Building off earlier work, Geoffrey Moore, Malcolm Gladwell, and others have helped technology entrepreneurs understand how innovative products diffuse throughout a market. Graphically it looks like this:
While the slope of your product’s curve will vary, most technology adoption cycles will follow a pattern like this. What we take away from this is that there’s a process – a method to the madness – and you can’t hijack an S curve at the halfway point. You start where everyone else does.
At the beginning.
The reason is that customers at each stage of the curve need something provided by the previous step. Late adopters need the validation provided by early adopters, while the technology enthusiasts at the front of the curve want open space before them. They value being the first to adopt something new, often simply for the technology’s sake. If your product is going to reach the mass market, landing you on the cover of Forbes, the technology enthusiasts – hackers* – are your gatekeepers.
So, you have a choice. You can release products into the ether and hope that they end up in the hands of hackers, miraculously diffusing throughout the rest of the adoption curve.
Or you can actually have a strategy.
Customer development is a tool that can help you understand the needs of the hackers (or earlyvangelists, as Steve Blank calls them). Traditional tools like voice of the customer won’t do this for you because traditional methods sample the majority. Customers in the majority don’t foreshadow future mass market needs that are the tide that raises your ship. You need hackers.
This raises a question: what if you do everything right, and you can’t find the hackers? Frankly, if there are no early adopters, there may not be a pain worth solving. This is a BIG idea. No one hacking/mod’ing/tinkering in your market? Time to be honest with yourself and go find the hackers in another market.
So how do you find the hackers?
Well, that’s the subject of another post.
***
*When I refer to hackers, I don’t only mean hackers that hack computers. I mean the tinkerers, the mod’ers, the users who don’t ask who else is using your product before they want to dive in and take the cover off.
[...] How to find a problem worth solving 29 04 2009 Before we lay out how to find a market problem worth solving (thus creating a wildly successful company), let’s remember what we talked about last time: [...]
The bell curve you show is for the total product life cycle from inception until end of life. The S curve normally applies to annual sales for a product or a category of product and ends at the maximum penetration for the product not the end of life. The S curve spans use by five categories of
1. Hackers / Technologists/Innovators
2. Visionary / Early Adopters / Earlyvangelists
3. Early Majority / Pragmatists
4. Later Majority / Mainstream
5. Laggards / Conservative
Hackers/Technologists may be your first users but are not normally Visionary or Early Adopters (what Blank calls Earlyvangelists).
Hackers/Technologists normally have little or no budget but an ability to work with early technologies that still have significant problems and help you refine them. Visionaries have an appreciation for the potential business impact of your product and are looking to effect a significant change in their business.
Hackers/Technologists/Innovators are key to getting a testimonial that your product is functional, but Visionary/Early Adopters are critical for substantiating the business value of your product.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize hackers as the gatekeepers to your market, or at least the only path into the market. Here are three techniques for bypassing them to focus on Visionary or Early Adopter prospects:
1. Deliver your product initially as a service to either early adopters or even pragmatic (early majority) users, buffering them from the risk of failure by selling the outcome/benefit.
2. Add one or two people to your early team with deep knowledge of the industry/vertical you are targeting and use them as internal technologists to refine the product until it is ready for early adopters.
3. Take a proven technology from one industry and apply it in another. For example, wiki technology has been combined with a browser-based WYSIWYG editor and applied much more broadly than programming specs and documentation for engineers.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for a really thoughtful comment. I don’t disagree with anything you said – your definition of “hacker” is more mainstream than the way I was using it. The simple point I was trying to make (which makes more sense when you read the post that follows this one) is that nearly every technology company faces an adoption curve. To ignore it is to shoot yourself in the foot. And rather than downplay a market because it is only inhabited by technologists, entrepreneurs should look more closely to see if those “hackers” foreshadow a greater market trend.
Bill