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Entrepreneurship & Startups vocabulary · MVP & Product-Market Fit

Early adopter

Meaning in entrepreneurship & startups, with examples

/ˈɜːrli əˈdɑːptər/nounCommon term

In entrepreneurship & startups, early adopter means: One of the first customers to try a new product, usually someone who has a strong need for it and accepts bugs and missing features.

In Turkish: erken benimseyen, ilk kullanıcı, erken kullanıcı

How it is used

Startups look for, find, win and listen to early adopters, because their feedback shapes the product. The term comes from the technology adoption life cycle, where early adopters come after innovators and before the early majority.

Example sentences

  1. Our early adopters were small agencies who were tired of using spreadsheets.

  2. We gave early adopters a lifetime discount in exchange for weekly feedback.

Common collocations

  • find early adopters
  • early adopter feedback
  • early adopter discount
  • win early adopters
  • customer discoveryThe early process of talking directly to possible customers to understand their problems and test whether your idea is worth building.
  • MVPMinimum viable product: the simplest version of a product that real customers can use, built quickly to test whether the idea solves their problem.
  • product-market fitThe stage when a product clearly meets a real need in a large enough market, so customers buy it, keep using it and recommend it without much pushing.
  • target marketThe specific group of customers a business plans to sell to first, described by features such as industry, location, size, age or needs.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: MVP & Product-Market Fit

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