Diffusion of Innovations (Everett Rogers, 1962)

An innovation spreads through a population along an S-curve, and the population splits into five adopter classes by how early they move.

The classes are a normal curve of adoption-time sliced at standard deviations from the mean t̄: innovators (before t̄ − 2σ, ~2.5%), early adopters (t̄ − 2σ to t̄ − σ, ~13.5%), early majority (t̄ − σ to t̄, ~34%), late majority (t̄ to t̄ + σ, ~34%), laggards (~16%). Adoption rate rises with five perceived attributes: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity (inverse), trialability, observability.

Transfer: Your reader base is never uniform — the same piece lands differently by class. Innovators/early adopters reward novelty and reward being early; the majority needs social proof that others already read/used it (observability), which is why visible engagement counts feed the majority even when the content is unchanged. The chasm between early adopters and early majority means a post that thrills the fringe can stall before the 34% bulk — cross it by dropping perceived complexity (make the takeaway trivially applicable) and raising trialability (a copy-paste snippet, a one-line prompt).

Kin: bass-diffusion-model · tipping-point-critical-mass · growth-stages · models