Building Your MVP: How to Approach Early Adopters

Advice on Doing Things that Don’t Scale

Before YC we thought that our company would either take off or fizzle out. Our thinking was this: If we build it, they will come—or they won't, in which case the market must not exist.

During YC, we learned that it’s a hard job as a founder to make your startup take off. (Of course there are exceptions like Facebook, which go viral from the outset and just keep growing.) As Paul Graham notes, a good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before electric starters existed. Once the engine was going, it would keep going—but there was a separate and laborious process to get to that point.

Recruiting Early Adopters vs. Selling to Customers

For us, this laborious process meant hitting the streets of Washington Heights and doing everything possible to recruit early adopters. Now, this is different from selling to customers— and the mistake a lot of early founders make is that they confuse the two. They say they’re talking to early adopters, but they're really approaching it as if they’re selling to that group of people. 

Whereas selling to customers is about generating sales and revenue—or any kind of quantitative goal—recruiting early adopters is all about learning qualitative lessons from conversations and some ancillary analysis on behavior. It’s about observing behavior and listening, which is antithetical to what we typically learn when we’re selling to customers. That’s because in the latter situation, all you care about is the sale, making it a purely transactional relationship.

When you’re recruiting early adopters, on the other hand, you really want to give yourself the opportunity to have a deep, meaningful conversation with a very small cohort of people. These people should be “experts in your segment of the market—they should have already tried numerous versions of your product so that they can give you a lot of crucial insight and perspective. For example, I love pistachio ice cream; I've tried at least 15 versions and can tell you which is the best in terms of flavor, consistency, etc.

This is why surveys don't work—it's really hard to capture a lot of the nuance that in-person interviews or even a video call provides. If you can give someone a gift card in exchange for an hour of their time, it goes a long way; you’ll be able to capture a lot more information from that conversation than from analyzing a survey. So founders: Get out of your own heads, get out there, and talk to users. 

B2C vs B2B Early Adoption Approaches

While this very important lesson we learned is essential for B2C startups, the approach is different for B2B companies. Many B2B companies’ customer segments are other startups—meaning if they’re taking part in an incubator like YC, they’re in a sea of potential customers. What some of these companies do is approach other startups, sign them up with a laptop on the spot, and sit behind the person to watch them use their product. It serves as an informal, ad hoc, micro focus group that happens in real time.

These B2B startups were able to capture a lot of information very, very quickly. Imagine if you did that 40 to 50 times, you’d be able to hatch a lot of interesting data points, right? Your objective is not necessarily to get to know those 40 to 50 customers, but you'd still be getting really strong data points that would help you get your next 40 to 50 customers in a more sustainable, effortless way.

Learning from Gimmicks

At Regali, we used a lot of gimmicks, especially when we were a small team. Washington Heights has a big, rich culture of immigrants—predominantly Dominican—so we would take part in the Dominican Day Parade, take pictures with the band Aventura, and dress up as bananas and give away gift cards at remittance agencies around the neighborhood so that people could try our product.

A lot of these gimmicks were successful in terms of giving us the ability to get in front of the end customer, but we failed in the sense that we approached these interactions as sales people rather than as interviewers—and that completely skewed our approach. We weren’t asking questions, we were trying to sell a product. Because of that, we weren't able to capture as much intel as we could have from what was a great opportunity.

While using gimmicks is a great tactic for getting in front of customers, it’s not a sustainable strategy for generating revenue. Gimmicks simply aren’t substitutes for deep, meaningful, one-hour conversations with a cohort of early adopters.