Early adopter fail (or why you should obsess over startups you love)

I just got back from the New York Tech Meetup and the actual meetup was great - saw a bunch of awesome demos, including possibly the most useful tool for web designers - notable. But in terms of actual using these products, even as early adopters, we failed. There was a decent amount of chatter on the #nytm hashtag, but at a meetup of around 500 people, I had counted maybe 25 checkins on foursquare. Now for most places 25 checkins on foursquare would have been great, but this was the New York Tech Meetup, the place where foursquare was presented eight months ago. I love foursquare, I probably use it a bit too much (I'm the only person that's checked into my building's gym for example) but it's real usefulness is only apparent when everyone you know uses it (or at least a good number). If there isn't a 50% (a completely arbitrary percentage) adoption rate of people that go out of their way to go to tech conferences/presentations, what are the chances that the general population is going to start using it?


The counter point to this is that startups shouldn't target early adopters as their market for exactly this reason - we should be the low hanging fruit. If regular people are using your product everyday, you can pretty much be assured that the early adopter market is too (or you are big enough that you no longer rely on them to keep your numbers up). Andrew Chen has a great post on his blog about finding your target market and why early adopters are rarely it. But still, as the low hanging fruit, we should pick up and obsess over the startups that we love. Chances are we aren't going to be the marketing or revenue base that they are looking for, but we are the ones that provide the encouragement and suggestions that all startups thrive off of.


This isn't a rag on foursquare at all - far from it. I'm just saying if you like a product a startup has produced go ahead and use it, even before it has reached critical mass. More importantly, tell everyone about it. I don't think my mom or sister will start using foursquare any time soon, but I'm sure they know what it is after this past weekend and maybe as it starts to gain momentum they will end up being one of the earlier adopters. So go ahead and checkin everywhere you go on foursquare, post your checkins to twitter and tell all your friends - if nothing else you can always tell people how much better it was when it was underground.