In this section:
1. We will give you many great options to get early adopters for your product. Early adopters are the single most important element to the success of your startup. Early adopters are creatures that will stay with your service forever, grow with you, and give you suggestions to improve your service.
2. After you complete this section, you will get early adopters - but beware that once you start getting users, they will discover bugs and request new features that you need to build quickly. Make sure you are ready for exposure, and that you have the bandwidth to build and fix.
Crossing the Chasm (Must Learn)
There are 5 types of customers for you. Not including the innovator, which is basically you, we have the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards. The Early adopters are ones are dying for your solution, because they the ones w/ the biggest pain. Then after that are the early majority, which are the people that will use your service when there is credibility to your service. After that are the late majority, which are a group of people that need even more convincing than the prior group. At last we have the laggards, which are the people that are finally using smartphones, because they can no longer buy anymore landline phones.
The chasm is the gap between the early adopters and the early majority. A successful company is able to break through the chasm from only have early adopters, to having it apply to the early majority. However, the important thing to realize is that startups try to target the early majority, which they will never get to if they don't get the early adopters first. The reason is because the early majority are ones that will only use something when there is a wide adaptation of the product. Therefore, early adopters are ones that will use your product early on, and really help you get the initial feedback and credibility that you need to cross the chasm.
What this means for you is that you should always build your startup's solution and features to target the early adopters first. And to break through the chasm, you need to continue to refine your solution and build merit so that it also becomes attractive the early majority. The successul companies are the ones that are able to cross the chasm, and vice versa. Therefore, the goal of all startups, at this point, is to focus on crossing the chasm, and keep growing, tweaking, to get to where we all want to be.
