Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore · 1991
Crossing the Chasm (1991) is a book by Geoffrey Moore on Marketing & Tech Adoption. Geoffrey Moore's classic reveals why most promising tech products die in the gap between enthusiastic early adopters and the cautious mainstream, and gives you a battle-tested playbook for crossing that chasm to win the much larger market.
The canonical guide to taking disruptive products from early adopters to the mainstream market.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Crossing the Chasm pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.
- Plot your customers on the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards) and recognize that the dangerous gap is the chasm between visionaries and pragmatists.
- Visionaries buy dreams and want to be first; pragmatists buy proven productivity and want references from people like them. Selling to one with the playbook for the other is why products stall.
- Cross the chasm like D-Day: concentrate all your force on one narrow beachhead niche instead of spreading thin across many segments. Total focus beats broad ambition.
The other 4 — and the full 9-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 9 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Chasm Nobody Warns You About
- The Technology Adoption Life Cycle
- Visionaries vs. Pragmatists: Why They Can't Be Sold the Same Way
- D-Day Strategy: Target a Single Beachhead
- Target the Point of Attack: Choosing Your Niche
- Assemble the Invasion Force: The Whole Product
- Define the Battle: Positioning and Competition
- Launch the Invasion: Distribution and Pricing
Finish Crossing the Chasm tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 9 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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