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When entering an existing market there are clearly businesses who are using SaaS already, then there are those that are not and choose to still do something the old fashioned way.

I believe that those who are already using a solution are early adopters to some extent and if i target the people who have yet to even start trying an online solution for their business then im not likely to be getting feedback from early adopters/earlyvangelists.

Am i right in thinking this way or am i missing something?

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You should interview everyone who is likely to suffer from the problem you're trying to solve (i.e. all potential customers) disregarding their adoption habits because your ultimate goal is broad market adoption. However, your interviews should be structured slightly differently because of the different kinds of feedback you can collect from them.

Early adopters can provide you with the reasons for their switch to SaaS and with feedback on competition. The former will allow you to better target your marketing, and the latter will help you with product management & differentiation.

Mainstream & late adopters will help you understand their worries about SaaS solutions, which will help you with marketing messages and validation of the bigger market potential. In other words, without knowing why mainstream might not buy your product, you may end up stuck with only early adopters and not grow the company further.

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as well as structuring the interviews slightly differently for those different groups of people, do you think that with surveys that i should have two separate surveys? Or maybe structure the survey so that it goes to a different page for early adopters and another different page for the others, say once they have identified themselves within the first question or first few questions or a survey. Btw, very useful advice from you yet again, i appreciate your thoughts and opinions, thank you. – user14718 Jan 13 '12 at 13:54
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I don't recommend using surveys for these interviews because you need to ask open-ended question. In a survey, you would put a large text entry field like this one for comments. Since people don't like typing, it will intimidate them and you'll either have abandoned surveys or incomplete answers. Interviews are longer and harder but you should be concerned with the depth of your findings rather than the quantity of respondents. – dnbrv Jan 13 '12 at 16:17
Thanks very much for the advice dnbrv – user14718 Jan 13 '12 at 18:54

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