12 Best Practices for Finding Early Adopters to Test Your MVP

Ah, the early adopter: known for sharing their opinions, diving into new products, and driving trends forward. This audience’s feedback is critical for enhancing your minimum viable product’s (MVP) design, features, and positioning. How do you find and engage with this influential crowd? We share some of our top strategies for attracting early adopters to your MVP.

To start, figure out who cares about your product and why – essentially why they would buy it. Some of this information will come from work you’ve done up front in product discovery and some you’ll know from UX research. “Define your adoption goals and client acquisition strategy; identify your target buyers, users and influencers and determine where they are reachable. Go where they are with targeted value-oriented messaging and a clear call to action. Make it easy for them to try, onboard and buy your product and, ideally, share your product’s story” explains Lance Mohring, Field CTO at 3Pillar. 

The goal of getting early adopters is to gain early, raw, and unfiltered insights. Ideally, you want to ensure that your audience is balanced and includes:

• Those who already know and use your product and your brand
• Those who have tried your product or brand at some point and are no longer loyal fans
• Those who have bought competitive products
• Those who aren’t aware of your brand

Kathryn Rosaaen, Manager of Product Management, at 3Pillar explains why this balance is so essential, “Detractors and neutrals are harder-to-find candidates and come with some risk that loyal fans of your product don’t have. However, you need that balanced mix to achieve raw, filtered feedback. Who wants to be told that everything is perfect when we know that for early stage products it almost never is?” 

A word of caution on this strategy: make sure you’re not looping friends and family in with your loyal fan category just yet. “Your early adopters need to be chosen carefully. One of the most dangerous things I’ve seen happen is when a startup will say, ‘Our friends and family will be our early adopters,’” notes Kathryn. “Certainly, they should have a first glance at the product. But their feedback is inherently biased. Early adopters should be representative of your target market.”

Where does your target audience spend their time online? Look for popular social media platforms, groups, forums, and other communities; lean on LinkedIn to target a B2B audience in particular. These spots are good starting places to gather insights, start conversations, and build connections. Your firm may also have a database of users or subscribers that can help you connect with your target audience. Consider slicing and dicing the database based on last login, frequency of use/login, retention rates, and more. 

But don’t just limit yourself to the online world; there are plenty of connections to be made in person as well. Industry events such as conferences and trade shows as well as meetups can help you tap into your target audience in an authentic way. 

An exclusive community can be an attractive way to connect with and retain early adopters in both the B2B and B2C spaces. You can build a sense of community by listening to participants, providing incentives for referrals, sharing relevant content, and detailing your brand’s vision for where you’re headed. Making them feel part of the process and you’ll achieve higher levels of engagement.

In some B2B organizations, you may find that there is a diverse yet selected group of people representing the larger market. They provide feedback on releases and participate in ongoing discussions with product and UX leaders related to their needs. This sort of advisory committee of real users can make it easier to tap into early adopters but ensure that you have that diversity of people who truly represent your desired customer base. 

Depending on your industry, you may have thought leaders in the space who could serve as early adopters. Because these influencers of sort are known for championing new ideas and have niche expertise in your field, they’re often worthwhile candidates. Look to industry events, publications, and communities to find them. If your product line receives reviews online, this can be another useful place to uncover potential early adopters. A sneak peek to these influencers (whether the press, analyst community, or social media consumer) can help you gather insights.

Once you identify a handful of early adopters, you can leverage their networks to find more. Incentivize your earliest adopters through a referral program with free or reduced price products, discounts, and the like. The key consideration for this method is to make referring other potential adopters as easy as possible. Include a variety of means of doing so such as social sharing and referral links – consider including features in your MVP that make it easy for adopters to share with others.

If your brand has an established following, you can engage with them directly through live streaming, webinars, and social media comments. Building this rapport goes a long way. Sometimes all it takes is an Instagram message to find an early adopter. 

As you build your base of early adopters, make sure you prioritize communications that allow you to dig deeper. Typed feedback only goes so far and it’s easy to misinterpret written comments. Whenever possible, talk directly with your early adopters. 

And as you make these connections, consider using vaporware. “That doesn’t need to be a bad word. It’s essentially a no code approach to testing an idea,” suggests Kathryn. You might have a clickable Figma design that serves as your MVP at a trade show. Or perhaps you show a design and ask for sign-ups to let people know when it’s ready, so you can measure demand and expectations.  If you’re in a regulated industry or at a SaaS company, this method is a great way to get early feedback. 

Do you have partnerships or collaborations with other businesses? By jointly promoting your offerings, you can tap into each other’s customer bases and expand your reach. This technique is especially useful if you’ve already exhausted your current base. 

A little social proof goes a long way. Make it a priority to display regular testimonials and case studies on your website, email marketing and social media platforms. Doing so gives early adopters a reason to believe your product line is worthwhile. As you work with more early adopters, you can showcase their experiences and testimonials as well as continue to attract users. 

You can also create a demo to build credibility with your target audience. This might look like a walkthrough video or clickable prototype. 

People love feeling like they’re a part of something exclusive. Add a sense of urgency and you’ve got a magic formula to attract early adopters to your MVP. To do so, try advertising the following with your program:

• Free products
• Exclusive access
• Limited-time offers
• Bundles and discounts

Make sure your copy for these special offers leans into the value of your MVP. What will early adopters gain from testing it? How will it solve their pain points? What makes it different from the competition? These are questions you’ll want to answer in your advertising. 

If you want to maintain strong, positive relationships with your early adopters, you need to show you’re listening. Include ways to take in feedback in your program. Popular feedback channels include surveys, focus groups, interviews, and emails. You can also collect reviews, ratings, and comments to round things out. 

Keep in mind it’s not enough to just collect this feedback. You need a process for the intake, triage, and management of this feedback. You shouldn’t be acting on every piece of feedback. Instead, you want to watch for trends across the feedback, dive into one-on-one conversations to understand the true need, validate the data, and ideate from there. Without a process, responding to every piece of feedback can lead to conflicting and ever-increasing demands.

Plus, you want to balance the feedback you receive with what you learn from data and UX research. “All those inputs should be centralized, triaged and balanced against our Product Vision, Desired Audience’s Needs, where we are in achieving Product-Market fit, and our unique value proposition in the market before we even think about putting something in a backlog. Kathryn says, “Many excellent AI-enabled products can help engineering teams synthesize and identify patterns across various qualitative and quantitative user inputs. Leverage this capability for trend spotting, and then rely on your product sense and deep understanding of the market and users to determine the best direction forward.”

What’s also key here is upfront expectation alignment with early adopters. Ensure that they understand everything they report will not necessarily be acted on, but will be heard. That way, they know their voice matters and continue to report what they find. 

While it does take some work to attract early adopters, the good news is that their inherent desire to engage with the latest and greatest works in your favor. They’re already doing the research to scope out what’s new in your industry, and they want to be in the know. In other words, there’s a loyal customer base out there just waiting to test drive your MVP. 

The ultimate hack to attracting this customer base is to start by ensuring your product is solving their problems in the first place. At 3Pillar, we can help you make sure the resources you’re putting into your products yield measurable results. Learn more about our 6-week proven product validation process.