James Quinn

Finding (and keeping) early adopters? 🚀

by•
Wanted to start a thread to hear about how some other startup founders have approached finding the right early adopters and have kept them interested/engaged as the product grows, fails, and goes through changes. How did you find the early adopters? What was your strategy for keeping them engaged? How often did you reach out to them for feedback?
25 views

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Shane Devane
I've emailed potential customers directly and asked if they have problems X because I'm going to be working on it and I'd love to understand it more. Engaged them to understand their issues. Recommended solutions (alternative options etc). Mentioned what I was working on in passing and if they were interested in experimenting to see what they could learn then it would be great to sign them up. It took 60-90 days minimum for me (longer sometimes). My product is a solution for a problem but not the only solution. I have indirect competitors that I discuss.
Devanand Premkumar
@shanedevane One good thing about having a competitor is that the market is viable. It is sure a positive sign in my opinion.
Ali Sabti
Early adopters are most interested in the process imo. They might love the problem you're trying to solve, but they'd like to see and participate in the building process. Keep them engaged by truly integrating these early users into your development cycles.
Pax Prakarsa
Another shameless plug. Here is a list of 11 resources for product launch, (including finding early adopters, communities of creators/makers, etc.) https://www.xoxial.com/lists/lis.... Appreciate if you could please let me know how useful it is. Also, anyone can add more resources to the list.
Dave Poku
I am about to launch my product at the end of the month. I am very interested in this topic because I think process of finding early adopters is the most critical in the life of a product. It's like birthing a child, what and how you feed it earlier on will determine whether it thrives, has stunted growth or dies completely. It would be interesting to hear how people did it vs. how they are stuck where they are.
Zach Wright
I can share what we are doing at a very early stage: we're using surveys (like mTurk) to do our customer discovery, and have found that by including a question like "would you be interested in trying our app?" we can get decent conversion into beta testers. Whether this will turn into actual "early adopters" is another story. I've been working on the problem of how to keep these folks engaged as well. My thought is that people like to have input into the product development process, so we're trying to include them there. We're giving them access to updates as we roll them out, but it's hit or miss when it comes to maintaining regular use. I'm curious what others are doing here. Do you start a community resource for your early adopters (Slack channel, Twitter following, etc.)?
Cortez Grek
best place I've ever invested in and they actually did as they promised. I think they are new and actually taking advantage of the crypto world . Great place to save up start up