Feb

16

Adopt Early, Adopt Often - and then?

February 16, 2008 |

The last few days have seen an interesting discussion about the role of early adopters and early (often harsh) reviews between Louis Gray, Mark Hopkins and, to some degree, Steven Hodson. I just want to add a few thoughts about the role of bloggers as early adopters.

I have beta-tested a fair share of new websites in the last few years, so I guess I fall into the early adopter category. I also have no qualms reviewing a product at any state in its production cycle and I always try to give some feedback to the developers. My review can be anywhere from extremely harsh to praising a product (like I did with LinkRiver).

For me, being an early adopter and being a harsh critic go together, because I don’t see a problem with being both. That said, though, I do tend to look at services multiple times in their development cycle and am prone to changing my recommendations multiple times during that cycle. An early alpha product like Assetbar, I can’t recommend even to early adopters right now, but I will look at it again in a month or so, and chances are, it will look a lot different and so will my review.

Because we write about them, we do, as Louis comments in a post today, have a chance of working with some of these developers in making their products better by testing them and writing about them and, in the end, bringing some new testers/users to them as well. In that respect, I think we have some responsibility towards the developers who give us
early access to their new products. Mark, because he writes for a very large audience, is probably right in being more cautious in deciding to write about very early stage products, as his reviews reach a lot more readers and an early harsh review can set of an avalanche of bad press for that services.

But we early adopters are a fickle bunch - and even more so with web services, as we don’t have any real investment in them. Few of the products we test actually make it into our daily routines. The real test for a product is not to attract early adopters, but to keep those early adopters with you and grow your userbase beyond those trying to live on the cutting edge of the web.


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1 Comment so far

  1. Daryl Tay on February 16, 2008 10:20 pm

    mentioned this on Louis’s blog, as much as I’m willing to try these new services (AssetBar!!), I’m equally motivated to stay and keep using them if they react to what we as users are saying (and AssetBar is!). I think that makes all the difference. You can get all the early adopters in the world to use your service, but if you aren’t interacting with them and telling them they’re important, you won’t keep them long.

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