@Early Adopters

Once a startup launches its new product, it finds itself lacking a very important thing: Social Proof.

Social Proof has always been around since our early days in the caves. If everyone is eating this plant, than this plant seems to be a good one and I should eat it too instead of venturing around for new food.

For startups, it usually manifests itself in the dreaded question “So who else is using this?”

There is (usually) wisdom in the crowd and so far Social Proof has been good to us. This poses a problem for our founder where even if he has a 10x better/cheaper product, he has no social credit to back it off.

If time was not an issue, then our founder can afford to wait and with enough time, people will start to recognize that this is a superior product and will start to adopt it but startups are always short on time. If money was not an issue, then our founder can find a celebrity to endorse it but here again startups are always short on money and the very little they have should definitely not go to celebrity endorsement.

So what does our founder need to do?

They need to understand the bell curve around product adoption. In the middle of the bell curve is almost everyone who adopt a product. There’s usually few people on the right and those are the late adopters and founders should avoid them at all cost. There’s people on the left of the bell curve and these are the early adopters and the topic of this post.

As an example, for Uber, users are currently in the middle of the bell curve. Almost everyone uses an Uber. There are still people that still uses other means of transportation and these are the late adopters. Finally, there are people who used Uber before Uber became a thing and these are the early adopters.

Contrary to popular belief, early adopters are not risk takers or star wars fans. They are usually people who know a lot about their job or industry to understand where it is broken and how a new product can make things better in it. They also understand the reward this product will bring to them and are courageous enough to adopt it for themselves or their employers.

Your mission as a founder is first to find these early adopters and second to absolutely delight them at all cost.

One last note on this, San Francisco is a city of early adopters. This in an incredible unfair advantage this city has. Maybe, it is because many founders end up here and founders are natural early adopters. Because of this, if a product acquires market share and most importantly love and appreciation in San Francisco, it is usually a strong indicator of a major global breakthrough coming in down the line. I have seen it with one startup founder I was visiting a long time ago. He took a screenshot and shared it on Slack. I was like “what is this?”. He told me that it was a thing he and his team uses to chat with each other. Couple of months later, Slack was at over $1 billion in valuation.