Sublime

Crossing The Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore, HarperCollins, 1991.

Companies see products all around them made by other companies and decide to copy or acquire them. But in doing so, companies often end up trying to create many products for many customers—and lose focus on the job that brought them success in the first place.7 Worse, trying to do many jobs for many customers can confuse customers so they hire the

Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

At the end of the day, what matters is not what happens during the recurrent bubbles, but what comes next. The price to pay for widespread instability is that some investors regularly lose money because they didn’t pick the winner, whereas many employees eventually lose their jobs because they happened to work for the losers. In this context, the s

THE DISTRIBUTION QUESTION

One approach is to solve the specific problem or fill the specific need of an individual customer—not an individual customer group, but a single, solitary individual customer. The idea here is the same as above: if you invent a solution to the problem of a single customer, chances are there are other potential customers hidden in the woodwork that

As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it: [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral

According to the late Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who had been named the world’s top management thinker, people don’t really buy products or services. Rather, they “hire” them to do a job.