From: How to Motivate Early Adopters to Work with you in the Early Days
Here are the top ten things you can offer to motivate early adopters to meet with your team:
- Competitive edge
- Early adopters actively seek ways to out-do the external (or internal) competition. They’re driven by the possibility of innovation, which is what they see in startups.
- Visibility
- Early adopters like to be the first to discover new products. Discovering the next trend can give them great personal visibility and help their self-image. Discussions: They get to talk about their company and their everyday challenges. Early adopters enjoy the process of brainstorming solutions to their problems.
- Action
- They have a chance to be part of the action and contribute to something real. They might not get a chance to do that in their everyday work.
- Intelligence
- People don’t have a lot of ways to understand what’s standard in the industry. You can share insights from other parts of the industry and make them smarter.
- Fun
- Meeting with you might be the most fun thing they do during their day.
- Networking
- They get to meet you, your team and, ultimately, they might meet other early customers through your company.
- Ownership
- They can actively contribute to the decision making and creation of a new product — that can be exciting.
- Promotion
- Everyone wants to impress their boss. If your product becomes successful and provides a competitive edge, they might get promoted.
- Equity
- As early customers, they can become advisors, earn equity or join the company board.
All early adopters are different. You will need to do your research to understand the best way to motivate these prospects, but you have to talk to the problems they care about if you want to recruit them for your customer development panel.
