The Adjacent User

Bangaly Kaba (EIR @ Reforge, Former Head of Growth at Instagram and Instacart) helped Instagram grow from 400M to over 1B+ users. One of the core concepts he has taught at Reforge that helped them grow to that level, is The Adjacent User Theory.

"The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and have possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them." 

The Adjacent User is critical for three reasons:

1. Solving for the Adjacent User helps you capture the full potential of your current product-market fit.

2. The impact solving for the Adjacent User compounds over time.

3. The Adjacent User focuses product efforts in a different way than what other core product efforts are typically focused on.

You solve for the Adjacent User by:

1. Know who is successful today and why. This gives you the attributes that you can tweak to define your adjacent user.

2. Define who the adjacent user might be based on bottoms up data analysis.

3. Figure out why they are the adjacent user. In other words, why are they struggling? To do this there are four techniques Bangaly recommends:

   1. Be the adjacent user by simulating their environment.

   2. Watch the adjacent user through research studies.

   3. Talk to the adjacent user through customer discovery.

   4. Visit the adjacent user to watch them in their actual environment.

Most importanly, you need to choose which Adjacent User to solve for. Sequencing is important. There are a few important points:

1. The Adjacent User should only be different on one or two attributes. "Let's say you have 5 different vectors you can expand on. If your adjacent user definition is different on all 5 of those vectors, or even the majority, choosing that segment is a bad choice. That is like trying to hit a home run on every swing."

2. Make sure the Adjacent User aligns with the strategic direction of the company. Just because they exist, doesn't mean you should solve for them.

3. Solve in-house problems first. "These are users that are already showing up in your funnel and product vs brand new users who aren't there yet. Those that are already showing up are displaying intent, but having trouble finishing."

4. Look at the growth trajectory of the segment. Fareed Mosavat (EIR @ Reforge, Former Slack) - "At Slack, we found that both users in France and India had far worse monetization. A lot of teams would have probably chosen to solve for French users since they are a higher income audience. But users in France weren't growing and we didn't have a clear hypothesis of why they weren't monetizing. On the other hand, India was growing way faster and had a clear hypothesis as to why they weren't paying. When looking at it on a slightly longer term horizon, solving for users in India was clearly the higher ROI opportunity."

Related: Defining Target Audiences, Product Market Fit Expansion