CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB JOBS
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- VIDEO
- AMAZON
- ALL TOPICS
CONTRIBUTORS
Should Early Adopters Reap The Rewards for a Startup’s Growth?
Last week I wrote about the default list of users that Twitter has selected for both new and current users to pick from (or select all). One of the questions I posed to the FriendFeed community was if Twitter was making a mistake by pimping the celebs and others who will pimp Twitter instead of giving the boost to the users who got the engines going and helped get Twitter on the track to where the service is today in terms of users and usage.
This afternoon early adopter Robert Scoble posted a message on FriendFeed asking if a kitten would die if he deleted his Twitter account. The second part of his question was a comment noting, "I’m wondering cause more and more of my early adopter friends are moving to other services (I am watching)." Interestingly enough, Robert says his early adopter friends are moving back to Facebook.
Early adopters tend to move from service to service and, in many cases, help build the service to a level that helps build momentum. From simple feedback to very involved testing, the group helps typically for no pay and for the good of the industry. While there are parts of the early adopter set that frustrate me, overall they are a very important piece to building a Web 2.0/social networking business.
What should early adopters expect when helping to build a new service? Is it reasonable to expect things like being pimped over users who just joined the service? Or do early adopters know their role and are content enough to just know that they helped get the service to a strong foundation?
Early adopters don’t do it “for the good of the industry”.
They do it because they have a desire to be in on the next cool new thing – and while that does help boost the signal, it’s not as though the company owes them for it.
The company has a primary responsibility to do what benefits the COMPANY.
It’s called staying in business ? Making a profit ?
If your company exists for other reasons, you’re running a charity.
I am going to comment anonymously tonight – I am an early adopter and agree that it was wrong of Twitter to only show off their celebrity users – but I would say we all saw it coming.
I love helping services and providing feedback though I agree that services need to remember who helped them get big in the first place.
This reminds me of how I felt when The Clash played Shea Stadium. Sad that they sold out. Sad that my personal secret favorite band was now known to everyone.
Twitter is just a tool There will be new tools to play with soon enough.
I think it is good to reward early adopters in some way. Featuring them automatically is not necessarily the right thing. Some alternative ideas are:
- Giving them a little extra consideration when considering the featured list (although this should be secondary, the list should compiled primarily compiled to achieve whatever goals they are trying to achieve).
- Giving early adopters an early heads up on new features. (This is win-win because it becomes a viral marketing channel)
- Listening to early adopters and implementing features for them, even if they are not features that the mass market would want. (I think companies make the mistake of ignoring the needs of the early adopters once they start to reach the mass market).