Aug 17, 2008
Who should be your early adopter?
There has been some interesting discussions about who to select as your early adopters. This hits me close to home because we are currently deciding our specific launch strategy and how that relates to early adopters. An article by Robert Scoble touches on the importance of early adopters to the success of any project, and an article by Alexander van Elsas discusses how Silicon Valley early adopters can be a quick way to trap your startup into failure.
For RentWiki.com, our early adopters and early contributors are the key to our success and growth. They will determine our content, features, functionality, and scalability. However, we much be aware of the minority voice that is tied to early adopters. We are trying to help movers find great neighborhoods and avoid bad ones. And our end mission is to provide a vehicle for people to share their personal stories and knowledge of neighborhoods… a simple review site would probably suffice. However, early adopters (myself included) want a service above and beyond what is currently available.
So the question remains, should our early adopters be the Silicon 100,000 or less mainstream internet users?
