ICP Profile — BeWith
Who we're talking to: the ideal customer, their goals, and what blocks them. Source: Brand Discovery Worksheet (agents&me).
The Ideal Customer
Cities running hundreds, sometimes thousands, of events a year across community centers, cultural venues, parks, and neighborhood programs.
Cities with leadership that knows the next decade of municipal competition is about resident experience, not just infrastructure.
Cities tired of running 2026 communities on 2010 software.
What They Want to Achieve
On the surface: a thriving, engaged community.
Packed events. Active community centers. Programs that reach every neighborhood, every age group, every population. Residents who feel seen, served, and proud of where they live.
Underneath: residents who love their city.
Happy residents talk. They post. They show up. They tell their friends "this is a great place to live." They renew their connection to the city with every event they attend, every program their kid joins, every park they enjoy. Resident happiness isn't a soft metric. It's the foundation of everything else.
At the top: re-election and reputation.
Mayors and department heads know the truth: residents vote for the city that makes them feel something. Not the one with the best roads, the one that throws the best summer festival, runs the program that helped their grandmother, opened the community center their teenager actually wants to go to.
What's Blocking Them
1. Technology stuck in 2010.
The systems running community departments today were built before the iPhone. Clunky desktop software, forms that don't work on mobile, integrations held together with duct tape. Staff fight the tools every day instead of using them. New hires take months to ramp up. Every "let's add a feature" request from leadership turns into a six-month IT project that never ships.
2. Data that exists but doesn't talk.
Cities are sitting on goldmines of data (resident registrations, event attendance, facility usage, payment history, demographic info) but it lives in 15 disconnected silos. Nobody can answer basic questions: Who are our most engaged residents? Which neighborhoods are we failing? What's our ROI on the summer program? The data exists. It's just unreachable.
3. Interfaces that residents abandon.
Residents experience the city's tech the same way they experience Amazon, Netflix, and Wolt, except the city's tech feels like 1998. Registration forms with 40 fields. Pages that don't load on mobile. Hebrew that breaks. Payment flows that fail. Residents give up halfway through and never come back. The city blames "low engagement," but the real problem is the friction the city created.
4. Residents don't trust city communications.
Years of generic municipal emails, irrelevant SMS blasts, and one-size-fits-all messaging have trained residents to ignore everything the city sends. By the time you have something genuinely valuable to share, the inbox is already muted. Trust, once lost, is brutal to rebuild, especially when every message still looks like it was written by a 1990s bureaucracy.
5. Marketing that isn't really marketing.
Cities don't have marketing teams, they have communications departments. The result: announcements instead of campaigns, flyers instead of funnels, broadcasts instead of targeting. No segmentation, no personalization, no A/B testing, no learning loop. A retailer with this approach would be bankrupt in a year. Cities do it for decades and wonder why events are empty.
6. Staff drowning, not building.
Community managers didn't sign up to be data-entry clerks, Excel jockeys, and WhatsApp coordinators, but that's what the job has become. They have no time for strategy, creativity, or actually connecting with residents because they're too busy being the integration layer between broken tools. The people most capable of building community are the ones with the least time to do it.
7. Politics moves faster than procurement.
A mayor wants to launch a new resident engagement initiative this quarter. The procurement process for a new system takes 18 months. By the time the tool ships, the political moment has passed, the budget cycle has rolled over, and three new priorities have appeared. Innovation dies in the gap between vision and infrastructure.