Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

So much for the market to the left of the chasm, the early market. To get to the right of the chasm—to cross into the mainstream market—you have to first meet the demands of the pragmatist customers. These customers want the whole product to be readily available from the outset. They like a product such as Microsoft Office because virtually every d

The key point to notice is the transition from product to market, corresponding to crossing the chasm.

The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable. This objective comes before revenues, before profits, before press, even before customer satisfaction.

For all these reasons—for whole product leverage, for word-of-mouth effectiveness, and for perceived market leadership—it is critical that, when crossing the chasm, you focus exclusively on achieving a dominant position in one or two narrowly bounded market segments. If you do not commit fully to this goal, the odds are overwhelmingly against your

The critical attitude to maintain in all four of these challenges is that chasm crossing represents a unique time in your enterprise’s history. It is a far cry both from your past, where selling to visionaries was the key to success, and your future, which will be focused on either niche or mass-market expansion programs. Between these two stages i

We began by isolating a fundamental flaw in the prevailing High-Tech Marketing Model—the notion that rapid mainstream market growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success. By analyzing the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists, we were able to see that a far more normal development would be a chasm period of little