Thread by @varun_mathur

/make hay

Early adopter markets are now so big and fluid that products can grow very fast in them, ventures get massive valuations and successful financial exits happen, all without actually having to cross the chasm, which was the failure point of startups in earlier years

The number of monthly paying subscribers to either Spotify or Netflix (~100MM) is higher than the total number of Internet users since the dot com boom 20 yrs ago!

3MM-5MM are hosts on Airbnb, or driver-partners for Uber, Lyft or DoorDash. Slack has 10MM DAUs

World of 4B+ users

I am guess-estimating that a startup can rise to $25 billion in valuation or market cap based on the early adopter markets alone

Even if it cracks the mainstream market, well, the market already assumed earlier it *will* based on growth with early adopter & is already priced in

Crossing the chasm remains valuable, but that is next level. That is the zone of $25B+ companies, and there will be many such built over the next decade. They have to, for the markets are 10x bigger and fluid as people have richer connections

cc @eladgil
blog.eladgil.com/2019/05/market…

If you want to build a breakthrough consumer venture today, look at especially what didn’t work before when the early adopter markets were relatively much smaller and products died before the chasm.

A Cambrian explosion of such specialized products seems natural right now.

Pets .com failed while Chewy succeeded

Kozmo didn’t make it while DoorDash and Postmates have grown massively and are enroute to the public markets

Webvan folded while Amazon and Instacart iterated upon for existing early adopter market with home delivery of groceries

How about a power email client which can save high tech workers 1 hr a day ? That market I am estimating is $100B alone (how+what variable)

~$20/hr global pay x 1hr x 5 days x 50 weeks = $5000/yr x 20 million tech workers globally = $100B

cc @rahulvohra
abovethecrowd.com/2014/07/11/how…

Which brings me to crypto and this chart again. I think it is still in the innovators market, and can grow massively in the early adopter market, even though has no pathway to the majority due to tough UX

Think Satoshi was surprised by the growing size of this innovators market

I spent a lot of time going through books written in/about previous 20 years in tech and also going through archive.org. Techmeme’s historical view is amazing as well.

Markets which seemed improbable back then are the ones to build for today.

People don’t change.

What didn’t work 5/10/20 yrs ago does not mean it is not a good idea in the current market, where the early adopter market is sufficient in itself to drive the venture towards massive success

Mainstream is now a fun level and this is a good time to be 10x optimistic

Play again

Given this state, as a founder it makes sense to build only for/subset of the early adopter consumer market of ~100MM people, and not be confounded by “will this work for a mainstream user ?”

This is the change from 5-20 yrs ago and a great time to be optimistic

cc @jeremysliew

Quora started out from the tech circles of Silicon Valley, and @andrewchen was bang on right here 8 yrs ago. It now has 300MM MAUs, which signals it is breaking out of the massive early adopter market towards mainstream.

andrewchen.co/quora-numbers-…

vox.com/recode/2019/5/…

Medium of Vlogging

Its a matter of time before a brilliant video UX to create, share, search and discover high quality and frequent video driven blogging platform takes off. It will too grow in the massive + fluid early adopter market before re-orienting to cross the chasm.

What would be the size of the early adopter market for consumer tech products by 2025 ?

Thinking that would be 250 million, Millennials and Gen Z, smartphone and Internet connected power users across US, Europe and India. By 2030, 1 billion.

We will see unprecedented growth 🚀

Also thinking that early adopters don’t typically have a need to be loyal to any app. They are power users and can seamlessly shift and adapt from one to another.

Eg Medium - it grew 📈 with the tech community, then with the paywall has alienated many.

reddit.com/r/Blogging/com…