The Early Adopter Chasm
We already know who our early adopters are, but how do we get to a wider market?
The Acorn Collective is a truly global crowdfunding platform. We will be using blockchain technology to help founders and startups find access to funding.
As Head of User Experience (UX) at The Acorn Collective, I wanted to share how we will be approaching the design of the Acorn platform.
In my first article, I gave a brief introduction to the guiding UX principles that we have come up with to help us ensure the platform is as usable, accessible and pleasurable for everyone who comes in contact with it.
In this series, I will discuss each principle in the context of a challenge that we will face when building this new product.
What is the early adopter chasm?
As an organisation who has recently finished an ICO (initial coin offering), we have a massive and engaged audience.
This is fantastic!
Most products at our stage might have an idea who their future audience will be whereas we, at time of writing, have a Telegram channel with over 57,000 members! These are people we can talk to, discuss ideas with and leverage to help us to build an amazing product.
However…
This risks building a crowdfunding platform for ICO backers.
What we want to build is a crowdfunding platform for everyone!
We are aware that our very first users of the shiny new platform will be people who have supported us through ICO. This is a great start but crypto people are innovators and early adopters.
Early adopters are actually kind of a perfect audience for crowdfunding founders.
They tend to seek out and are excited about new ideas. They are willing to take the time to understand the benefits and take a risk on a project with their own money. Then they want to tell everyone about this amazing new thing they found.
But early adopters are a very small part of a market. They often have high demands. Have specific requirements, which are rarely the same as the needs and wants of the wider public.
They also tend not to be very loyal long term.
I hope I don’t offend anyone with that statement. I include myself as an early adopter, and if you do too I ask you to think about that drawer of gadgets you have. You know the one — maybe it’s several drawers and a box too. I bet it contains a smartwatch or two (specifically a Pebble?). Phones from a variety of brands (perhaps a OnePlusOne). All sorts of cool things that once were the big life-changing goods, now forgotten.
As I said: Early adopters are a perfect audience for a new product. But it’s important to for that product to wean themselves off the milk of innovators on to the solids of mass-market consumers.
This is referred to as ‘crossing the chasm’ after Geoffrey A Moore wrote about it in his book of the same name.
If we can’t jump that gap effectively then we will fall into the chasm of failure where so many cool brands have ended up in the past (I refer you back to that Pebble watch in your drawer).
How do we solve this?
A lot has to do with the commercial aspect: The fact that we will be the only choice for most of the world especially developing countries is a big factor. They literally can’t use the existing competitors. That Acorn is free to use has got to be attractive for a lot of founders too!
From a product design and user experience point of view, we need to aim to solve real problems and add value. If we can build a platform that offers a better experience and access for everyone, higher levels of success for founders and greater transparency for backers. If we achieve that we can disrupt the incumbent brands.
We achieve this by validating everything with real people.
We validate the problems that we need to solve; prioritise the biggest risks; use discovery methods to find the opportunities; rapid prototyping to eliminate the solutions that don’t work, and use a lean design and development process to refine the solutions that do work.
Importantly, we test our work with the right people.
We also design for extremes: A solution we’ve found might work for an early adopter, but it should work for a clueless technophobe just as well.
Our ICO contributors shouldn’t be worried that we will forget them — instead, they should be reassured we are looking to build a valuable solid long-term proposition.
