Early Adopters: Who They Are and Where to Find Them
Early adopters are the second of the five groups that take up a new product on the technology adoption lifecycle: they come after the innovators and before the early majority, and they are 13.5% of the people who adopt in Everett Rogers' model, by the shares Lumen Learning's Principles of Marketing course gives (read on 12 November 2026). For a software founder they are the first users: people who have the problem now, who will take an unfinished product to get the fix early and whose choice brings in the next group.
This guide answers what an early adopter is and draws the early adopters curve with all five adopter categories. It sets innovators and early adopters against the early majority and the laggards, then turns to the practical part: nine places where early adopters of software gather, with what each asks and costs on its own page, how to get your first users in the weeks around a launch and the early adopter offers real products run. Beta testers, who try a build before it is public, have a post of their own.
Early adopters are the 13.5% who follow the innovators: people with a problem now who will take an early product and talk about it. A software founder meets them where new products get listed, in the subreddits and newsletters of their trade and on a waitlist of their own. Getting listed is the slice to hand over: SideProjectors charges $20 for one fast approval, while $29 has Submitator file 30 directories you choose from the 189 on our list.
What is an early adopter? Definition and meaning
An early adopter is a person, or a company, that takes up a new product, idea or technology soon after it appears, ahead of most of the people who will use it in the end. Wikipedia's entry opens with two names for the same customer, “An early adopter or lighthouse customer”, and gives the source: “The term originates from Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations (1962).” In Rogers' model early adopters are one of five adopter categories, sorted by how soon each group takes an innovation up.
What sets them apart is influence rather than speed. The Lumen course puts it this way: “Early adopters have a high degree of opinion leadership among the adopter categories. They are more aggressive than later adopters, but are judicious about their adoption choices.” Early adopters of technology are not the people who buy everything first. They are the ones who pick a new tool because it fixes a problem they have, and whose colleagues notice what they picked.
Early adopters examples: corn, phones and payments
- Farmers and hybrid seed. The study that set diffusion research on its course, Ryan and Gross on hybrid corn in Iowa (1943), found that adoption ran over more than ten years, as Wikipedia's article on the theory records.
- Buyers of a new phone. Wikipedia calls the premium they pay the “early adopter tax” and points to the Apple iPhone: versions that cost less tend to follow a release by a few months.
- Startups buying from startups. Paul Graham's essay “Do Things That Don't Scale” (July 2013) tells how Stripe set up its first users on their own laptops, and says who to look for first: “Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups.”
The early adopters curve: five adopter categories and their shares
Rogers drew adoption as a bell curve: a few people at the start, most of them in the middle and a long tail at the end. The early adopters graph below plots the share of each group, and the table under it adds the running total and where a software founder meets each one.
Early adopters chart: the five adopter categories, their share, what they want and where you meet them
| Adopter category | Share | Running total | What they want from a new product | Where a software founder meets them |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innovators | 2.5% | 2.5% | The new thing itself. The course calls them risk takers who can absorb a product that fails | Launch platforms on launch day, beta lists, technical communities |
| Early adopters | 13.5% | 16% | A fix for a problem they have now, chosen with care. Others watch what they pick | Directories and launch platforms, the communities and newsletters of their trade, your waitlist |
| Early majority | 34% | 50% | Proof that it works for people like them: references, reviews, a product that is finished | Search results, review sites, comparison pages and colleagues who already use it |
| Late majority | 34% | 84% | A settled standard. They arrive after the average buyer, with more skepticism | Search, the vendors their company already buys from, a sales call |
| Laggards | 16% | 100% | To keep what works. The course calls them focused on traditions | Seldom through marketing: the course finds aggressive marketing unlikely to change when they adopt |
Shares: Lumen Learning's Principles of Marketing course, the reading "Diffusion of Innovation", read on 12 November 2026; its figure is described as "Innovators make up 2.5% of the market, early adopters 13.5%, early majority 34%, late majority 34%, and laggards 16%." The running total adds them up in curve order. The two text columns are this post's reading of that page's descriptions of the five categories and of Geoffrey Moore's split between visionaries and pragmatists (Wikipedia's article on Crossing the Chasm, read the same day), not figures from either source.
Follow the running total and the first 16% is the market a new product starts in: innovators and early adopters together. The course is plain about which of the two to court: “The early adopters are actually in a much better position to influence broad opinion of the product and to draw in the early majority.” The two middle groups are the largest, at 34% each, and laggards (16%) outnumber early adopters.
Innovators, early adopters, early majority and laggards compared
Innovators and early adopters: the difference
Innovators vs early adopters, in one line: the first group buys the novelty, the second buys the fix. Innovators (2.5%) try things because they are new and can afford the ones that fail. Early adopters (13.5%) wait until a product answers a problem of theirs, then tell people. On a launch day the innovators are the first to click; the early adopters are the ones who come back, and whose recommendation reaches the next group.
Early adopters vs early majority
The early majority (34%) wants proof before it moves: other customers like them, reviews, a product that no longer changes every week. Early adopters buy what a product could become; the early majority buys what it already is. That gap has a name and a book of its own, below.
Early adopters vs laggards
Early adopters and laggards sit at opposite ends of the curve. Laggards (16%) adopt last, often when the old way stops being available, and the course finds that pressing harder on them changes little. For a young product they are not an audience to plan for: every week spent persuading a laggard is a week not spent with an early adopter who would have said yes.
Diffusion of innovation and the technology adoption lifecycle
The technology adoption lifecycle is the five-group curve above applied to new technology. It comes from rural sociology: researchers in the American Midwest studied how farmers took up new seed and equipment, and Rogers gathered that work into his 1962 book, which named the five adopter categories.
Diffusion of innovation: the five things adopters weigh
Diffusion of innovation is Rogers' account of how a new idea spreads through a group over time. Wikipedia lists five characteristics he says potential adopters weigh, and each one maps onto a software product:
- Advantage. What it does better than the tool or the spreadsheet in use now.
- Compatibility. Whether it fits the stack, the habits and the files a team already has.
- Complexity / Simplicity. How long it takes to get the first thing done.
- Observability. Whether other people can see it in use: public pages, shared links, listings where others browse.
- Divisibility / Trialability. Whether someone can try it first: a free plan, a trial, a demo without a call.
Crossing the chasm: Geoffrey Moore's gap
Crossing the chasm is the title of Geoffrey Moore's book (1991, revised in 1999 and 2014), which takes Rogers' curve and finds a break in it after the early adopters. Moore's own site says the book offers strategies for “closing the gap between visionary early adopters and the more pragmatic majority”, and Wikipedia's summary names the hard part: “The most difficult step is making the transition between visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority).” For a founder the lesson is practical. The first 16% will try a product on its promise; the next group needs to hear from them first, so every early adopter who stays should end up as a review, a case study or a name the next buyer recognizes.
Where to find early adopters of software
Early adopters go looking. They browse the sites that list new products, read the communities and newsletters of their trade and sign up for waitlists, and for a business product many of them run startups themselves. Here are nine places to meet them, each with what it asks of you, what it costs on its own page on 12 November 2026 and who reads it.
Where to find early adopters of software: what each place asks, what it costs and who you meet
| Place | What it asks | What it costs | Who you meet | On this site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch platforms and startup directories | A form per site, a description cut to its limits, at some a badge or a queue | Each site sets its own price, from free up; Submitator files 30 of them for $29 | Founders, makers and people hunting for new tools | The 76 we submit to, launch sites by their link |
| Product Hunt | A tagline, a 240×240 thumbnail, at least two 1270×760 gallery images and a launch date | Free: Product Hunt sells no paid launch. It is one of the 76 in the first row | Makers and early adopters going through the day's launches | Launching on Product Hunt |
| SaaS and software directories | A listing form; some ask for a badge | Free to paid, site by site | Buyers comparing the tools in a category | The 59 we submit to |
| AI tool directories | A listing form; some ask for a badge | Free to paid, site by site | People trying new AI tools as they appear | The 54 we submit to |
| Beta lists (BetaList) | A startup on its own domain, with no app store link or free hosting subdomain | Every submission paid, about $39 by our guide; prices appear at the end of its form | Early adopters, founders and investors, by its own account | BetaList, step by step, finding beta testers |
| Posts that keep to each subreddit's own rules | Free | The people in each subreddit you choose | Reddit's two sets of rules | |
| Newsletters | An ad written for the issue | HackerNoon: from $1,000 an issue. SaaS Club: $2,200 for four sends in one month, $1,800 a month on a three-month term | HackerNoon: 400,000+ subscribers. SaaS Club: 5,000+ subscribers, B2B SaaS and AI founders by its own account | Promoting a site, channel by channel |
| Your own waitlist | A landing page with a signup form | Waitlister: free up to 100 subscribers, $19 a month for unlimited | People who asked to hear from you | What a SaaS landing page carries |
| A lifetime deal marketplace (AppSumo) | An application, then a deal agreed with them; AppSumo says about 10% get in | Nothing upfront; a share of each sale | The 1.5M entrepreneurs on its list, by its own account | Early adopter offers |
Prices and quotes from each seller's own page, read on 12 November 2026: BetaList's help page ("All submissions are paid. There is no free submission option." and "Current plans and prices are shown at the end of the submission form."); HackerNoon's newsletter ad page, published 14 May 2025 ("Ads start at $1,000 per issue" and "an opt-in audience of 400,000+ subscribers"); SaaS Club's newsletter sponsorship page ("The Supporting package: 4 newsletters a month on a 3-month term. $2,200 for a single month."); Waitlister's pricing page (Free at $0 a month for 100 subscribers, Launch at $19 a month, prices before VAT); AppSumo's page for makers ("Keep 95% of sales from buyers you bring, 70% from buyers we bring.", and in its FAQ "Revenue share rates are negotiated based on your product category and expected performance."). BetaList prints no price outside its signed-in form: about $39 is the figure in our BetaList guide (18 October 2026). Product Hunt's free launch and its asset sizes: our guide to it, read 18 October 2026. Directories and launch platforms: the rows of our 3 November 2026 catalog export, intercepts left out. The "What it asks" and "Who you meet" cells are this post's summary of those pages and of our guides; words in quote marks or marked "by its own account" are the seller's. Submitator files the highlighted row for you.
Launch platforms and directories: where early adopters browse
Listings are the part of that table that stays up after launch week: each is a page with your product on it for as long as the site keeps it. Launch sites are the largest slice of what we submit to: 76 launch platforms and startup directories, beside 59 SaaS and software directories and 54 AI tool directories, 189 in all. Our record marks 40 of the 76 launch sites as passing a followed link, and 116 of the 189 overall. Two of the launch rows are communities with guides of their own, Hacker News and Indie Hackers, and launch sites judged by the link they give are on our Product Hunt alternatives page.
The work is in the number of them. Each site has its own form, its own limits on a description and its own review, and some ask for a badge on your site that has to stay up. SideProjectors, a marketplace that lists side projects for free, reviews every one by hand and says “Most projects get reviewed within 2-5 business days, but it can vary depending on volume.” It sells a way round the wait: “The cost of request for fast approval is $20 USD.”
Beta lists: a paid seat in front of early adopters
BetaList puts new startups, in its own words, “in front of early adopters, founders, and investors”, and charges for every one of them. The plans show up at the end of its form, about $39 by our guide, and its faster plans add the newsletter: “Faster plans also guarantee a spot in our newsletter to 70,000+ subscribers.” Its help page adds a rule worth knowing before any launch: “we don't accept submissions using free hosting subdomains (like vercel.app, netlify.app, herokuapp.com) or direct links to app stores”. A product still in testing is the subject of our post on finding beta testers.
Reddit: two sets of rules for every post
Posting on Reddit is free, and every post answers to two rulebooks. Reddit's rules page sets out the order: “Below the rules governing each community are the platform-wide rules that apply to everyone on Reddit.” The platform list is Reddit's own to enforce (“These rules are enforced by us, the admins.”), and its Rule 2 includes “do not spam”. The subreddit lists are kept by members: “Some of these users help manage the community as moderators.” So read a subreddit's rules before the first post, answer questions where you can help and bring up the product where it answers one.
Newsletters and your own waitlist
A newsletter sells a slot in front of readers who chose the topic. HackerNoon sends a daily newsletter to “an opt-in audience of 400,000+ subscribers” and its ad page says “Ads start at $1,000 per issue”. SaaS Club writes to founders (“Every week, thousands of B2B SaaS and AI founders and decision-makers read our newsletter”) and prices four sends in a single month at $2,200. Either buys an audience for one issue; your own list keeps the people who answer. A waitlist tool such as Waitlister holds the first 100 signups free (“Start for free, no credit card required.”) and charges $19 a month past that.
SideProjectors: $20 for one fast approval. Submitator: $29 for 30 directories.
SideProjectors is one of the 189 directories and launch platforms we submit to. Pick it and 29 more; each gets a description written for its form, and every badge a directory asks for stays live on our side. 60 for $49, 100 for $79, paid once.
How to get your first users: the first six weeks
Paul Graham's essay opens its advice with the part founders put off: “The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.” Here is that work in order, for a product that is live or days away from it. The launch itself, from eight weeks out, has a checklist of its own.
- Before week one: name the early adopter. Write down who has the problem now and what they use instead: a spreadsheet, a workaround, a tool they complain about. How to identify early adopters comes down to that: they already spend time or money on the problem. The essay's rule for choosing among them: “If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters.”
- Before week one: a page and a waitlist. Put the product on its own domain with one page that says what it does and for whom, and a form that collects emails. Run the page through our free landing page roast: it rates five things a first-time visitor reads (the offer, the headline and the call to action among them) on a scale of 10 and gives a concrete fix per area.
- Week one: the first ten, by hand. Write to people who have the problem: your network, people who asked about it in public, other startups. Offer to set them up yourself and stay on the call while they do.
- Weeks one and two: get listed. File the directories and launch platforms early, because each runs its own review and some run a queue. Filed by Submitator, most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours and every directory within 21 days at most.
- Weeks two and three: one launch day. Pick one launch platform for the day and tell your waitlist and your first users when the product goes live there. Post in the subreddits you already read, inside each one's rules.
- Weeks three to six: answer, fix, ask. Reply to every early user, fix what they hit first, ask the ones who stay for a review and the name of one more person with the same problem. Note where each signup came from, so the next month's effort goes to the places that sent people who stayed.
How to get users for your app
An app needs the same page first. A store listing is not enough for most of the places above: BetaList turns down direct app store links, and directories list a product by its website. Give the app a domain and a page with the store badges on it, list that page, and gather signups before release so launch day starts with people waiting. Getting testers onto a build before it ships is covered in our beta testers post; promoting the site once it is live, channel by channel, in our website promotion guide.
Early adopters marketing: offers real products make
Marketing to early adopters is a trade. They take a product with gaps and give feedback, a review or a recommendation; the maker gives something back, usually early access, a lower price or both. Wikipedia's entry notes that lighthouse customers are sometimes given preferential pricing and terms. Here are four offers as each seller prints them, read on 12 November 2026.
Early adopter offers: lifetime deals, early access and supporter licenses, on the sellers' own pages
| Offer | Who runs it | What their page says | What the early adopter gets | What it asks of the maker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A lifetime deal on a marketplace | AppSumo | “Keep 95% of sales from buyers you bring, 70% from buyers we bring.” | A deal priced for a list of buyers who look for them | An application (“About 10% get in.”) and a share of each sale |
| Free early access | JetBrains (EAP) | “free access to pre-release versions of our software” | Pre-release builds at no cost, each one valid for 30 days | Builds out in public before they are finished, a tracker for the bug reports and a plain warning that stability may vary |
| A supporter license with beta access | Obsidian (Catalyst) | “Early access to beta versions”, on a card priced $25 and marked “One-time payment” | Beta versions before release, community badges and exclusive channels, for one payment | Betas good enough to hand to paying users early, and the terms up front: a Catalyst license is non-refundable |
| Paid early access | Steam Early Access | “Early Access is a place for games that are in a playable alpha or beta state, are worth the current value of the playable build, and that you plan to continue to develop for release.” | A game they can play while it is being finished | A game that plays now, not a promise: “Early Access is not a way to crowdfund development of your product.” |
Each seller's own page, read on 12 November 2026: sell.appsumo.com ("We agree price, deal terms and your listing with you."); jetbrains.com/resources/eap ("All EAP builds are valid for 30 days from their date of release."); obsidian.md/pricing (the Catalyst card at $25 USD, "One-time payment", and the FAQ line on refunds that calls Catalyst licenses "non-refundable"); Steamworks' Early Access documentation. The "What their page says" column quotes each page; the last two columns are this post's reading of it, quotes aside. No seller here was asked for terms beyond its public page.
Two habits run through those pages. The offer is tied to something real: JetBrains to the 30 days a build lasts, Steam to a game that already plays, Obsidian to keeping the app “100% user-supported” and AppSumo to a price it agrees with each maker. And the page says plainly what the buyer is getting into: Steam spells out that Early Access is not a pre-purchase, JetBrains that its builds may be unstable and Obsidian that a Catalyst license is not refundable. Founder pricing works on the same terms: a lower price for the first customers, with a stated end or a stated reason. A deadline or a seat count that is not true spends the trust early adopters bring.
Where Submitator fits
Submitator takes the listing row of that table off your hands. You choose the directories yourself, out of the 189 on our list, on a dashboard where every one carries its Domain Rating, and no site joins that list until a submission to it has run end to end. Every directory gets a description of its own, written to the limits of its form, and we fill the form in. A CAPTCHA never reaches you: we handle it.
When a directory wants its badge on your site, one component carries every such badge; we keep each of them live after that, and no directory ever costs you a commit. We also push each listing page we file through IndexMachine, our sister product. That is the free indexing ($25 value) bundled with Starter, Growth and Scale, and it needs nothing from you. Whether a listing gets indexed stays Google's call.
Pricing is per batch, paid once: Starter covers 30 directories for $29, Growth 60 for $49 and Scale 100 for $79, while All Directories at $149 covers the whole catalog, sites added later included. Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours and every directory within 21 days at most. A directory that rejects your product earns you, by default, another of your choice (All Directories aside, since it holds every one already), and a refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions set out in our terms. Our count of startups submitted stands at 580+. What became of the ones we filed for paid orders from July into November has a statistics post of its own.
Submitator runs no ads and does no outreach. Its part is the listing work, paid for once. SideProjectors is on our list as well: its $20 speeds up the approval of one listing, while $29 files 30 directories of your choosing. For how a SaaS budget divides between channels like these, see our SaaS marketing post.
Sources. Rogers' shares and the five descriptions: Lumen Learning's Principles of Marketing course, read 12 November 2026; on that day we also read Wikipedia (its entries on early adopters, diffusion of innovations and Crossing the Chasm), geoffreyamoore.com and Paul Graham's essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" (July 2013). Prices and offers: the note under each table. SideProjectors: its help page on approval and the fast approval window its project pages load, read 12 November 2026 ("After payment is confirmed, your project will be automatically approved within about 2 hours." "The cost of request for fast approval is $20 USD."); our plans are not said to buy that approval. Reddit: its rules page on redditinc.com, read 12 November 2026. The questions answered come from Google US results for early adopters and how to get first users, collected 12 November 2026. Catalog counts: the 189 rows of the directory table we exported from production on 3 November 2026 that belong to a category group, with intercepts left out. A row counts as followed when our admin lists its link as dofollow and no census of ours has flagged it as passing no equity; that is the catalog's own record, not a new crawl of anyone's listings, and each DR is the Ahrefs figure carried in the export. What we say about Submitator rests on three sources. From our founder: a description per directory, filled forms, CAPTCHAs handled, one component for every badge with each badge kept live, listings pushed through IndexMachine, a directory added to the list once a submission to it has run end to end, and most directories out within 24 to 48 hours. From our pricing and home pages: the plans, the indexing bonus and 580+ startups submitted. From our terms: delivery within 21 days at most, a replacement directory after a rejection and the 30-day window to request a refund. No sentence on this page promises users, customers, rankings, traffic, a higher Domain Rating, indexing or a mention by an AI assistant. Domain Rating by Ahrefs
FAQ
What are the five types of adopters?
Everett Rogers sorted the people who take up an innovation into five adopter categories, by how soon they adopt it: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), the early majority (34%), the late majority (34%) and laggards (16%). Those shares are the ones Lumen Learning's Principles of Marketing course prints for his curve. Innovators and early adopters together are the first 16% a new product reaches.
What is another word for early adopter?
Lighthouse customer is the second name Wikipedia gives in its first line. Geoffrey Moore calls early adopters visionaries in Crossing the Chasm and sets them against the pragmatists of the early majority. Startup writing tends to say first users or first customers. Innovators are a separate group: the people who adopt before early adopters do.
What percentage of people are early adopters?
13.5% in Rogers' model, after the 2.5% who are innovators, so the two groups together make 16%. The shares describe how adoption spreads through a population, not a head count of any one market: how many early adopters a product finds depends on the problem it solves and who has that problem now.
What is the difference between innovators and early adopters?
Innovators take the risk for its own sake: Lumen Learning's marketing course describes them as risk takers who can absorb a product that fails. Early adopters choose with more care and carry more weight with others, which is why the same course tells marketers to court them rather than the innovators: their choices pull in the early majority.
How do you get your first 100 customers?
Recruit the first ten or twenty yourself, from people who have the problem now; Paul Graham's essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" calls recruiting users by hand the most common unscalable thing founders have to do. Alongside that, get listed where early adopters browse for new tools and run one launch day. Then reply to every user, fix what they hit and ask the happy ones for a review and a name. Submitator files the listings: 30 directories for $29.
How do I get users for my app?
Give the app a page on its own domain before anything else: BetaList, for one, turns down a direct link to an app store or a free hosting subdomain. List that page where people look for new tools (directories, launch platforms, beta lists), post in the subreddits your users read within each one's rules and collect signups on a waitlist before release. Testing builds with real users first is covered in our post on beta testers.
Should you give early adopters a discount?
Yes, if the discount is tied to something real and says when it ends. The offers we read on 12 November 2026 show the range: JetBrains gives pre-release builds away free and invites feedback, AppSumo sells software as deals whose price it agrees with each maker and Obsidian charges a one-time $25 for early access to its betas. Whatever the terms, give the reason and the end date, and never invent a deadline or a seat count: the people who took the early risk are the ones who notice.
Keep reading
Their $20: one fast approval. Our $29: 30 directories.
SideProjectors charges $20 to approve one listing in about two hours. Submitator is $29 for 30 directories you pick, under a dollar a directory, and $79 for 100, paid once, with a description written for each and every badge kept live.