Nice work on that 'sign-up for my newsletter', fullscreen, non-closable modal screen that pops up after reading a few paragraphs! Nice way to capture your adjacent users and convert them to whatever-core-something-engaged power customer.
In sociological studies of innovation adoption, a general finding here is that different niche communities often have different needs, so a successful innovation adapts to fit it, generally through involvement of the niche members. Growth in turn often follows those niches. I like to think of this kind of growth as where the product is a circle in the middle of a bunch of niche communities, and growing the product surface moves it through adjacent niche communities. There are different levers here via different people once you think that through.<p>So, it's good to map out those niches and help them one-by-one. Likewise, studies like this became a research field soon after gmo corn became a thing, and worth understanding the many kinds of innovation adoption if your job is here. (Broad area is called the Diffusion of Innovation.)
The tone of the article rubs me the wrong way for some reason. Consider these two paragraphs:<p><i>The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using the it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them.</i><p><i>While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.</i><p>There's so much assumption there. <i>"not able to successfully become an engaged user";</i> <i>"too many barriers to adoption";</i> <i>"didn't quite understand [...] how it fit into their lives".</i> No question about whether potential users are interested in the product in the first place? It's so life-changing that if someone decides not to use the thing, it's because they <i>failed</i> at becoming engaged, or just don't understand that it's life-changing?<p>I'm confused. Maybe this is the level of delusions of grandeur you need to succeed at that scale with that kind of product, and I'm just hopelessly naive :(
This sounds like a blog-form re-write of Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm", a book from 1991.<p>There seems to be a rash of people blogging up with 'new' ideas and theories that have existed for a long time.
This isn't new by the way. Many people talked about it. Off the top of my head, Patrick Collison mentions the importance of reviewing and expanding your product-market fit on Tim Ferris's podcast.
My snake oil detector perked up here. It seems like this guy is attempting to take credit for Instagrams success while simultaneously trying to apply a hand-wavy growth 'theory'. Seems like he is attempting to market a startup in incubation.