I wasn’t implying you should be completely making up your personas. I agree that you should base them on as much real data as you can find and if I implied otherwise I apologize. I probably could have done a better job at making that clear.

However not every small business, particularly a brand new one, has access to all the data they would ideally use in creating personas. They may need to do a little guesswork where the data comes in. I think creating personas based in part on some assumptions you make to fill in the gaps where your research is lacking can still be useful.

As a new business starts to bring clients and customers it can better research it’s customer base and re-evaluate any personas created.

I’d also argue that in some cases imagination is fine. Take a service oriented business in search of a niche. There might be a very diverse group of people who would be interested in your services, so diverse that it can include a majority of the population. I think in this case you can create personas based in many ways on imagining who might be a typical persona in a certain niche and then tailoring both your design and the services to that persona and niche.

The imagined persona will not be perfect, but where data is lacking I think it can still help you focus on who your customers might be. It’s certainly better than throwing something together without thinking at all who might buy your services. And yes once you do have more data about the people who become your clients or customers you should do more to collect real data and write better personas based on the real data.

Thanks for bringing up the issue.