Recently, I’ve been working on apps and business ideas like AlwaysHungry, 60Hz and Secret Hotels (for lastminute.com.au). Finding early adopters to test these products are not easy. Things are even more complicated because my friends and colleagues tend to be very tech savvy.
It seems like people associate early adopters with being able to use a phone really well, or know their way around Safari with shortcuts on a Mac. What I observed in my time observing people using things I build is that they use products in anger.
What do I mean “using in anger”?
These users deal with the app in an aggressive manner. They press anything and everything. There is no real purpose behind the usage. They experience the product in a very detached manner.
There’s nothing wrong with all of this. In fact, it is a great form of stress testing. What sucks about it though is the lousy feedback you get. Feedback that sets you down the wrong path because the content never spoke to them in the first place.
Comments like “this button looks out of place”, “I like how Tweetbot does it” is irrelevant if they had used the app with a real purpose. These forms of feedback generally point you towards whether you’ve built the product right, not so much if you built the right product.
I think this contributes to even the biggest companies in the world building things that are irrelevant. Designers and developers build things to be used in anger. They go for rounded corners and bug-free apps rather than apps that flow well and really work hard to present content well (rounded corners rarely help the cause).
Reddit is the most relevant example I can think of. That thing looks like a shit website, reminds you of a dirty alleyway in the city somewhere. But it works. It’s got such awesome, random, awesome content I keep going back to it!
Back to early adopters.
If you want these special beings, find places they hang out in like forums etc. Look for people who are already solving the problem manually and bitching about it. The most important quality you are after in a person is that they are “someone who endures bugs, lack of rounded corners and much much more for the right content or solution”.
Good Luck!