tested with real businesses.
We're onboarding new brands carefully, gathering feedback, and building the next layer of features based on what early users actually need. If you want to be part of that process and help shape what Profyl becomes, the waitlist is the best place to start.
Get in touch
Questions? We'd love to hear from you.
Whether you're interested in early access, want to give feedback, or just want to know more about how Profyl works — drop us a message.
hello@profyl.app →