Why does Early Adopter matter?
Early adopters are not simply your first customers; they are a different population with different tolerances, and confusing them with the mainstream market distorts everything. They forgive rough edges, which is why they can be sold to at all this early. But they also want things the mainstream never will, so a roadmap built entirely from their requests drifts steadily away from the larger market you eventually need.
What does Early Adopter look like in practice?
The practice that built its own scheduling spreadsheet is an early adopter. The effort proves the pain, and the fact that it is a spreadsheet proves the market is unserved. The practice that says "sounds interesting, come back when it's ready" is not one, however friendly the meeting was. Willingness to tolerate something incomplete is the actual test.
What are the common mistakes with Early Adopter?
- Assuming early-adopter enthusiasm predicts mainstream demand.
- Building every feature they ask for and ending up with a product only they want.
- Mistaking friendliness for early adoption. The signal is tolerance of the unfinished, not interest.
- Failing to notice when you have exhausted them, early adopters are a small population, and growth stalling is often just running out of them.
Where the term comes from
The five adopter categories founders still use (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards) come from Everett Rogers's 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, and the field they summarise is agricultural rather than technological. Rogers was a rural sociologist, and the paradigmatic study behind the curve was Ryan and Gross's 1943 work on how quickly Iowa farmers adopted hybrid seed corn. The average farmer took about seven years to go from hearing about it to planting it.
Valente & Rogers on the diffusion paradigm's origins ↗Related concepts
- Design PartnerAn early customer who commits to working closely with you while you build, giving real feedback and real usage in exchange for influence over the product and usually favorable terms.
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)A description of the specific kind of customer your product serves best, precise enough that you can tell whether any given company or person qualifies.
- Product-Market FitThe point at which a product satisfies a real need for a specific market well enough that demand begins to pull the company along rather than the company pushing the product.
- Ideal First CustomerThe single customer whose success makes the next several reachable, chosen for how much their problem hurts, how fast they can decide, and how much their name or story carries to the customers after them.