Early Adopters are not the Mass Market
Dare Obasanjo posted a great article on how “Early Adopters are not the Mass Market”.
If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters.
Folks out on the West Coast seem to have a real hard time with this concept. Every little company that I’ve ever tried to do business with that had gotten a little press from TechCrunch or one of the other A-List bloggers seem to think that they’ve hit the big time and expect you to bend over backwards to do business with them. Then 12 months later, they’re no where to be seen.
