The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers You’ll Ever Know

 

Earlyvangelists are a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup’s product or 

service because they can actually envision its potential to solve a critical and immediate problem—

and they have the budget to purchase it. Unfortunately, most customers don’t fit this profile. Here’s 

an example from the corporate world. 

Imagine a bank with a line around the block on Fridays as customers wait an hour or more to get 

in and cash their paychecks. Now imagine you are one of the founders of a software company whose 

product could help the bank reduce customers’ waiting time to ten minutes. You go into the bank and 

tell the president, “I have a product that can solve your problem.” If his response is “What problem?” 

you have a customer who does not recognize he has a pressing need you can help him with. There is 

no time in the first two years in the life of a startup that he will be a customer, and any feedback 

from him about product needs would be useless. Customers like these are the traditional “late 

adopters” because they have a “latent need.” 

Another response from the bank president could be “Yes, we have a terrible problem. I feel very 

bad about it, and I hand out cups of water to our customers waiting in line on the hottest days of the 

year.” In this case, the bank president is one of those customers who recognize they have a problem 

but haven’t been motivated to do anything more than paper over the symptoms. They may provide 

                                                 

 

 

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 There’s a great body of work on the area of “Lead Users” popularized by Eric Von Hippel of MIT.  Also see Enos 

1962, Freeman 1968, Shaw 1985, Lilen & Morrison 2001. 

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The Four Steps to the Epiphany   

useful feedback about the types of problems they’re experiencing, but more than likely they will not 

be first in line to buy a new product. Since they have an “active need,” you can probably sell to these 

customers later, when you can deliver a “mainstream” product, but not today. 

If it’s a good day, you may run into a bank president who says, “Yes, this is a heck of a problem. 

In fact, we’re losing over $500,000 a year in business. I’ve been looking for a software solution that 

will cut down our check cashing and processing time by 70%. The software has to integrate with our 

bank’s Oracle back end, and it has to cost less than $150,000. And I need it delivered in six months.” 

Now you’re getting warm; this is a customer who has “visualized the solution.” It would be even 

better if the president said, “I haven’t seen a single software package that solves our problem, so I 

wrote a request for our IT department to develop one. They’ve cobbled together a solution, but it 

keeps crashing on my tellers and my CIO is having fits keeping it running.”  

You’re almost there: you’ve found a customer who has such a desperate problem that he has had 

his own homegrown solution built out of piece parts. 

Finally, imagine that the bank president says, “Boy, if we could ever find a vendor who could 

solve this problem, we could spend the $500,000 I’ve budgeted with them.” (Truth be told, no real live 

customer has ever said that. But we can dream, can’t we?) At this point, you have found the ultimate 

customer for a startup selling to corporate customers. While consumer products usually don’t have as 

many zeros in them, earlyvangelist consumers can be found by tracing out the same hierarchy of 

needs. 

Earlyvangelists can be identified by these customer characteristics (see Figure 3.1): 

•  The customer has a problem. 

•  The customer understands he or she has a problem. 

•  The customer is actively searching for a solution and has a timetable for finding it.  

•  The problem is painful enough that the customer has cobbled together an interim solution. 

•  The customer has committed, or can quickly acquire, budget dollars to solve the problem.