On Early Adopters

People with new ideas are always a threat to the status quo. And there’s nothing wrong with the status quo itself: it exists because things somehow work. The ones who defend it most fiercely are the ones who benefit from it. And then we show up and say: “Let’s try something new. No guarantees — and if it doesn’t work out, someone loses their job”… The volunteers, to put it mildly, are few.

Recently I listened to a talk by Simon Sinek — the author of Start with Why. He was explaining how to push new ideas through a system that resists them. His rule sounds rather paradoxical: don’t try to convince people who don’t want to be convinced. Otherwise you get an endless argument of “I’m right — no, I’m right,” in which both sides are right — each in their own context.

He leans on Everett Rogers’s law of diffusion of innovations. In any population, the distribution runs roughly like this:

— the first 2.5% are innovators, people of big ideas: Jobs, Branson;
— the next 13.5% are early adopters: they genuinely enjoy spending time and money on things that reflect their beliefs and their vision of the future. These are the people who stand in line for two days for a new gadget when they could calmly walk in two weeks later;
— then comes the majority, about 68% — pragmatists and cynics: “What’s in it for me?”, “Can I get my money back?”, “Will I get in trouble if something goes wrong?”;
— and the last 16% are the laggards: they change only when there’s no choice left.

Mass adoption of any idea, according to Rogers, requires 15–18% penetration. After that a social phenomenon kicks in — the tipping point — and the system tips over on its own. The reason is simple: the majority never tries anything first — only after someone else has.

The problem is that almost any idea, even a brilliant one, gathers about 10% of people who “see what you see” all by itself. But ten percent isn’t enough to flip the system — and that’s where everything stalls. How to jump from 10% to 15–18% is what Geoffrey Moore wrote about in Crossing the Chasm.

Sinek’s answer: with early adopters, it’s worth talking about the “why.” About belief and the dream, not the plan and the product specs. The facts will be needed later — but that’s not where to start. That, he says, is how he built his entire brand: no marketing budget, no PR, and — at the time — no social media.

Two stories I especially liked.

The first. In the lean years, when there were literally pennies in his account, a potential client called him: “I hear you do good work. Convince me why I should hire you.” Sinek answered: “No need.” Not an early adopter. But to those who said, “There’s something here, even if it’s a bit raw” — he said yes, at times for free. Because they let him experiment on their organizations.

The second. A corporation with a hundred thousand employees commissioned a training program for millennials. Big companies usually do it like this: hire the best lecturers, write the curriculum, launch it with a heap of beautiful presentations — and… zero takers. Sinek did the opposite: one class of a hundred seats, admission by essay, get yourself to New York at your own expense, and no one born before 1984 — so the bosses couldn’t come spy. At the end he said it straight: the program doesn’t exist yet, he needs volunteers — no extra pay, no career boost. Early adopters need small barriers: an entrance that’s too easy devalues participation. Fifty people stepped up. And two weeks later, the project’s sponsor was fielding calls from furious managers all over the country: “Why weren’t my people invited?!” Word from those fifty had spread through the entire organization.

Why am I telling you all this? We often burn our energy trying to win over the skeptics — at home, on the team, in business. I’ll be honest: I myself always saw selling a new product as an appeal to the broad slice of people labeled the target audience. But it seems the energy is better carried to where it’s already being waited for. And that fundamentally changes how we define a target audience.

A systemic paradigm shift isn’t launched by arguments — it’s launched by the people who were given the first try. The rest will come along, once they see that someone already has.

Here’s to finding our early adopters! 😎