Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

I finished reading Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore. I started reading this book before my Bangladesh trip in February and continued reading during my Kenya trip last month. This is a very useful but hard read. As I am working on a bay area startup, it is very relevant for me.

The author Geoffrey specializes on market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. I read his other book Zone To Win but this book is his most popular one where he talks about how technology startups can successfully move from early market to mainstream market. According to him, the consumers of technology products fall under five major categories — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards; first two of whom are found in early market and the rest in mainstream market. The author suggests that there is a big gap i.e. chasm between this early market and the mainstream market that companies need to be very determined to cross following the below recommendations.

1) Understand the technology adoption life cycle — the diagram below shows how over time a company needs to move winning over innovators and early adopters to early and late majority, late majority consumers.

2) Define your target market — focus on a niche market to cross the chasm i.e. market segmentation, dominate and own that segment of the market. big fish, small pond

3) Provide a whole product — find ways to deliver the complete solution, move from product based to market based value, use partnerships

4) Know your competition — compare and contrast

Originally published at http://ashikuzzaman.com on August 12, 2022.