© 2024 Emmanuel Smart, CMC®
This article is for entrepreneurs, creators, and product leaders who are convinced they have created a product that meets customer needs. In simpler terms, they believe they have found product-market fit. However, they find themselves growing slowly or much slower than expected. It can be frustrating to see potential customers in your target market refuse to pay for or even use your product at no cost. If you have ever launched a product that solves real problems and was priced appropriately, you would have discovered that the title of this article is true: Adoption is not your birthright.
Zoom (the video conferencing app) was founded in 2011 but launched in 2013. Zoom solved numerous problems—it saved users the costs associated with physical meetings. It also saved a lot of time. It’s a product that made sense. Customers needed Zoom. It even had a free version. It was too good to be true. It was a miracle product because you could hold a meeting with many participants and even share your slides. Yet it took COVID-19 to get the world to notice Zoom. If any product should have been instantly adopted by the corporate world, it should have been Zoom. But even for Eric Yuan and his team, adoption was not their birthright. In December 2019, they had 10 million daily users. By April 2020, in the midst of COVID, they had grown to 300 million daily users.
Opay and its competitors had tried multiple times to promote the POS as a viable alternative to ATMs. However, just as people preferred expensive and time-consuming physical meetings because of the human touch, potential customers bypassed POS operators near them and traveled to distant ATMs to save on withdrawal costs and avoid handing their Debit Cards to strangers. They didn’t want strangers to know how much they were withdrawing or any information about their finances. However, it took COVID to turn people into POS users as banks couldn’t keep their ATMs filled with cash. POS operators even increased their rates, but frustrated customers, faced with empty ATMs, were forced to use POS services. Once they experienced the ease and convenience of POS, their fears disappeared. The logic of preferring the cheaper ATM fee no longer made sense. Since POS agents were closer, customers chose the convenience of POS in the long term, realizing that the time and money saved outweighed the service fee.
Many snacks sold in Nigerian traffic wouldn’t be bought if there was no traffic. These snacks have transitioned from being “traffic snacks” to everyday snacks after customers experienced them. Product-market fit does not guarantee that people will adopt your product or service. Foreign religions wouldn’t have spread widely in Africa without colonialism. English, Spanish, and French wouldn’t be spoken in Africa if not for colonialism. Adoption occurs when external or internal factors force it. COVID, traffic, and colonialism were external factors that drove the adoption of technology, religion, sales, and language expansion. However, we cannot depend on external factors alone. There is a rumor that some traffic hawkers create roadblocks to ensure heavy traffic for easy sales. This is not the kind of internal factor I promote.
Uber became a global hit by ensuring people experienced their service. There was no way anyone would enter a car with a stranger unless it was a yellow taxi. However, Uber used two key tools to ensure customers experienced their service: free rides and well-paid salespeople. What Uber was trying to do was not a product that could simply be sold online. They needed trust, and they needed salespeople by the hundreds or thousands to give out free rides and earn commissions. They went a step further: if you liked the free ride and wanted another, you simply had to refer a friend for a free ride, and you’d get one too. Most of their online marketing was for brand promotion, not to get sales or riders. They created their own internal force and pursued it aggressively, and the rest is history. There are many stories of both external and internal factors driving adoption, but the lesson is clear: you need to push your product, especially when you’re convinced it has product-market fit. Only then will you achieve adoption. Push until it’s adopted.