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Are Web 2.0 startups wasting their time with Web 2.0 early adopters?

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Cookie cutter go-to-market strategies
I run into a lot of startups that have identical strategies for getting to market. When you talk to them, a lot of them will talk about the same questions:

  1. When are you launching?
  2. What do you do to get on Techcrunch/Venturebeat/DEMO/etc.?
  3. How do you think Twitter/Friendfeed/etc got their successful launches?

I think there are some big assumptions that go into the questions above, which we’ll discuss in this post. But let me first show you a very famous diagram:

The traditional “Crossing the Chasm” curve

The “technology adoption” curve above was popularized by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm book, and mostly deals with enterprise software. (I had the pleasure of spending some time with him while I was at Mohr Davidow, where he is a venture partner)

People often have the same image in their minds when thinking about go-to-market strategies for consumer internet as well. The general idea is to go through the typical flow:

  1. Get a bunch of early adopters (aka Techcrunch readers) excited about your product
  2. They blog, twitter, and promote your product to their friends
  3. Eventually this process will reach the mainstream and you’ll get the wider market

I also want to bring up the definition used by Moore to describe a market, which is a bunch of folks that reference each other when making purchasing decisions. In this case, it’s the bloggers and alpha nerds that are the market.

But what if this is NOT the starting point for your market? Who are the other early adopters and visionaries?

Redefining enthusiasts and visionaries
The major point I will make here is that Techcrunch and related blogs reach an audience of early adopters, but these may not be the earlier adopters that you want. After all, what’s the point of launching a music startup on Techcrunch, for example, if your startup is primarily for the teen mass market?

I want to point out a great article posted by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point) years ago, called The Coolhunt, which you can read here. The article discusses the emergence of bottoms-up “cool:”

Once, when fashion trends were set by the big couture houses-when cool
was trickle- down-that wasn’t important. But sometime in the past few
decades things got turned over, and fashion became trickle-up. It’s now
about chase and flight-designers and retailers and the mass consumer
giving chase to the elusive prey of street cool-and the rise of
coolhunting as a profession shows how serious the chase has become. The
sneakers of Nike and Reebok used to come out yearly. Now a new style
comes out every season. Apparel designers used to have an
eighteen-month lead time between concept and sale. Now they’re reducing
that to a year, or even six months, in order to react faster to new
ideas from the street. The paradox, of course, is that the better
coolhunters become at bringing the mainstream close to the cutting
edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes. This is the first rule
of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of
discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains
the triumphant circularity of coolhunting

Where Gladwell uses the term “cool,” the people in the technology industry use the phrase “early adopter.” Within every target market, no matter how mainstream, there are early adopters or “cool” people who are more likely to uptake these new products and have friends reference them for decisions.

Where are your “real” early adopters?
And thus as a corollary, if your market is moms, there are cool moms that are likely to try out the new technology. And if your market is Asian immigrants, there are cool members of that group who are trying out new technology.

My point is simply this:

In 99% of all cases, the Techcrunch early adopter crowd is probably NOT the ideal early adopter crowd to go after - your target market lives somewhere else

The exceptions I’ll make to this are B2B tech startups like Gnip, or companies primarily trying to target VCs in their announcements.

So where are your early adopters you want to be going after? I don’t know, but that’s the kind of research that you should be doing to create a compelling, differentiated go-to-market strategy that anything but cookie cutter.

One last thing to think about… where did LOLcats and the FAIL meme start? Start by reading about 4chan. Also check out SomethingAwful, Genmay, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and all the other sites that expose some of the darkest underbellies of the internet ;-) Between these sites, Yahoo Groups, IRC, and other old-school communications platforms, I’m guessing a large number of internet memes are generated there by early adopters of some kind.

Written by Andrew Chen

July 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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Viewing 21 Comments

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    We think about this all the time. This is even more complicated in community building companies like social networks, MMOs, etc. Often the early community ends up leaving an un-erasable mark on the future of your community (e.g. Digg).


    Which is to say, if you believe that your early adopter audience is not Techcrunchies -- then it behooves you to make sure the early users of your community are not from that group. However, this seems to run counter to a lot of typical approaches from web startups. The prevailing wisdom is "you can't pick your customer" and "build it and see which users like it."


    These two ideas seem to be in direct conflict, no?

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    One important reason for visibility among the TechCrunchies is distribution -- we want our app and API embedded in *their* apps. Sort of the B2B exception, but not exactly.

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    Back in April I got an email from TechCruch with an offer to shoot a 60 second pitch for my company. They were doing a ton of these setups before the TC/PopSugar event. They only gave me 48 hours to prepare but I was excited anyway.


    A couple hours later I came to my senses. Why do I want to bust my ass for 2 days to be featured on the TechCrunch site? I am not looking for funding and my target audience is 15-25 year olds.


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    edit: TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch site - even more reason not to waste my time.

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    If you have a really unique and innovative offering then it may be harmful to be profiled on techcrunch too early. I and basically everyone I know who reads it is looking for the "next best thing"


    Check out friendfeed & twitter. these are products that get an unusual amount of attention on these blogs because the editors use them and love them. Also look at the effect of the high visibility of these products - there is now a dozen or so "twitter clones" and "freindfeed clones" including open source clones to make your own!

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    Last month, I started doing an analysis of Facebook apps that had been profiled on one of the big tech blogs at launch(never finished becasue it got boring quick). Those stories had no effect of Facebook app growth in the slightest. For the obvious reasons you list above. The core thing that a tech blog writeup gives a startup is validation. I know a couple companies who raised their Series A without having to pitch because of a favorable writeup in Techcrunch. The takeaway is don't bother with the tech blogs until you ready to raise VC money.

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    I've been harping this point a long time - YES.

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    Fantastic post Andrew! I just had a conversation with someone about this over the weekend.


    Of course we believe a lot of new media / social media companies would be well served by exhibiting / sponsoring BlogWorld which is not an overly "early adopter" crowd but a social media crowd. These are folks who want solutions to help them create, distribute and monetize their content and who have never heard of Techcrunch.





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    The notion of a high-tech early-adopter has been fractured, which compounds the problem. Gone are the days when a group can follow the Christensen playbook to achieve adoption amongst early-adopters and use them to traverse into the bigger markets.


    We live in interesting times.

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    Well said!


    The "Cold Start" problem is one of the biggest start-up killers out there. It's also one of the hardest things to test during development, which entices many people to think it's okay to skip it.


    Other causes I often see are:


    * Most tech developers have only focused on tech and post-launch product release in their careers, and very rarely have done any brand development and original product releases.

    * Many people think because they believe their product is better it will market itself (If you build it they will come)


    * Many VCs are ready to believe marketing is just a matter of marketing headcount and retained PR.


    * Many start-ups convince themselves they (or their mothers) are reliable market research pools.


    * Many start-ups overconfidently think that since the marketspace is huge, just getting 1% adoption would be all it takes, and that since that is such a small adoption rate, it should be easy enough to achieve.


    In my experience, The needles in traffic stats created by TechCruch and the like are almost never populated by target customers, it's by industry peers focused on their own projects.


    To know you have a commercial success requires seeing active and consistent usage by a sizable customer base. You may get a different set of customers than you expected, but you need to know that there is at least one real customer base that wants to become long-term customers. And ideally, you want to have confirmed this customer base in advance before committing to the company.


    [Thanks Andrew, for keeping it real out there ;]

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    I don't feel it's a waste of time at all. For a startup, sites such as Techcrunch are just another marketing vehicle. Word of mouth is very important for cash strapped startups.


    The objectives of these vehicles are to gain expose to VC's and other "A" Listers. If you can gain the validation and housekeeping seal of approval of the "A" Listers then you've won half the battle. Testimonials work wonders! Therefore, it's only 1 component of a 2 pronged strategy. The other component is building awareness amongst your true target market.


    Remember FTW ;)

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    I believe this is right on. I see this happening for intraprenauers as well. There is a need to strengthen the marketing of innovation to address the motivations of the early majority. That is where the real ROI takes off. http://wolfsblahblahblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/is-moores-chasm-theory-telling.html

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    Excellent post Andrew. When we initially launched our alpha version two years ago, we deliberately shied away from mainstream technology blogs as we realised that if we got profiled, we wouldn't be able to afford the increase in traffic and bandwidth required (although thankfully Mashable did mention us in the end, but on a day when other news dwarfed our project). Since then we've steadily grown traffic and have been able to increase server capacity as and when it could be afforded.

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    Absolutely. Everyone is an influencer at something. To think that a small bunch of affected A-listers are a panacea or silver bullet is horribly flawed.


    That said, I do think that we are also radically underestimating the power of long tail influence, which is still very much in its nascency.

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    Well written! I have been thinking of this for some time. I am not a typical early adopter at all. Second wave at best and usually I do adopt to learn a service and mine it for its potential use in education.


    With this constant eye open for how a gadget or service can be used for schools, I see a huge untapped market on one side that has longevity and built in inroads into things like mommy markets and much more.


    If say, a bunch of these services united and dedicated a branch of themselves to forming and being a part of a new type of school system, (and online academy the likes of which is yet unknown as those that exist don't early adopt almost anything)they would in essence BE the school. They would have a built in market. The students would use their resources to learn and their families to keep tabs. The teachers and admin to do the content work of the school. And they would take what they know of the services and use them personally later.


    I don't see public ed as it exists giving up the reigns to tech, but charters are legal and if developers could unite to form such a school eventually there would be no chasm. They would begin in the belly of the bell.


    It's a weird idea, but it does address getting to those unreached markets in a way that helps everyone.






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    I've wondered about this as well. You really don't see any startups launching AT the consumer, they launch at the Silicon Valley crowd. The last time we saw Web startups marketed to Joe Public was during the first dot com bubble, when it was done very poorly (sock puppet Super Bowl commercial?)


    It makes me wonder what the marketing plans are they show to the VC's. Surely everyone isn't trying to sell to Google?

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    This is a great post ...


    @Pete, we're in a similar situation, launching a new offering targeting 15-25yo web users, and with no tech flavor (although behind the scenes there is a lot of advanced technology).


    Whilst it's tempting to spend a lot of time on promotions with the tech blogs and Silicon Valley early adopters, we're thinking it may be better to spend more time going after individual trend-setters out there in consumer land... Even just one mass invite message from them to their hundreds of friends is enough buzz to get started and probably less work than getting a lot of tech blog coverage..

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    nice post, altho i think this was probably expressed nicely in Josh's 53,361 post from a few years back:

    http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html


    that said, i like your updated examples & pics/graphs... and the observation is certainly worth repeating.


    (aka "the beatings will continue until morale improves" ;)

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    Great reminder Andrew! Its funny to me when savvy start-up individuals forget the basics of sound PR and marketing when rolling out a property that has any sort of demographic focus. I hope the extra effort I am putting into a promotion strategy for a rollout later this year will be a success story confirming the wisdom of the principles you outlined here.

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    IMO this is more of a SV/West Coast mentality than Boston/NY.


    It can probably be traced back to the beginning of the web in 95 when Tupac was more interested in developing a great flow and intellectual stylings while Biggie was more interested in making cash and girls...


    Anyway, great post Andrew.

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    I wouldn't recommend ignoring the a-listers just yet. True, a lot of their dealings are with fellow "echo chamber" tech-savvy folks, but a lot of the followers of a-listers are people wanting to learn about technology. Many folks seek out "who are the best people to follow in order to learn about technology" and that's one of the main reasons that Scoble et al gain audience share. Of course you need to focus efforts at reaching non-tech-savvy folks as well but a-listers are just part of the mix.

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