(2024-10-19) Maurya The Early Adopter Paradox

Ash Maurya: The Early Adopter Paradox When you try to market to everyone, you reach no one. This is why you should start with early adopters. “Niche,” “beachhead market,” and “ideal customer profile (ICP)” are all synonyms of early adopters. This is sound advice. But, when defining early adopters, it’s easy to stack a bunch of defining traits because you’re trying to narrow down on a smaller sub-segment of your ideal customers.

The danger of going too narrow is creating a “friendly” customer bubble that bursts when you run out of these customers.

2 Underlying Strategies at Play

I. The early adopter segment is a lot bigger than you think.

one should aim to achieve product/market fit (the inflection point in your hockey stick) with just your early adopter segment.

If you aren’t planning on a $100m startup, use a traction roadmap to determine your product/market fit point. That is how big your early adopter segment needs to be.

II. Early adopters are not cheap customers.

Early adopters want to be first because they want to achieve better outcomes than their peers. And they aren’t price-sensitive. They are more than happy to pay fair prices, and sometimes even a premium, to go first.

The art of good customer segmentation is finding fewer, not more, attributes that cause people to buy from you.

II. Start with the one attribute all early adopters have.

All customers share one universal attribute — a switching trigger.

A switching trigger is an event in the customer’s timeline that causes their “old way” of doing a job to break, prompting them to consider a “new way.”

Sometimes, switching triggers are obvious. Most of the times, they are not, and have to be discovered.

III. Layer on additional causal attributes through discovery, not guessing.

The most effective way to uncover switching triggers is through carefully scripted customer interviews. (problem interview)

With the right targeting and questioning, not only do you quickly uncover switching triggers but a host of other insights, like
desired outcomes,
chosen solutions,
problems, pet peeves, or struggles worth solving.
Add them to your early adopter criteria if they pass the causality test.

And yes, forget personas at this stage of your journey.