

Ask HN: How do you define an early adopter?  - nickfrost

In Steve Blank's post http://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by-subtraction-the-minimum-feature-set/ He talks about a minimum feature set, and validating customers based on their willingness to purchase it. Early adopters.<p>Do you think of an early adopter as a "novelty seeking person" or as an individual that may identify with certain new products and want to use them before they're popular?
======
dwwoelfel
There's actually a really good book on this: _Diffusion of Innovations_ by
Rogers, <http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0743222091/>

The book places adopters into 5 categories, innovators, early adopters, early
majority, late majority, and laggards.

The innovators are the few that have the means and risk-tolerance to
constantly try out new ideas. The book estimates that about 2.5% of the
adopters fall into this category.

The early adopters are the next to adopt. They kind of serve as liaisons
between the innovators and the rest of the world. The book estimates them at
13.5% of adopters.

The early majority are the people that pay attention to what the early
adopters are doing. They make up about 34%.

The other two categories are uninteresting.

To illustrate, HN would be the innovators, Lifehacker the early adopters, and
Lifehacker's audience would be the early majority.

There are various characteristics of early vs. late adopters. Most of them are
as you would expect. Early adopters have more education, higher social status,
more empathy, less dogmatism, more optimism, more social connections, etc.

I highly recommend the book. It's aimed towards sociologists, but I didn't
have too much trouble, and I'm certainly not sociologically inclined.

------
benologist
A person whose itch you are scratching that doesn't mind all the rough edges
and missing features.

