Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

"This book, and there’s a sequel called Into the Tornado , are the operating manual for how to introduce a product into a market. He wrote this book in the 1990s, before the internet bubble. The examples are products like hard drives, so not super applicable today, but the book still is. He says that we traditionally have thought of product adoption as a bell curve; there are bleeding-edge adopters at the edge, then there are pragmatists who wait till everyone else does it, and then there are late adopters. You start at one side and gradually build your way up the curve. The hypothesis of this book is that this is not true. There are bleeding-edge people who will try something brand new, but then there’s a chasm: a gap between these buyers and the next set of early adopters. This chasm, where you can’t find anybody to buy your product, is dangerous for many reasons. Does it mean your market is too small? Do you have the wrong product? Moore says the key is to understand why these buyers are so different from each other and what you have to do to get across the chasm to the early adopters. Where Ben’s book talks about the emotional journey of getting through the chasm, Crossing the Chasm is about strategies to identify and understand different types of customers and how they think about and buy products. Into the Tornado says, ‘Then what? How do you get from early adopters up and over that curve to all the money?’—because you don’t really make money until then. I walked around at AppNexus for years with Into the Tornado in my backpack. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t recommend Into the Tornado because I never finished. I’d open it and go, ‘Oh, that’s such a good idea, I have to go do that!’ and put it back into my backpack. I think I’m still on chapter eight. Crossing The Chasm is one of those books that has really deep insights about how businesses, especially, buy products, the people who work there and what motivates people and companies. It really gets at this idea of strategy. There are so many successful startups, they can’t all be doing something different. There’s a playbook here, deeper ideas that we can pull into any industry. Venture capitalists are great at pattern matching and this playbook is a core part of it: ‘We can see the signs, we can feel it, we can think about how much capital we need, we can think about the talent.’ There are so many interesting books about the early startup and how to get through that early adopter phase. Another book I thought about including was The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which is another framework for this. It talks about customer development as this idea of, ‘how do you find the customer?’ You don’t build a product and then look for customers, you find the customer and build them the product. In general, I’m very sceptical of business books. With a lot of them, there is one idea in the book. One of my favourites is called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. I’ve never opened it, but I feel the title says it all. The basic idea of the book is that all the things that made you successful to get to the point where you are, you will have to relearn and do something different. If you were super scrappy and got your hands into every line of code, that won’t work if you’re running a 300-person company. It’s a very meditative, Buddhist idea, treating every step as brand new. Walk in with a beginner’s mind. (I assume that’s what it says, because I haven’t read it). For me, there are a few benefits of business books. One is a common language with a team around how to talk about things. For example, Ben has an idea of a wartime CEO and a peacetime CEO. That’s a really important concept. What does it mean to be at war? It means only the most important thing matters. We’re not going to worry about developing teams and all the cultural things: we have a crisis and we have to fight it. But in peacetime, we should be thinking about how to build the foundations, the culture, the process, and think about values. It’s a different way of being, a different attitude. That’s powerful not just as a lesson for a CEO but as a way to talk to a management team. “Guys, gals, we’re transitioning! We were in this wonderful place where we were just able to build, but now…WE’RE GOING TO WAR!” It’s a very violent metaphor he uses, but I think it’s valuable. For Crossing the Chasm , at my current company Scope3, we sold three deals in rapid succession just three months after starting the company. We were so excited… and then we didn’t sell anything for three months. We were kind of freaking out! ‘What are we doing wrong? Why can’t we find anyone to buy our product?’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I realized that we were in the chasm. We found the companies that believed in us and our vision, and they basically bought vapour. They were validating that we were building the right thing, and they gave us the feedback and the confidence to get through to the next set of customers. But most people aren’t going to buy vapour. Those first customers are so valuable to any company, and they got us through, but knowing there is a chasm lets you ask, ‘Why is no one buying our vapourware?’ Because no one’s crazy enough, except those first awesome believers. I’m sure Gurman (thank you!) will read this and think, ‘What? I bought vapour?’ That, to me, is the power of these books. They help the people who are in and around the company, whether an investor or a board member or a potential employee, ask the right questions about the traction a company is getting. They help the team to have a shared framework to understand that early adopters are going to want some proof and see some real data and product. You’ve seen the TED talk of the guy dancing by himself, but when the second person joins the dance, that makes it a dance . That’s the early adopter. As soon as a few people join, everybody joins. Crossing the Chasm helps entrepreneurs contextualize and strategize through a critical time in a company’s lifecycle. It’s required reading for anybody starting a tech company."