Early Adoption Is Mostly Bad Practice

Early Adoption Is Mostly Bad Practice

Yesterday, I wrote about Thrive Theme Builder.

It’s a powerful piece of software. I used it most of today, and I’m hopeful that it’ll do what I need it to: namely, help me build out a skeleton website where I can deploy it to new domains, create the specific branding choices for that particular project, and otherwise not think too much about the rest.

Here’s the downside: I should have waited another month or so before playing around with it.

I spent the afternoon building out a home page, getting all the elements aligned, creating various widgets and content boxes and the like. I figured if I get this right, I’ll only really have to do it once all the way, and in the future, my skeleton will be complete and I’ll just have to modify and add the content.

Two hours in, the whole page decided to turn itself black. This is a bug, not a feature that I’m missing. Very odd.

This is the problem you have when you’re an early adopter.

Early Adoption is Mostly Bad Practice

Inevitably, when a piece of software is launched, it’s going to have unforeseen bugs. To cut a long story short, unless you’re being paid as a beta tester, this isn’t your job and it’s a waste of your time.

I could have spent two hours eating cheeseburgers, waited to play around with the new bit of software kit for another couple of weeks, and probably the whole thing would have been productive.

And this is a business thing with potential upside.

When you’re an early adopter of consumer electronics or fad fashion choices, you are literally an unpaid marketing intern for an inferior product.

Take phones for instance; the whole, “Replace your phone on contract every twelve months,” is a ridiculous culture that serves only to inflate profit margins for tech companies.

You buy an iPhone 16 which is marginally better than an iPhone 15 for the benefit of being able to show off, (nobody cares, nor can tell the difference unless you gloat,) and some ridiculous new features that’ll be commonplace in a couple of years.

The reality is that with Wifi and the variety of apps available to you, you don’t need a phone contract.

And the other reality is that there’s absolutely zero need to get a brand new phone the minute it’s released when there’s a culture of dumping last year’s models long before they’re obsolete, (or even noticeably different.)

I buy new phones. They’re heavily marked down because when the 2020 model comes out, I’ll buy the 2019 version.

I do this once every three or four years, and to be honest, I have a drawer full of phones that I just use for verification purchases because they all still work. So I consider the £300 on phones I’ve bought in the last five years a bit excessive.

Back to the point… effectively my phone does pretty much everything the newest model does and more than I actually need it for.

Ergo, a more logical decision than fanboying over the latest iPhone or whatever.

But there is one reason you might want to be an early adopter.

Early Asymmetrical Advantages

If you stand to profit from being in early and the expected value calculations are correct, then you should consider it.

Something like having insider industry knowledge about something you’d want to buy because the item is expected to appreciate is a good example.

Nobody who buys an iPhone expects it to go up in value. You can’t buy enough iPhones to increase your own value.

But let’s say you are a watch collector. Rolex announce they’re releasing a new watch model, and it’ll be limited to 500 watches. You know from a previous collection that they get snapped up quickly and after a few years, they’ll be worth double. (This example is entirely hypothetical, by the way. I don’t collect Rolex watches.)

You should, in this instance, grab one and then sell it when you can get the inflated figure. Better yet, you should buy a handful of them, because then you own 1% of all the supply, and you can buy, sell and hold.

In a more realistic example,you might want to be an early investor in technology if it’ll give you that same asymmetric advantage. For instance, let’s take online business stuff.

Currently, you might use Facebook Advertising. If you pay $100 a day and you make $250 back, that’s very good. It’s a 2.5x return on investment.

Now, you might find a different advertising source. Maybe it’s new, maybe few people are advertising on it, or maybe it’s a new targeted niche for your ads.

It’s untested by the world, but because there are few advertisers, you’re only paying $0.05 a click instead of $0.5 a click.

Should you do it?

Yes, you probably should. Being an early adopter might net you 10x the returns, and from there you gain a massive advantage over everyone in your niche.

Final Thoughts

So, in summary… early adoption is virtually never a good idea. Paying more for a subpar product and essentially tricking yourself into either being a marketing intern or a beta tester.

However, there are obviously examples to the contrary; namely, when you have the reasonable expectation that you’ll gain an asymmetric advantage from adopting early and making it deliberately profitable.