All about is a Seed Groups.
When growing a customer base for our product (software, course, etc.) the classic way to think about customer growth is through the lens of the product adoption curve.
Adoption Curve Key
- Innovators - First in. Love to play with new products.
- Early Adopters - Love new products but wait for innovator reviews first.
- Early Majority - Wait for a product to be tested and proven by Early Adopters.
- Late Majority - Wait for a product to be widely adopted.
- Laggards - Last in. Skeptical. Eventually, FOMO gets to them.
Did you notice the diagram is missing a key bucket?
Customers who join our list before we have a product.
We need a new bucket!
I call it the Seed Group.
Seed Group Traits
- Hopeful: They are excited for the potential of our product and how it might affect them.
- Early Pragmatists: They have a problem right now and they hope we can solve it soon.
- All Types of People: They do not conform to adoption curve norms. We are building something they wish already existed, and that is a strong enough driver for them to join.
Just like with the adoption curve, the seed group has core user buckets. Let's explore them.
For context: A person lands on our Vapor landing page, they read our headline and subheading, they like it, and they enter their email address to join our waitlist.
This is a nuanced subject, but using broad strokes, users fall into one of the following four buckets:
Seed Group User Buckets
- Super Seeds: 5%
People who love our product idea and want to pay. They are quick to answer questions. They enjoy giving feedback on mockups and product ideas. They enjoy talking in depth about their niche. They are rooting for our success. - Followers: 25%
People who genuinely hope our product becomes a reality. They are happy to be on our email list. They will follow our updates. They might answer a survey. - Faders: 30%
People who are interested in our idea at the time they visit. They sign up with best intentions. Over time they become passive and interest fades. - FOMOs: 40%
People who like our idea when they visit our landing page. They signup just in case it turns into something interesting one day. They quickly forget about our product and aren't helpful for feedback.
Super Seeds are like gold dust!
The above folks were Super Seeds for my original SaaS app, Pluggio. I knew each of them well and had many conversations with them about the niche, pain points, and product features.
This awesome group was excited about the upcoming launch of Pluggio and then also played a major role in the first year of Pluggio's life.
Pluggio's core feature was queued tweets. When I launched, the setting possibilities were:
- Post one tweet from the queue every N hours.
Well, multiple Super Seeds passionately pleaded with me to add time ranges and the ability to turn on/off specific days of the week.
They wanted to be able to say something like:
- Post one tweet, every 3 hours, between the hours of 9-5, except on weekends.
This turned out to be a very important feature for all customers and a key selling point over the competition.
Given the power of Super Seeds, we will focus on finding and nurturing them at the beginning of Stage 7.
As we engage Super Seeds, they will present multiple nuanced problems.
It is our job to find ONE main problem at a time that is shared by the majority of our Super Seeds (and Followers) and focus only on that.
We don't want to become glorified dev shops and build custom solutions for individual customers. It is imperative that we validate common problems that are shared by multiple people before creating a solution.