[gumby]

> Myth: Your Early Adopters Are Your Best Customers

These folks suffered an extreme case of Early Adopters being unlike the majority, but anyone who gets this advice should read Crossing the Chasm (one of the 2 or 3 non-worthless business books, even if it's really only a single drawing).

Basically: consider the bell curve of a product's life span: First early adopters, then the early majority (your volume customers once you really have PMF), then on the other side of the midpoint: late majority and then the laggards).

The think is your early traction is on early adopters: people with special needs (not usually fraudsters :-), who find your product so valuable that they can put up with its bugs and lack of features to get value out of it, or just people who like the latest thing.

The features the early adoptors want not only are rarely what the majorities want, they could work against what the majorities want. The gap between the early adopters and the majority is a "chasm" -- huge, hard to get across and, as with Braid, often something a company falls into and dies.