Defining early adopters
Brant Cooper defines early adopters as people who have 3 characteristics:
they understand the problem you’re trying to solve are passionate about finding a solution, and if your model calls for it, are willing to pay
He caveats his definition by saying that ‘early adopters’ do not need to be passionate about your solution per-se, but just that they recognise that nothing out there today adequately solves a problem that is very important to them.
People fitting this description are prime early adopter fodder. The next stage is to see if we can find them, work out if there are enough of them and then decipher and confirm if the pain they are suffering is enough to drive them to immediate action.
Remember pain in and of itself does not guarantee action. Action is predicated on
pain > ($ of product + $implementation + risk of change) * status quo coefficient.
If we’re happy that the above holds true for our product/service, we can then and only then move onto more substantive customer discovery.
Category: Customer Development, Entrepreneurship, Lean Startup, Product Development