Define your early adopter criteria

All early adopters have one thing in common: a triggering event, that is, something that happened that broke old solutions. If they additionally acted on that triggering event, they would have used one or more existing alternatives. These are the two entry points when searching for early adopters.

1. Forget personas, at best they are just guesses. Also, being very detailed in the beginning can be dangerous because you don't yet know who your ideal customer needs to be.

2. Cast a wider net initially and what you might be thinking is your perfect early adopter segment. This helps you to avoid the local maxima trap and find a bigger customer segment.

3. Brainstorm triggering events. Don't get hung up on demographic information: gender, age, size of a company, industry... They may matter at scale, when you are trying to optimize your outreach. But in the very beginning, we want to look for triggering events:

   • What really starts these companies on a journey?
   • Are these prospects on a journey where they may be looking for better solutions?

   Go back to your Lean Canvas and:

   1. brainstorm or narrow down on triggering events in the early adopters box
   2. ask yourself what people are using today and what may have caused them to seek out those solutions in the existing alternatives box. Don't just think in terms of category, think in terms of what might people be doing when they are trying to accomplish a particular outcome or job.
   3. ask yourself what they were using before that they sought out a new solution, and why did that stop working

   If you can even brainstorm these things at the very beginning it is better than trying to go too narrow or just trying to target demographics.

   These triggers are more behavioral targeting. When a triggering event happens, the person does certain things, and those behaviors like what they buy, what they use, where they go, are where you find essentially opportunities for those like-minded customers or prospects that you are looking to attract.

4. Target active buyers. Once you've got these triggering events, you have to find those active buyers. Ideally, we want to find people going through the process at the moment. This makes it easier to find factual information in the interviews, things that people have actually done.

So don't just think of triggering events and existing alternatives, but narrow it down by recency.

Run prospecting experiments

How do we find these active buyers and early adopters? How do we get them to talk to us? You need a multi-faceted lead generation approach.

• Seeds (Many-to-many campaigns): you are planting a bunch of goodwill with your audience, and they talk to each other and they help with your marketing
  • Word of mouth relationships
  • Customer success stories
  • Referrals
• Nets (One-to-many campaigns): writing a blog, doing a podcast, doing a webinar...
  • Inbound marketing
  • Growth hacking
• Spears (One-to-one campaign): warm referrals on Linkedin, email etc.
  • Outbound prospecting
  • Business development

Source: Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

Where do you start?

Seeds is going to take time to develop. You need to have delivered something valuable to your customers to begin with for that to really kick in. So that's not something you could readily leverage at least in the early days.

There are different approaches depending on who you are targeting. Most people might start with the Spears approach. In the very early days, you should start approaching who might be those early adopters and set up a conversation with them. One of the most effective starting points are warm intros (friends in your network who can help in forwarding on a message). Some people might say "I can't do this because I don't have a channel". If you don't start building the channel today it will never be built out.

So the best time to build the Nets, is really as quickly as possible. You want to start investing in Nets, but Spears are oftentimes where you start out. Once you begin to understand a bit more about your customers you can then start building some inbound channels where you bring some of these insights in and that starts to build the Net.

Sometimes you start the other way and be audience first. Some people do this deliberately. They want to serve a customer segment and build a blog first. mint.com did this. They started as an online budgeting software, were targeting a younger generation so they knew that they had to build trust first and so while they were building their product they built a very valuable blog and grown an email list. When they launched their product they already had an audience ready.

Secure the interview

What's going to work for you is going to be determined on: