Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money

by Pat Flynn

Another way you can keep people excited is to create a private Facebook group to hold your customers and have them get to know each other, too. This makes it a little easier for you to facilitate discussions, get feedback, and share progress with photos and video updates. You begin to build an environment and culture where raving fans are born, but bear in mind you have to keep people up to date a little more often in a social media environment than you do with email. What should my minimum be? How many people should I have order before it’s a yes? Does everyone you follow up with need to pay you money in order to green-light your project? No. Most people will not, even if your solution is perfectly suited for them. Some may not be too keen on paying upfront for something or have the funds to spare at the moment, while others would like to wait until more people are on board with it later in the process. According to the Diffusion of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers, a professor of communication who published a book in 1962 of the same name, there’s a specific progression of adoption of new innovations by users based on a number of factors, including time. The first users (the innovators and early adopters) make up a small percentage of the overall user-base, followed by a surge of new users coming in the early majority and late majority phase, and then the laggards coming in at the end of the cycle. This adoption curve, seen below, works in our favor and completely pa...