Your ideal early adopter criteria is more about when vs who. What we are really looking for as a distinguishing characteristic in the beginning is less about who you are going after but more about when in the story are you going after.

Answer the question: Where are they in the story? If you think about any customer timeline you are going to find people very early in the process when some triggering event happens and they are just starting the journey. As time goes on there is going to be some urgency, some deadlines, things are going to start moving a lot faster, then they are going to make a move and then there is some PULL that happens.

Where you find your early adopters is going to be a function of where you find the struggles.

• If you generally find a lot of inertia, the person you are tackling is very early in the timeline.
• If you find a lot of the people in the middle part of the story, you find someone who has already bought something, you can see that the true competition changes.

(e.g. I am moving from an apartment to a house. I am basically trying to find somebody who is researching home ownership, and there is a lot of stuff there, but when I am finding someone who is a serial home buyer, they are a lot more further in the timeline, the existing alternatives change, their sophistication and maturity level changes and the person you target then is very different from the person you target at first house. Also someone who wants to downsize, he has done with houses and now he wants to go to an apartment, that's yet someone else in the timeline)

• When in the story are you really playing a role? When do you come in?
• At that point in time what's the landscape? (What's the consideration set? What's the competition? What are the struggles?)

Early adopter timeline

The people we need to target obviously are those who at least went through the passive looking phase. In your interviews you may find someone who has been triggered but hasn't done anything else, that's not an early adopter. You want to see some energy being spent, research being done, even if they didn't buy any product, there needs to be at least that first thought which got them into passive looking and ideally some cascading triggers.

• If they didn't buy anything and the story stops there, you should go really deep on everything that led up to it. So what they compared even if they have not decided yet.
• If someone actually bought something, you also want to see what's that chosen solution at this point in time. Chosen solution is not the one they are necessarily going to keep, but at least in that point in time, given all the research they have done, this was the best they could come up with. This stage is interesting to get channels ideas, places to go when people are looking for products, to get an idea of what that early search of a product look like. With better marketing you can show up there and steal the customer away before they buy other products.