This morning I was thinking about the term early adopter. It’s a catch-all phrase that refers to the people who first try out your product or service. The advice most founders receive is to get more early adopters who will tell others about what they’re building. This does more bad than good for the founder. The person giving this advice sounds really smart without offering in-depth advice on the kinds of people you need to first attract to get your project off the ground. The truth is not all early adopters are cut from the same cloth.

There are main two types of early adopters. There are the Alpha adopters and the Beta adopters. Don’t let the titles Alpha and Beta fool you, both are equally valuable. For simplicity we’ll call them ‘Masons’ and ‘Evangelists’. It’s common knowledge in the startup world that to succeed you need evangelists who use your product and tell everyone they know how great it is. What is less talked about are the users who may not tell as many people about your product but are instrumental in building it and making it better. These are your alpha adopters a.k.a. masons.

Masons are the early adopters who not only use your product but contribute heavily to it’s creation. These are the people who take time to constantly give you feedback, contribute ideas and content, and even go so far as helping you build your product. These people may not be sharing with others as much as the evangelists but without them your project can stall. Masons are the people who grow your project from being a small team of contributors to a community and even a platform.

I use the term masons and evangelists because it fits in with the analogy of building a church. A church needs both masons and evangelists to grow and flourish. Without enough masons the evangelists bring in a lot of believers but the church quickly becomes too small to handle the size of the congregation and can’t renovate fast enough. Eventually people start thinking there is no room for them and stop coming back. Without enough evangelists the masons build a wonderful structure that very few people actually know about. When you have the right ratio of masons and evangelists you have the potential to build a great cathedral that is world renowned.

What the right ratio of alpha to beta adopters is depends on your project. If you’re building a tool or an open source project then you need a lot of masons. Evangelists are still important but only in so far as they attract more masons and believers who donate to help the building process. Stripe is a good example because it’s users are almost exclusively masons. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if every non-technical person in the world signed up, but what those users could contribute to the further development of their platform would be limited, investors not withstanding.

On the other side of the spectrum would be Codecademy. The whole reason for it’s existence is to teach regular folks programming. In their case they need a heavy dose of evangelists who espouse the benefits of learning to code. Having more masons helps but to achieve true success Codecademy needs to convert a lot of non-developers into lifelong developers.

Finally there is one more type of product that needs a particular mix of masons and evangelists. These are consumer platforms, which need closer to a 50/50 split of Alpha to Beta adopters. These are the Notre Dames and the Hagia Sohpias (cathedrals) of the tech world. You might have heard of a few of them like iOS, Facebook, AirBnB, YouTube and Android. Platforms grow large and survive because anyone can be a mason, evangelist or both. Some platforms convert masons to evangelists better than others. iOS has a steep learning curve but YouTube is easy for anyone to create their own video channel. What’s interesting about these platforms is that they show the true nature of how early adopters actually adopt products.

Facebook started out with a tonne of evangelists and later brought on a lot of masons to expand the platform. Steve Jobs almost barred masons from iOS forever, but was convinced not to and later unleashed the most profitable mobile platform. What Android lacks in monetization it makes up for in the sheer number of users that developers can’t ignore. Users who rent out their house on AirBnB generally trust it enough to stay at someone else’s house when they travel.

In short, don’t just blindly pursue early adopters. Figure out the right mix of Alpha adopters a.k.a. ‘Masons’ and Beta adopters a.k.a. ‘Evangelists’. Both are key to building your product and attracting loyal users.

James McNab is a Designer from Toronto, Canada. James runs madrasa.ca a website for people interested in building products.