Earlyvangelists
Earlyvangelists are the ideal initial customer segment for a new product, proposed by Steve Blank in The Four Steps to the Epiphany. According to Blank, those are the customers that product managers can best rely on for feedback and early sales, and for spreading the word about the early product versions.
Earlyvangelists are a special breed of customer willing to take a risk on your startup’s product or service because they can envision its potential to solve a critical an dimmediate problem—and they have the budget to purchase it.
Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Scale of customer pain
Blank identifies the “Scale of customer pain” to identify earlyvangelists based on their customer characteristics, similar to Prospect Awareness Scale. To be an Earlyvangelist, a customer has to:
- have a problem your product wants to solve
- understand that they have that problem
- have been actively trying to find a solution and has a timetable to find it
- experiences enough pain with the problem that they tried to create their own interim solution
- has a committed budget to solve the problem, or can quickly acquire the budget for that.
Blank suggests that characterising customers pain on this scale is “critical part of Customer Discovery”, and that earlyvangelist customers can only be found in parts 4 and 5 of the scale. Those are people who already have a homegrown solution, and have a budget or can quickly acquire the budget.