What Does It Mean To “Cross The Chasm”?

The startup world is full of phrases and terms that seem impossible to keep up with. Some of which are useful to know and understand, and others kind of end up being unnecessary jargon that’s confusing and overly verbose. From “runway” and “burn rate” to “blitzscaling”.

And then there’s “crossing the chasm”.

The phrase comes from Geoffrey Moore’s influential 1991 book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers”. Moore took the idea of a technology adoption lifecycle and focused on a particularly difficult point in it. That is, the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market.

Since then, “crossing the chasm” has become part of the everyday vocabulary of founders, investors, marketers and technology companies. Now, it’s shorthand for one of the biggest challenges a new product can face: that is, you’ve proved that people will buy it, but can you convince everyone else?

What Is “The Chasm”?

When a new technology or product appears, it doesn’t necessarily move neatly from being unknown to simply and automatically becoming mainstream. In fact, different groups of customers adopt new technology for very different reasons.

Moore’s model divides the technology adoption lifecycle into five broad groups:

• Innovators: People who actively want to try new technology and are comfortable with experimentation.
• Early adopters: Often visionaries who are willing to take a risk because they believe the technology could give them an advantage.
• Early majority: The pragmatists. They want evidence, reliability and a clear reason to buy.
• Late majority: More cautious customers who generally adopt once something has become established and widespread.
• Laggards: The last to adopt, often because their existing way of doing things has become impossible or obsolete.

The problem he’s identifying sits between the second and third groups. And that, my friends, is the chasm.

Early adopters and the early majority might both be buying the same product, but they’re not necessarily buying it for the same reason. An early adopter, on the one hand, might look at a new AI tool and think, “This could completely change the way we work!”

A mainstream buyer, however, might look at the exact same tool and think, “Who else is using it? Does it actually work? What happens if something goes wrong? How much will this cost us?”

It’s the same product, the same tool, but quite a different response. So, why exactly does this happen and why is crossing the chasm so difficult?

The slightly cruel thing about the chasm is that getting your first customers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on your way to getting your next thousand. In fact, those first customers can sometimes give you a false sense of security, regardless of how great it is to get them onboard in the first place.

Early adopters are, by definition, more comfortable with uncertainty. They may be happy to use a product that’s still being refined, put up with a few bugs and provide feedback because they’re excited about what the technology could become.

But the mainstream market is different, because it wants proof. The mainstream market requires case studies and references. It wants a product that works reliably, and it wants to know that other businesses like theirs are already using it. It may involve several people in the purchasing decision rather than just one enthusiastic person saying, “This is brilliant, let’s buy it.”

Basically, the sales pitch that worked beautifully on the first group may suddenly stop working, and that’s often where people get stuck and growth may stall.

Some Startups Hit a Wall

Imagine for a moment that a startup launches a new piece of enterprise software. A handful of technology enthusiasts love it and a few ambitious and excited companies sign up. The founders have some impressive early customers and investors are happy. Sounds great!

But then something strange happens. Growth starts to slow down. The company keeps marketing, and it keeps adding features and speaking to potential customers, but for some reason, the next group of buyers just doens’t seem nearly as enthusiastic as the first.

And this is “the chasm”.

It’s not necessarily that the product is bad or that the company’s done something wrong. It may simply be that the company has reached a group of customers with completely different expectations.

Now, the mistake being made here is assuming that because one group bought the product, the next group will too. The reality is that actually, it probably won’t.

So, How Do You Cross the Chasm?

This is where Moore’s framework becomes more practical than a colourful metaphor, because the answer isn’t just “market the product harder”.

One of the central ideas Moore gives us is that of focus. Rather than trying to convince the entire mainstream market all at once, a company should identify a specific segment of customers with a particular problem and concentrate its resources on winning that group first. Focus on one group and cater to what they want and need. In some circles, this would be called establishing a “beachhead” market.

It’s about straying away from the idea of, “Everyone needs our product” and towards “This particular group of people desperately need our product, and here’s exactly why”. Quality over quantity, in a way.

Indeed, a mainstream customer isn’t necessarily interested in the fact that your technology is revolutionary. All they really care about and want to know is whether it solves their problem. And this is also where the idea of the “whole product” becomes important. Crossing the chasm isn’t just about having an impressive core technology. Mainstream customers may need support, integrations, services, reliability and other elements around that technology before they feel comfortable buying it. After all, they’re buying the whole idea and the entire package, not just one small part of it, and if you don’t have all of that well thought out and organised, you’re going to struggle to convince them.

The technology might be the exciting bit for the startups, founders and those involved in building it, but the “boring” bit, so to speak, may be what actually gets the deal signed.

What Happens After You’ve Crossed the Chasm? 

Well, ideally, growth becomes much easier. Once a company has established itself with a particular mainstream segment, it can use those customers, references and experience as a foundation for moving into adjacent markets.

Some people describe this as using Moore’s “bowling pin” strategy. That is, knock down one clearly defined market segment, then move on to the next rather than trying to knock down the entire market in one go. One at a time, slowly but surely, focused and precise.

It’s a far more disciplined approach to growth, and it also acknowledges the fact that being popular among a small group of people isn’t the same as being mainstream.

Not Everyone Needs To Cross the Chasm

The framework of “the chasm” was designed around high-tech products and, more specifically, innovations that represent a significant change in behaviour or require customers to learn something new. It doesn’t necessarily apply to every single new product or incremental improvement. What we’re saying is, a new version of an existing product doesn’t automatically have a giant chasm waiting for it, nor is every person permanently an “early adopter” or a “laggard”. Someone might happily be an early adopter when it comes to electric vehicles but be extremely cautious about adopting a new financial product, for example. Adoption is very much context-dependent.

The other important thing is that there’s a big difference between a technology itself and a particular application of that technology. Saying that “AI has crossed the chasm”, for example, is arguably too broad. Different AI applications can have completely different adoption patterns and face very different barriers, so we need to be a little more specific.

Ultimately, “crossing the chasm” is about recognising that the people who love new things are not necessarily the same people who make markets mainstream. And so the difficulty businesses face is not just to build something that people want, but to figure out what the next group of people needs to see before they’re prepared to want it too.