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Techies and normals

January 22nd, 2010 | product design, startups

There are techies (if you are reading this blog you are almost certainly one of them) and there are mainstream users – some people call them “normals” (@caterina suggested “muggles”). A lot of people call techies “early adopters” but I think this is a mistake: techies are only occasionally good predictors of which tech products normals will like.

Techies are enthusiastic evangelists and can therefore give you lots of free marketing. Normals, on the other hand, are what you need to create a large company. There are three main ways that techies and normals can combine to embrace (or ignore) a startup.

1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale.  Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology.  It is startup nirvana.

2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category. Usually the first time they get a lot of attention from the tech community is when they announce revenues or close a big financing. Some recent companies that fall in this category are Groupon, Zynga, and Gilt Group. Since these companies don’t start out with lots of free techie evangelizing they often acquire customers through paid marketing.

(My last company – SiteAdvisor – was a product tech bloggers mostly dismissed even as normals embraced it.  When I left the company we had over 150 million downloads, yet the first time the word “SiteAdvisor” appeared on TechCrunch was a year after we were acquired when they referred to another product as “SiteAdvisor 2.0″.)

3. There are lots of products that are loved just by techies but not by normals. When something is getting hyped by techies, one of the hardest things to figure out is whether it will cross over to normals. The normals I know don’t want to vote on news, tag bookmarks, or annotate web pages.  I have no idea whether they want to “check in” to locations.  A year ago, I would have said they didn’t want to Twitter but obviously I was wrong. Knowing when something is techie-only versus techie-plus-normals is one of the hardest things to predict.

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  • As a want to be "techie" that manages an experience for very novice internet users I struggle with looking at a new feature that is great for 5% of the users but won't increase our revenues 5%+.
  • I think any busy that describes their customers as "users" will undoubtedly struggle.
  • every internet company calls them users. google does.
  • As to "early adopters" they may or may not predict a transition to a wider market. They just explore services early and often to see what is implemented and how it can help them.

    Twitter hasn't gotten mainstream acceptance yet, while my brother and friends have accounts, they don't get near as much utility out if the service as I do.
  • I think your points are spot on Chris. Just got out of a class where we talked about just this thing so I thought I'd add a little MBA flavor to the discussion board.

    We often think in terms of *people* when trying to predict adoption curves (early adopters vs. majority, etc.) However, these 5 product characteristics are shown to be better predictors:

    Relative advantage - how much more useful is it than what's already out there
    Compatibility - is it consistent with existing values and experiences
    Complexity - how difficult is it to understand and use
    Trialability - how easy is it to experiment with on a limited basis
    Observability - how visible is it to others

    Think of Netflix as a good example. Strong relative advantage over blockbuster stores (no late fees, wider selection, delivered to your home). Compatible with what we're used to (we've all used the post office, still used DVDs). Simple concept (DVD rentals by mail). Advertised 2 week free trials all over the internet. Bright red envelopes everywhere you look.

    Tougher challenge with online streaming but you can see how they are using some similar techniques.

    Bottom line: if you've got a product that scores well in these categories, I'm not sure you need a lot of techie evangelists to succeed.
  • seems like a good set of principles. you should blog. (As should every MBA student!)
  • Thanks! Just getting started at psmart.wordpress.com.
  • now the tablet is not launched and they are predicting sales of 5 billion in the first year. thats the new problem for apple. great post
  • Not to get all Kinsey on the binary here but...

    I'd take a sliding scale of alliteration:

    Techies------------------------------------------------Normals
    Curious to Captivated to Coveting to Crowd to Complacent
    Techies------------------------------------------------Normals
  • I'd just like to add that though I don't care about the label....'normals' is hardly accurate. The label I'd choose would be more like mainstream. I mean....look at Lady Gaga who is the latest God on Earth.
    Just don't know if normal is quite the word....

    And even if it hurts I really believe that techies should force themselves to watch E! at least once a week.

    I think it would as helpful as a cleansing shot of wheatgrass honestly. Maybe not tasty but definitely good for you.
  • A hour of E! = wheatgrass cleanse for techies. that's funny and also probably true.
  • davidkpark
    For techies out there, John Lafferty is giving a talk titled "Three Rivers in Machine Learning: Data, Computation and Risk." It's Monday, February 1st, 2010, 11:00 am - Davis Auditorium, Schapiro Center, at Columbia University.

    John will be talking about how "[t]heoretical analyses are also being advanced to help understand the tradeoffs between computation, data, and risk that are inherent in statistical learning. Two types of results have been studied: the consistency and scaling behavior of specific convex optimization procedures, which have polynomial computational efficiency, and lower bounds on any statistically efficient procedure, without regard to computational cost. This talk will give a survey of some of these developments, with a focus on structured learning problems for graphs and shared learning tasks in high dimensions."
  • joshgreenberg
    I wouldn't frame it as "techies" vs. "normals", but rather as different degrees of sophistication along a spectrum between expert and layperson (which doesn't necessarily map onto traditional ideas of professionalization or other indicators of "expertness"). The reason that I think "techie" is misleading is that it makes it about the technology, where a number of the big successes of the past few years have been as much about sociocultural innovation as technological innovation (sez the guy who got a PhD in the social and cultural context of technology use).
  • Perhaps it's the discoverers and the settlers.
  • joshgreenberg
    I like this - all us geeks are like John Wayne in "The Searchers", good in a pinch but unable to come inside the house and be domesticated when the adventure's over...
  • Hey Josh, fair enough. "techie" might very well be the wrong word. 1) do you have a better word 2) do you disagree with the general premise that there is group alpha and group beta etc etc ?
  • Better word - go with Caterina's hint - Wizards v Muggles. Remember the Usenix Unix magic poster ?
  • joshgreenberg
    I guess the issue for me is that the idea of a one-way flow downstream from a core set of alphas to betas and onward seems a bit oversimplified; not that a dissemination process doesn't happen, but I'm not convinced that it's always a flow from the same group of people downward in every case.

    I do agree there's a subculture that focuses on early experimentation with new tools/apps (and which also tends to resonate with the norms of openness, hackability, and all things O'Reillyish), but that's an extension of a culture that far predates the web. If you're interested in this, check out my friend Fred Turner's fantastic book "From Counterculture to Cyberspace", which traces the causal chain from 60's back-to-the-land counterculture to the Bay Area web culture.

    On your questions, I don't have a better word that works across the board; to me the combination of amateur and enthusiast hits something important, though. What you call "techies" I'd call "enthusiastic amateurs", where "amateur" is used in its purest sense; people who do something because they love it. The question you're raising asks how anything breaks out beyond a particular subcultural bubble of amateur enthusiasm to more mass popularity.

    That said, there *is* something really compelling about the particular strength of the specific group of enthusiasts that you call "techies", who're important because there's a strong overlap between the people who're building shiny new things and those who use them. I'd say this gets back to your points about NYC vs Bay Area culture and opens up the question: are "techies" here in NYC the same tribe as those on the West Coast, or is there a more-than-geographic cultural difference between two?
  • I think we are agreeing..? I'm arguing that while every (tech) product has early adopters, they often aren't "techies". They are older female facebook users (Zynga), people into arts & crafts (Etsy), etc.
  • Aviah Laor
    Maybe this is the important insight on top of "Crossing the chasm": after 15 Internet years, the early adopters of many websites should not be considered techies anymore.
    For a new eCommerce site like Etsy, the good old marketing bell curve is OK again.
  • I find the that many techies have a certain snobbery to the point where it's detrimental to them....because they keep themselves so in their own little world that they miss out on what's going on in mainstream and Why.

    And that is just a Little important if they are trying to get a product, app, whatever it may be to market.

    I think it's important for both sides to be open minded and not exclusive to their own circles or they will miss out on alot.
    And that definitely applies to the elitist techie crowd too regardless of how open minded they may think they are.
  • I think this is one of the advantages we have as techies in NYC. Most people around us are normals. I remember back when Youtube was growing. If you looked at CA tech blogs, you'd think Youtube, Digg and Delicious were all equal, but in NYC everyone was talking about Youtube and no one the others. Gives you some perspective.
  • I'm curious how you'd interpret the second case (success with normals before techies) in Moore's Crossing The Chasm/Inside The Tornado frameworks.

    I'd always considered techies to be the early adopters that influence the early and late majorities.

    How does one jump straight to the majority?
  • That's a great question. I love Crossing the Chasm. My knee jerk response is B2B (which CtC was mostly about) is different than B2C, but otherwise I need to think about it more to give a decent answer.
  • The Zyngas of the world are following a Crossing the Chasm strategy. Their paid advertising was very targeted on a particular group (Facebook users, skewing female) with a specific application (simple but addictive non-traditional videogames).

    It is a lot easier to Cross the Chasm when you can tap into the explosive word of mouth that the techie community provides, but you can go mainstream without it, even as you follow the Crossing the Chasm bowling pin strategy.

    As a side note, it will be fascinating to see if the rise of Twitter and Facebook as mainstream phenomena increase the tendency of normals to meme-hop as the techie community has. Good news for startups if that's the case!
  • re zynga: yes, that is a good example where the early adopter != techies. Etsy would be another one like that. They had early adopter enthusiasts and grew from there but they weren't techies.
  • Adam P
    I think the early adopters in social gaming were the hardcore gaming players (mob games, poker games) gaming companies then used those lessons and applied to games for everyone.

    So in that case techies = gamers which later crossed the chasm to my mom.
  • @meaghano: Great point. Every techie startup should have some normals on staff to help keep things in perspective.
  • Yes, and not beta test on only techies. 'Normals' for the most part have no idea even what Beta means.
  • Great point - makes things tricky because often the 'techies' ask for features that 'normals' have no interest in at all. If you're trying to iterate on your product based on customer feedback this can take you in the wrong direction.
  • yes, exactly. very difficult to make those trade offs.
  • oh come on admit it, EVERYONE has at least a little techie inside them just waiting to get out, don't they? ;-)
  • sure, i'm over generalizing of of course. its all a matter of degrees.
  • Phillip Morelock
    Completely agree with point 3 --- as a techie I feel like I have a total 50/50 track record on those kinds of predictions.
  • me too. it's incredibly hard. as an entrepreneur / investors i try to focus more on normals than techies rather than betting that what techies like will cross over.
  • Totally.

    I am a Normal working at a startup-- (a fact I am constantly reminded of) it started out as a joke, and I probably am moving over to the dark side, but i think my perspective has come to be pretty valuable.

    They boys are always running new features or design changes by me for Normal-input, and when you're company as at that saturation point where things are (hooray!) far beyond the techies, I think it's, almost ironically, a pretty cool part of what I bring to the team.
  • You think you can stay at a startup and not become some what of a techy? My guess is not for long!
  • Hahaha, yes. My normal days are over, for the most part. But what I mean is that I am constantly taking a break from Outreach stuff to peer over a designer's shoulder and tell them "Normal people won't know to click Esc to exit that video! Give us the X!!" etc.

    And then they get mad and tell me I'm not a designer. Then I say FINE BUT YOU KNOW I'M RIGHT and put my headphones back on.

    But the interesting part is I find myself being the doubting thomas much more than they do-- I think the faith of the techie in the person who will be using your product, not always giving them what they ask for, is what allows it to be the best it can be.

    I can say, "Give us the X! We fear the unknown!" but really, if techies always listened to Normals, we would be having this conversation on a very fast horse.

    so, as valuable as my Normal Person UX input can be, in the end I always try to push myself to align with the vision of my team. Because the point is not to make everyone happy. The point is to fucking blow you away.
  • that's freakin genius stuff...do you blog? you should.
  • haha, thanks, i wouldn't go that far, but YES- ha!- yes, I blog.

    Aforementioned startup = tumblr, and blogging on the platform was how I came to be friends w. the staff and asked to join the team.
  • I knew it was Tumblr, we've talked re: foursquare. I'll check out you
    blog!
  • oh yeah DUH. Hi Ryan!! Sorry to bomb your comments, Chris!
  • :)

    Ryan Graves
    312.860.7926
    Twitter: @ryangraves

    From my iPhone, pleeze dirsegard errors
  • davidkpark
    I need to challenge your claim on being a "normal" - reading dixon's blog...on Friday night...you may claim to a "normal" but behavior indicates "techie" ; )
  • Hahaha! Busted.
  • yes, i think you should have Normals in the company and also hopefully in your social circle.
  • Ha!
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