How to find early adopter customers for your startup

Fuel your growth and get invaluable feedback

Early adopter customers are the lifeblood of an early stage startup. They fuel your initial revenue growth, provide invaluable feedback on your product and pave the way for your success. Without them your growth will stall so it is vital to find them as efficiently as possible.

A common misconception about early adopters is that they are found in a certain profile of company — other startups. This misconception leads to the common mistake of using the firmographics of your first few startup customers to build your ideal customer profile, develop your target list and launch a sales effort only to see your win rate plummet.

The reality is that an early adopter is a type of person, not a type of company and that you can find both early and late adopters in all sizes and stages of companies. Running into late adopters unexpectedly at early stage companies is a key reason why your win rates plummet after an initial success. For this reason it is just as important to profile your target buyers as it is to profile your target companies.

In the old days you had to try to talk to every prospect 1:1 in order to figure out if they were an early or late adopter, which was very time consuming. In today’s market it’s much easier as there are multiple online signals that indicate if a buyer is an early adopter.

Here are 7 early adopter signals, how to find them and how to implement them in your go-to-market