Early adopters | Hacker News Reader

Early adopters

blog.wepay.com

49 pointsceredona5 comments

Moore gives a case-study of how Quicken got started (in crossing the chasm, in ch 6 define the battle - p.139, rev. ed.). Sounds very relevant and useful, and I commend it to you, even though it's about a later stage (providing the whole product ie. to actually salve the pain; and positioning with respect to other ways/attempts to fix it).

Of the people who have the problem that WePay solves, there is a continuum of how bad the problem is, how important it is to them to fix it and so on. But there is also a continuum of those people's attitudes towards change. Psychologically, some people like change and some don't. It is these early adopter that you want - that are a subset of the people with the problem who are suffering acutely.

Crossing the Chasm strikes again.

No, actually. The "chasm" comes much later, when you have lots of early adopters and it's time to go mainstream. That's a very different problem from the one in the OP, which is about how the population of early adopters is not the same for every product.

Crossing the Chasm is well worth reading. It's also cool that the research was originally done about seed potatoes.

This is somewhat tangential, but I would bet the set of all people who stood in line for an iPhone and who refuse to use facebook is vanishingly small.

if you just look at age demographics of facebook users:

http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/01/2009-facebook-demograph...

40% of facebook users are 18--24.

now compare to people with iphones in 2009 (different to people who queued, admittedly, got stats on this? but still earlyish adopters since 2009 data)

http://gorumors.com/crunchies/age-demographics-of-iphone-use...

whilst for the iphone, very few are in the 18--24 range: just 13%. most people are 35-54.

it seems from this 2009 users of the iphone tend to be older than users of facebook. perhaps because the iphone is an expensive device.

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