Home in on early adopters As an entrepreneur, you need to simultaneously communicate a big market opportunity while staying razor-focused on your early adopters. Your objective is to define an early adopter, not a mainstream customer. Your list of customer segments should represent the total addressable market (TAM) for your idea, while your early

The basic premise of TOC is that at any given time, a system is always limited by a single constraint or weakest link. Imagine

Home in on early adopters

The roadster was a high-price, low-volume car. They only sold 500 cars a year for a few years and then stopped production.”

Taking the requisite time to deliberate and define your MSC is a critical first step. I wouldn’t advise skipping it. There is no right or wrong number for your MSC, but you should have a number.

you can describe your customers’ problems better than they can, there is an automatic transfer of expertise—your customers start believing that you must also have the right solution for them. Marketer Jay Abraham calls this phenomenon the “Strategy of Preeminence.”

Your goal is establishing “just enough” traffic to support learning.

The activation step is where happy customers are made, and it’s often also referred to as the “aha moment” of a product. Notice in Figure 13-1 that the activation step has the most lines leading out of it. This is what makes activation a causal step.

in the new world what’s riskiest for most products has shifted, with customer and market risks outweighing technical risks.