Early adopters

What an early adopter is

The term comes from Everett Rogers' book Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1962. Rogers split the people who take up a new idea into five groups, by how early they adopt it.

Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, from 1991, added a warning: the gap between early adopters and the early majority is wide. Early adopters will put up with a rough product to solve their problem; the majority won't. But you need early adopters first, because they're the only ones who'll use you before you're polished.

Steve Blank's five traits

Steve Blank, in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, calls the ideal first customers earlyvangelists and lists five traits. The more of them someone has, the more likely they are to try your product, and pay for it, early.

1. They have a problem.
2. They know they have the problem.
3. They're actively looking for a solution.
4. They've put together a solution of their own, out of other tools or by hand.
5. They have, or can get, a budget to pay for a fix.

The workaround is the best sign

Of the five traits, the homemade workaround is the easiest to see from outside and the strongest signal. Someone who has built a spreadsheet, a script or a routine to cope with a problem has already spent time on it. They're not wondering whether the problem matters. They're waiting for something better.

These posts, from our ideas library, are from developers checking whether AI coding agents really finished a task. Each one describes a check they built themselves:

Where to find early adopters

Where people ask for help

Reddit, forums, Discord and Slack groups, Q&A sites. Someone who posts a detailed question about your problem already has the first three traits.

In complaints about current tools

Reviews, comment threads and forum posts about the tools people use today. Unhappy paying customers have a budget and a reason to switch.

Among people who share workarounds

Templates, scripts and how-to posts about coping with the problem. The authors, and the people thanking them, are early adopters.

In your network, one step removed

Not friends who'll be polite, but their colleagues who have the problem. Ask for introductions.

In communities for one job or trade

A group for bookkeepers or landscapers is smaller than a general business forum, and far more likely to share your problem.

How to reach them without spamming

Early adopters often gather in communities that dislike promotion. Read each community's rules first. Lead with help: answer the question they asked, share what you've learned, and mention what you're building only when it's relevant and allowed.

When you message someone directly, refer to what they wrote and ask about their problem, not your product. “I saw your post about chasing late invoices. How are you handling it now?” gets more replies than a pitch. Paul Graham's essay Do Things That Don't Scale describes the same approach: recruit your first users by hand, one at a time.

One number from our own data: in the 90 days to 19 October 2026, our tools flagged more than 28,000 Reddit posts from people asking for a fix to some problem. Early adopters are posting every day. The work is finding the ones whose problem you solve.

What to do with your first early adopters

Your first ten users shape the product more than the next thousand. Treat them like partners:

• Talk to each one. Ask what they tried before and why they're willing to try you.
• Ask them to pay early, even a small amount. Payment is the clearest sign you're solving something real.
• Fix what blocks them before adding features others might want.
• Ask who else they know with the problem. Early adopters often know each other.
• Watch whether they keep using the product. Early adopters who quit are telling you something.

Product-market fit: how to measure it