Your startup fails without early adopters
early adopters should be your number 1 priority as a early stage startup. Why? Without testing your ideas fast with users, you will build something that no-one wants. According to Harvard business review that’s one of most common reasons for failing.
Airbnb, Facebook, Tesla, … all focused on early adopters
Facebook would not exist if it wasn’t about Harvard students.
Airbnb wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t about overbooked conference visitors who booked to late.
Tesla wouldn’t exist without those 250 people who could afford to pay 109.000 USD upfront.
All those multi billion dollar companies focused on early adopters in the beginning.
Early adopters marketing works differently than traditional marketing
Most knowledge on marketing and user acquisition exists for turned on companies. Turned on companies are companies that already found a path for revenue. When you start a startup you usually didn’t find access to customers and revenue. That’s why a lot of advice on getting users might not apply to you as a early stage startup. The process of Marketing for early adopters is simply another one, as you would do for an existing profitable company.
Step by step guide of Marketing for early adopters
You can use our free tool that guides you each of these steps.
1. Define your Audience
The first step is always to define who you think has the problem you are trying to solve. You should define characteristics of the customer. Like age, profession, gender, …
2. Define where the audience is active (channel and sub channel)
Once you know who the customer is, you can check on what channels they are active. For example a 14 year old teenager would probably be found on tiktok. A 60 year old woman might be on Facebook.
When you identified the channel, you might want to find the specific sub channel. A sub channel would for example be a specific Facebook Group, a reddit thread, a YouTube Channel
3. Find acquisition type
There are only 3 types of how a user can hear of a new product / service. Paid ads, organic content and virality (word of mouth). On each channel / sub channel people can hear about a product in one of those 3 types of acquisition.
4. Validate what channel is rideable
As soon as you know how to get access to a channel, you need to validate if you have any possibility to get access to this channel. A channel might be already fully owned by a competitor.
Ultimativer you goal is to prove that you can acquire early customers for a reasonable price.
Problems and Mistakes when acquiring early users
- Focus on only 1 channel to acquire customers
- Do not build a product if no acquisition channel is available for you
- If you cannot make it work one time, you probably cannot make it work 100 times.
- CAC > LTV
