The Three Qualifying Early Adopter Characteristics You Need to Know Now

Identifying who your early adopters are is hard.

But surprisingly, it’s much easier to identify who they are not. And by eliminating customers that can’t possibly be your early adopter, you create more time and resource to focus on those that are.

Try this quick & simple “MMM Test” based on three qualifying early adopter characteristics that divide your audience like a razor into viable and unviable early adopters.

Early Adopter Characteristics 101

Most people’s mental model of early adopter characteristics descends from Geoffrey Moore’s description of Innovators and Early Adopters from his book Crossing The Chasm.

He teaches that Early Adopters are the individuals who:

• Are willing to try new products or technologies before the majority of the population.

• Are not afraid of change and are often influential in shaping mainstream acceptance of innovations.

As discussed my recent articles on A better way to identify your early adopters and innovators vs early adopters, I somewhat disagree with this and advocate for taking a problem-solver approach instead.

Furthermore, there are a few early adopter characteristics that cut through the noise startups are subjected to and actually qualify whether or not a person is a viable early adopter for your startup. This “razor” bisects your customer audience into viable early adopters and unviable “anti-adopters.”

To define your early adopters, start with your anti-adopters.

How to Know When Someone is Not Your Early Adopter

This concept of anti-adopters arose during my time as CMO of Topology Eyewear.

Like many early stage startups, we were debating the various signals we were getting from different audience groups and trying to decide who to focus on. in the midst of what I’d call a good natured but “table-slapping” debate with the CTO, Alexis Gallagher, Alexis slammed his hand on the table and declared:

“Listen! For any person to have a realistic chance of buying our product right now, three things have to be true:

1. First of all, they have to have a problem with stock eyewear, because if regular glasses are fine for them, they're not going to bother going through the effort of using our product.

2. they have to be comfortable enough with a smartphone, or comfortable enough with technology in general to trust that this process is going to work.

3. And thirdly, obviously, they have to be able to pay the $500 price tag in order to get these product.

   
   

   If all three things of those are not true, no one's going to buy the product. “

Though his challenge was hard to hear at the time, I soon realized he was right, and implemented these points as the guiding early adopter characteristics to guide our acquisition efforts.

We called it Alexis’ Razor, because it cut through the noise of our early marketing and bisected the audience into those that simply could or could-not be our early adopters.

Introducing the Qualifying Early Adopter Characteristics and the MMM Test

Over the years since that meeting, I’ve applied Alexis’ Razor at every startup I’ve worked with, modifying it into a simple 3M’s or “MMM Test” that can work for any startup.

The 3 characteristics that matter are:

1. Money

2. Motivation

3. Mindset

Let’s unpack these a bit further…

1: Money

This simply asks whether your customer can afford your product.

If your early product is necessarily expensive or a very advanced product, not everyone can afford it straight away. Having such people in your funnel skews your metrics, creates false negatives and wastes your resources. Get them out of your funnel entirely.

In some cases particularly problem-driven innovators and early adopters may be willing to spend more than they can logically afford for your product, which makes them a great early adopter.

2: Motivation

Early adopters need to have some force that's compelling them to try something new and overcome any risk or any hassle involved in giving your untested new product a shot.

As I’ve previously argued, the most motivating factor is the need to solve a problem. This is much stronger than the stereotypical innovator’s curiosity to try something new. In the Topology example, innovator customers were motivated to solve the problem of poor fitting glasses.

If you have a funnel of innovators that are mostly driven by innovation rather than a genuine pressing need, brace yourself for poor conversion.

3: Mindset

Sharing your mindset means that they need to agree with your unique way of how you're going about solving the problem, which many will not.

This is where your unique POV comes in. While other companies may have identified the same problem, you are taking a unique approach to solving it based on a contrarian perspective, or doing it in an innovative new way. In the Topology example this meant solving the fit problem with a radically different technology that the user had to be comfortable with.

Even an innovator customer needs to agree with the philosophy of how you will solve their problem.

Anti-Adopter and Early Adopter Case Study: Bryte

To illustrate this with another example, let me tell you about my experience as CMO at Bryte, a startup that developed a high-end smart mattress.

I applied the MMM model to focus our early adopter targeting and product superpowers to the most viable subset of our initial audience.

• Money
  The Bryte Balance Smart Mattress was a very advanced premium product starting at more than $6,000. So obviously our early adopter wasn’t going to be someone that can't afford anywhere near that amount of money.
  
  

• Motivation
  For us this meant somebody that had a problem with their sleep. Most people that bought the product had a self identified problem with their sleep that they wanted to solve. If somebody could easily sleep on any surface in any situation, they would not value the outcome Bryte offered and so would not consider risking giving us a try.
  
  

• Mindset
  This was critical: To benefit from Bryte, they had to be able to willing to accept technology as part of the solution. Because a lot of the wellness audience that do value is sleep only value a very natural, non-tech solution. Indeed many people think that technology has no place in the bedroom at all and they prefer to even leave their smartphone outside of the room. Obviously that person isn't going to buy an expensive smart bed. We had to accept such people were simply not our customer.

Looking at our audience through this lens of Money, Motivation and Mindset helped us eliminate people that were not our audience, which in turn helped us focus limited resources on people that were.

Conclusion:

Bisecting your audience into viable early adopters and anti-adopters has the double benefit of knowing who to focus on, and saving your resource and effort from those that will not convert.

The MMM test provides a valuable approach to understanding who your early adopters are by considering their money, motivation, and mindset. By utilizing this framework, you can eliminate those individuals who do not fit the criteria and focus on engaging those who are most likely to embrace your innovation.

Need A Little More Help Finding Your Early Adopters?

If you’ve enjoyed this post but still have some questions, would like to bounce some ideas off someone or discuss any other aspect of Traction Design, book a pro-bono (free and no obligation) chat with me now.

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