Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (first published 1991) is the playbook for one specific, brutal moment: the gap between the customers who buy you because you're new, and the customers who buy you because you're safe. Almost every promising product that dies, dies in that gap. Here are the principles, in my own words, and why each one matters when you're actually trying to make money.
Moore builds on the adoption lifecycle: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. The two groups that matter most are the early adopters (visionaries, roughly 13.5 percent of the market) and the early majority (pragmatists, roughly 34 percent).
Why it matters: These groups buy for opposite reasons. Visionaries buy a dream — they want an edge and will tolerate a half-built product to get it. Pragmatists buy a proven solution — they want references, completeness, and to not get fired for choosing you. If you sell to a pragmatist using a visionary's pitch, you lose. Same product, different language, different proof.
The chasm sits between early adopters and the early majority. The trap: each group only trusts references from inside its own group. Pragmatists don't care that visionaries love you — visionaries are exactly the people they think are reckless. So your early traction generates zero trust with the people who hold the real money.
Why it matters: You can have glowing early customers, real revenue, and press, and still stall. Founders misread this stall as "we need more features" or "more marketing spend." It's neither. You haven't earned credibility with the next group on their terms. Recognizing the chasm for what it is stops you from burning cash on the wrong fix.
Moore's core move, framed as a D-Day landing: don't attack the whole market. Pick one narrow, well-defined segment and dominate it completely — become the obvious, default, only-sane choice for that one type of customer. A small pond you own beats a big ocean where you're a rounding error.
Why it matters: Pragmatists buy what their peers buy. If you're 80 percent of the use in one tight niche, every prospect in that niche hears about you from someone exactly like them. Concentration manufactures the word-of-mouth credibility you can't buy. Spreading thin across many segments produces no reference base anywhere, and you stay stuck.
Visionaries will assemble the missing pieces themselves — integrations, support, training, onboarding. Pragmatists won't. They want the complete, end-to-end thing that solves the problem out of the box, with the surrounding ecosystem already in place.
Why it matters: The gap between "your technology" and "a solution someone can actually deploy without a project plan" is where deals die in the mainstream. Picking a narrow beachhead is what makes a whole product affordable to build — you only have to complete the solution for one use case, not all of them.
Once you own the first niche (the head pin), use that win as leverage into the next adjacent segment, then the next — each victory funding and de-risking the one after it, until you build the momentum to take the broad market. You don't leap the chasm; you bowl across it, one pin at a time.
Why it matters: It reframes "we're stuck in a small niche" as "we have a base camp." Domination compounds. Trying to skip straight to mass market is the impatience that strands most products in the chasm forever.
Moore's later work names distinct stages — early market, bowling alley, tornado (mainstream hypergrowth), main street (maturity). What works in one stage actively hurts in another. The scrappy visionary-selling that won the early market is the wrong motion for the pragmatist mainstream.
Why it matters: Most go-to-market failures are timing failures — running last quarter's winning playbook into a market that has moved on. Knowing which stage you're in tells you which behaviors to keep and which to kill.
Early traction lies. The customers who first love you are not evidence that the mainstream will. To cross over, pick one niche you can utterly dominate, ship the complete solution for it, earn references from people the next buyers actually trust, and expand pin by pin. Dominate a small thing before you reach for a big one.
"Crossing the Chasm" framework attributed to Geoffrey A. Moore. Concepts summarized here in my own words; read the book for the full treatment.