Last month, Kevin Starr from Mulago Foundation and impact guru, asked us “What are we doing to make it easy for early adopters to join you this year?”
Good question! It’s in fact all we’re thinking about in these early weeks. Why the focus on early adopters?
An early adopter is someone who takes more risks than the average person and will be willing to try us out.
Early adopters are really critical for almost any new service or technology. Think about Facebook – they started with the right segment of “early adopters” – Boston undergrads – and those undergrads, through their network, are the ones who broadened Facebook to their high school friends across the country, who continued to share it with their universities and so on.
For myAgro, if we find, attract and retain the right “early adopters” in each of the villages we work in, we will be able to meet our targets for this year and set a good foundation for expansion next year. The early adopter’s more risk-averse neighbors and friends will probably wait and watch the early adopter’s work and results before joining myAgro next year.
We’re using the following framework to think about early adopters:
- How do we identify early adopters?
- How can we make it really easy for early adopters to sign up?
- How can we make our program attractive enough to justify the risk of saving with us?
- How can we use early adopters to promote our brand and service?
We know from our initial enrollment meetings, farmers are interested and excited about myAgro. We need to find the risk-takers in the group who are willing to take the next step and join us in this first year.
