🧠 desperate > interested
You can have the perfect framework and still burn six months chasing the wrong people. Here’s how to find early adopters without guessing wrong or drowning in data.
Hey friends 👋
Last week, I talked about the Early Adopter Pyramid — why only 16% of your market will ever buy something new, and how those five levels filter 10,000 prospects with the problem down to the 47 who are actually desperate enough to buy.
But knowing the definition doesn’t help without a method to find those 47 people.
Let’s dive deep 👇
I come packing two approaches.
Let’s not waste time. Here’s the first:
Top-down: the hypothesis-driven approach
You start with: We think it’s this person at this type of company.
Use this when you have domain expertise, strong signals from your own experience, or clear patterns from early conversations. Or even just a hunch worth betting on.
You’re making an educated guess about who’s at the top of the pyramid, and then seeking to validate it.
The validation loop:
Pick your hypothesis segment. Be specific — not “sales teams”, but “VPs of Sales at Series A SaaS companies with 5-15 reps.”
Run 5-10 customer interviews with people who match that profile.
Check for pyramid indicators: Are they aware and actively searching? Have they hacked together a solution? Do they have budget and bandwidth?
If yes, double down. Validate with an ask. Then find 20 more just like them.
If no, invalidate and iterate — fast.
Example: You’re building sales automation. Your hypothesis is “VPs of Sales at Series A SaaS companies” because you were one, and you manually exported Salesforce data into Google Sheets every morning to build pipeline reports.
You interview 8 VPs. Five say, “Yeah, that’s annoying, but we just live with it.” Three say, “Oh my god, yes, I have an analyst who spends 6 hours a week doing this, and it’s still wrong half the time.”
You’ve found signal. The three are at the top of the pyramid. Now find what makes them different from the other five. Company size? Sales team structure? CRM complexity?
Find the pattern, then find 20 more who match it. Rinse and repeat.
With each cycle, your target segment becomes better defined, and your conversion rate increases.
The advantage is speed. Focused learning. Clearer pivots. You’re not drinking from a fire hose — you’re testing specific hypotheses and getting clear yes/no answers.
Bottom up: the pattern-recognition approach
If you don’t have enough data to form that initial hypothesis, invert it.
You know the problem space, but you don’t know who hurts most.
Use this when you’re in a new market, segments are unclear, or you keep getting surprised by who’s actually desperate. You’re letting the data reveal the pattern.
The elimination process:
Talk to 10 diverse people who live somewhere in the problem space.
Cast a wide net: different industries, company sizes, roles.
Find the 2 of them who show real urgency. Not polite interest — urgency. They’re already hacking solutions. They’re asking when you’ll ship. They want to pay you now.
Identify what makes them different from the 8. What’s similar between the 2? What do they have that the 8 don’t?
Find 10 more who match that profile. Interview them. Do they show the same urgency?
Repeat until the pattern becomes undeniable. You’re working your way up the pyramid.
Example: You’re building something for e-commerce. You talk to 10 online retailers — Shopify stores, Amazon sellers, DTC brands, marketplaces.
Eight say, “Interesting, keep me posted.” Two say, “Holy shit, when can I start using this?”
You dig into the two. Turns out they’re both Shopify Plus brands with $2-10M in ARR and in-house logistics teams. They’ve both built complex systems in Airtable to manage inventory across warehouses.
The other eight? Not so much.
So you find 10 more Shopify Plus brands in that revenue range with in-house logistics, and 7 show the same urgency.
You’ve found your pattern. You know exactly who to target. 💥
The bottom-up approach is more work, but it has an advantage: it surfaces non-obvious segments and reduces bias from your own experience.
The market tells you where the desperation lives.
When each approach fails
The top-down approach fails when you’re in an echo chamber. You’re betting on your own assumptions. You’re building for yourself three years ago, but the market has moved.
The bottom-up approach fails when you’re drowning in data and never committing. You interview 50 people and find reasons why each one is different. You’re so open-minded your brain falls out.
The hybrid: Start with a hypothesis, but stay open to pattern disruption. If your interviews keep surprising you, switch to pattern recognition. If patterns are muddy, sharpen your hypothesis and test it faster.
Always follow the evidence.
Let’s return to potency.
As I mentioned last week, we need focus to create potency.
To paraphrase Frederick the Great: “To market to everyone is to market to no one.”
Narrow targeting isn’t limiting your market — it’s the only way to capture ANY market when you have finite resources.
You need everything to align around one customer:
Messaging that speaks directly to their hacked solution. Not “We help teams collaborate better.” Instead: “Replaces your QuickBooks + Google Sheets + Slack chaos for remote accounting firms.”
A product roadmap that solves their exact next pain. You’re not guessing what features matter. You’re building the five things that make their broken workaround unnecessary.
Case studies that mirror their situation exactly. “Here’s how another Shopify Plus brand with in-house logistics saved 15 hours a week” hits differently than “Here’s how a customer improved efficiency.”
Sales conversations that close in days, not months. They don’t need education. They don’t need convincing. They need confirmation that you actually solve their specific pain. Then they buy—without hesitation.
You need real contrast:
Generic: project management software for teams
Potent: replaces your Google Sheets + Slack + email chaos for remote creative agencies managing 20+ client projects
The second one loses 90% of the market—and that’s the point! Because it captures the 10% that actually matters right now.
Why waste time trying to convert the ones who never will?
This doesn’t limit future growth because you’re not rejecting the 84% who aren’t early adopters—you’re sequencing them for later. The early majority won’t buy until they see the early adopters succeed.
So dominate the 16% first. You can’t skip steps.
You can’t capture everyone before you capture someone.
Until next week,
—jdm