How to find early adopters for B2B SaaS product?
I'm not looking for advice on how to find first clients or first paying clients. I'm trying to figure out how to find and identify early adopters and front runners in an industry so I don't end up taking early customer feedback from laggards and building something that is stale already when released.
In my last venture, I build marketing tools and its really easy to find early adopters in marketing plus they make so much noise online that they can be easily identified.
Now I'm considering to start a venture in supply chain sustainability analytics and the issue I'm facing is that supply chain professionals aren't nearly as vocal online so my tactic identifying advanced practitioners or early adopters based on online content postings or event Linkedin job descriptions is not working. I know these people exist as I've been able to find few just by cold reaching a few dozen people with right titles.
For someone with experience in this: How did you manage to find suitable prospects in scale for early-stage SaaS tool in industries that aren't yet fully online or at least not loud online?
Start producing the valuable content around the topic and then introduce it in the relevant communities without trying to sell your idea but rather to help people with the solution. It worked for us at least.
One of the books that I read says, select some 50 to 100 people in the domain of your application who you want them to be your first customers. Personally introduce your product to them and ask them to try. Out of 50, even if you get 10% of those people noticing that your product solves a specific problem they are having, it will be a hit.
So, handpick your adopters and introduce it to them.
In the meantime, I have a question for you:
Are you looking for adopters who are famous so your product could scale easily or can it be anyone who is willing to try it?
Never saw your comment for some reason but better to answer late than never. If I'm not coming from within the industry I would take anyone who is within a targeted industry because my main goal is to get feedback on am I really event building the right thing here. In case I'm building something for an industry or a problem I've been working for years with I'd look to get famous faces of the industry because I probably have already validated what I'm building and famous backers allow me to build so noise in the industry around what I'm doing.
Hey,
Could you please provide some insights about why you think it's easy to find early adopters in marketing? How did you achieve that?
You might want to check my comment on finding early adopters to your saas platform.