By Matt Lhoumeau, CEO of Concord. Back in 2014, when we launched Concord, I made what seemed like an obvious decision: let people edit their contracts online, directly in our platform, just like they would in Google Docs. No more downloading Word documents, making changes, saving new versions, and emailing them back and forth. It was the future, right?
Wrong. Well, not wrong exactly—just five years too early.
This experience taught me one of the most painful lessons in entrepreneurship: being right about where the market is going doesn’t matter if you get there before your customers are ready to follow.
The Curse of the Visionary
When you’re building a startup, particularly within the tech space, there’s monstrous weight to be imaginative. VCs need to see the “another enormous thing.”The tech press celebrates companies that are “disrupting” industries. And as founders, we often fall in love with elegant technical solutions to messy human problems.
But here’s what I’ve learned after 10 a long time of building Harmony: the foremost innovative solution isn’t continuously the leading solution—at slightest not appropriate presently. In some cases, you wish to meet your clients where they are, not where you think they ought to be.
In our case, we spent the first few years trying to convince lawyers and business professionals to abandon their beloved Word documents. We built beautiful features that would make any software engineer weep with joy.
And our customers? They just wanted to keep using Word.
The Technology Adoption Curve is Real (And Brutal)
On the off chance that you’ve examined Everett Rogers’ innovation appropriation lifecycle, you know almost trailblazers (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early larger part (34%), late lion’s share (34%), and slow pokes (16%). What they do not tell you in commerce school is how horrendously moderate the move between these bunches can be.
We were building for the innovators—that tiny 2.5% who get excited about any new way of doing things. But to build a sustainable business, especially in the SMB and mid-market space, you need the early majority. And the early majority doesn’t adopt new behaviors just because they’re technically superior. They require verification, social approval, and most imperatively, they ought to see that the hazard of alter is lower than the chance of remaining the same.
With our contract administration computer program, we were inquiring individuals to alter a principal workflow they’d been utilizing for decades. That’s not a small ask.
The Hidden Costs of Being Too Early
Being ahead of the market isn’t just frustrating—it’s expensive. Every month you spend trying to change entrenched behaviors is a month of:
- Higher customer acquisition costs: You’re not just selling a product; you’re selling a new way of working
- Longer sales cycles: Each prospect needs extensive education before they even understand why they need your solution
- Lower conversion rates: Even interested prospects often conclude that the change isn’t worth the risk
- Increased churn: Early adopters who do convert may leave when they realize their colleagues and partners aren’t ready to change
We burned through significant resources trying to push the market forward faster than it wanted to move. Looking back, I sometimes wonder what we could have built with that time and money if we’d been more pragmatic from the start.
The Pivot That Saved Us
The turning point came when we finally accepted reality and added robust Word integration to our platform. Rather than constraining clients to forsake their commonplace apparatuses, we let them keep working in Word whereas continuously presenting them to the benefits of online collaboration.
It felt like a defeat at the time. We were compromising our vision. But that “compromise” opened the floodgates. Suddenly, law firms and businesses that had been hesitant started signing up in droves. We gave them a bridge from their current reality to our vision of the future.
This is when I learned an important lesson: Incremental innovation beats radical innovation almost every time. Not because radical innovation isn’t valuable, but because humans—especially in business contexts—change slowly.
Finding Your Innovation Sweet Spot
So how do you avoid the innovation timing trap? Here’s what I’ve learned:
1. Test the Market’s Readiness, Not Just the Product-Market Fit
Before you build, have at least 50 conversations with potential customers who aren’t your friends. But don’t just ask if they’d use your innovative solution. Ask about their current workflows, their pain points, and most importantly, what would have to happen for them to change their current process.
If the answer is “nothing short of a miracle,” you might be too early.
2. Look for Behavioral Bridges
Instead of asking customers to make a giant leap, can you build a bridge? For us, it was Word integration. For you, it might be:
- Importing data from their current tools
- Offering a hybrid approach that works with existing workflows
- Creating a transition period where both old and new methods work
3. Follow the Pain, Not the Potential
Yes, your innovative solution might save customers 10 hours a week in five years. But if their current pain is only costing them 30 minutes a week, they won’t make the switch. Focus on solving the problems that keep your customers up at night today, not the problems they don’t know they’ll have tomorrow.
4. Build for the Early Majority, Not the Innovators
This was our biggest mistake. Innovators will try anything once, but they won’t sustain your business. The early majority—that crucial 34%—needs to see that your solution is proven, stable, and doesn’t require them to be pioneers.
When designing your contract lifecycle management software or any B2B solution, ask yourself: “Would someone who’s been doing their job successfully for 10 years see this as an improvement or a disruption?”
The Long Game of Innovation
Today, almost everything we envisioned in 2014 has come to pass. The majority of our customers now prefer online editing to Word documents. Real-time collaboration on contracts is standard. The market caught up to our vision—it just took five years longer than we expected.
But here’s the thing: we only survived to see this day because we learned to balance innovation with pragmatism. We met our customers where they were while slowly guiding them toward where we knew they’d eventually want to be.
If you’re building something innovative, remember this: being right about the future is worthless if you run out of money before the future arrives. Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do is recognize when the market isn’t ready for your innovation—and adapt accordingly.
The goal isn’t to be first. It’s to be there when the market is ready. And sometimes, that means being patient enough to build bridges instead of trying to make everyone jump.
Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.
