Deridut’s Early Adopter Playbook: Finding Your First 10 Customers in an Emerging Market

Building something genuinely new comes with a unique challenge: finding customers who are willing to bet on innovation. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Javier Marti shared Deridut’s systematic approach to finding early adopters for their water risk platform, offering valuable insights for founders tackling similar challenges.

The 1-in-100 Reality

Javier is refreshingly candid about the odds of finding early adopters: “It’s a tedious process to find early adopters, but there’s always one early adopter, every hundred people that you talk to.” This 1% conversion rate might seem daunting, but it provides a crucial framework for planning early customer acquisition efforts.

Pattern Recognition in Early Adoption

What makes this process particularly interesting is how Deridut identified patterns in early adopter behavior. As Javier explains, they found that early customers often came from a place of frustration with existing solutions: “we found that the people that we talked to, they have been burned by other solutions which may not have provided them the answers that they were looking for.”

This insight led to a key qualification signal: prospects who say “we tried everything, we tried this, we tried that, and then it was stumbling to the road and what you’re offering. This actually makes sense.”

Market Education as Customer Development

For Deridut, finding early adopters is intrinsically linked to market education. As Javier notes, “a company like ours is all about awareness. We need to make sure that everybody understands that when you’re tackling a global problem with a global reach, you need to be known by a lot of people.”

This broad awareness strategy serves a specific purpose in early adopter acquisition: “The more you get to be known by the audience, no matter if they’re buyers or not, the better.” This approach helps identify potential customers who are already grappling with the problems their solution addresses.

The Role of Strategic Positioning

Deridut’s success in finding early adopters is partly due to their strategic market positioning. They deliberately positioned themselves between two established market segments: “On one hand, we have competition from sensor companies… And on the other hand, we’re sitting in front of all the people that are actually consuming data for risk models.”

This positioning helps them identify potential early adopters who are feeling pain points in either segment but need something different from existing solutions.

Converting Early Interest into Adoption

The key to converting early interest into adoption lies in Deridut’s approach to product development. Javier emphasizes the importance of “direct sales, talking with customers and listening to their pain points and understanding what they could do and they couldn’t do, understanding what could be the ideal solution and seeing whether your product is actually feeling that ideal solution or not.”

Embracing Market Timing Reality

Perhaps most importantly, Deridut’s approach acknowledges market timing realities. As Javier notes, “The traction is sort of slow… when you look at traction in a field which is extremely destructive, where market is still like, yes, we know that there is climate change that is risk associated to the water. We don’t know how to tackle that at large.”

This understanding helps set realistic expectations for early adopter acquisition while maintaining focus on long-term market development. As he puts it, “The future is there, that exists. The reality today is that we are still working towards that future.”

For founders building innovative solutions in emerging markets, Deridut’s experience offers several key lessons. First, expect and plan for the 1-in-100 reality of early adopter conversion. Second, look for patterns in early customer behavior, particularly signs of frustration with existing solutions. Finally, recognize that finding early adopters is as much about market education and positioning as it is about direct sales efforts.

The goal isn’t to rush growth but to build a foundation of early adopters who can help validate and refine your solution while providing a platform for future market expansion. It’s a reminder that in emerging markets, success often comes not from rapid scaling but from patient, systematic early adopter acquisition.