marketing, growth, customer-developmentI know there are millions of scenarios. Please explain with an example of a startup for explaining who would the early adopters be, and how to identify them?
Early adopters are the first batch of users who are willing to spend time and ideally money to use(or validate) your new concept. those adopters are people who suffer from from the problem you are solving and think your value proposition (product) will help them solve these problems.
Regarding identification there are several ways to do so, I think one smart way is to make a customer persona to understand who are your customers and how do they look like and make sure that they have the problem your product solves.
Once you have this persona (profile) of customers identified you start reaching out to people who match your persona and attract them to your product.
Actual example I am working on:
I am challenged to validate my ideas so I always build customer persona and try to reach out to people to validate my idea, this process to find early adopters takes long time. so I am currently building http://findearlyadopters.com/ which connects startups with segmented early adopters based on previous products they used before.
I started identifying customers persona, but asking the first question who have the same problem as I do, obviously we are talking about startup founders & incubators. so I started conducting interviews with those people who confirmed the existence of the problem. Now I am building the product with their feedback in mind all the time.
Here is the pitch deck to understand how I defined the problem and the solution: http://tinyurl.com/nvu49ss
It would be great to get your feedback on the concept we are building here since your question is the same question we are answering in our product
Today crowdfunding is the primary way of locating lead adopters. Lead adopters are the people who have the highest demand for your product on the supply demand curve. They are willing to pay more or incur some risk in order to use your product or service. They are also often experts on your product/service and their opinions greatly influence the adopters that follow them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter
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