1. Crossing the Chasm (Introduction, ch1 & 2)
Geoffrey Moore

2. Geoffrey Moore
“The point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.” (4) 2

3. Geoffrey Moore
“The gap between these two markets, heretofore ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long term high-tech marketing plan. A successful crossing is how high-tech fortunes are made; failure in the attempt is how they are lost.” (4-5) 3

4. Geoffrey Moore
“Every truly innovative high-tech product starts out as a fad—something with no known market value or purpose but with ‘great properties’ that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an ‘in crowd.’ That’s the early market. Then comes a period during which the rest of the world watches to see if anything can be made of this; that is the chasm. If in fact something does come out of it—if a value proposition is discovered that can predictably be delivered to a targetable set of customers at a reasonable price-then a new mainstream market forms, typically with a rapidity that allows its initial leaders to become very, very successful.” (4-5) 4

5. Geoffrey Moore 5

6. Geoffrey Moore
“As you can see, the components of the life cycle are unchanged, but between any two psychographic groups has been introduced a gap. This symbolizes the dissociation between the two groups—that is, the difficulty any group will have in accepting a new product if it is presented in the same way as it was to the group to its immediate left.” (10) 6

7. Geoffrey Moore
“Let’s begin with the lack of new customers. As opportunities from the early market of visionaries become increasingly saturated (with big-ticket products this can be after as few as 5 to 10 contracts), and with the mainstream market of pragmatists nowhere near the comfort level they need in order to buy, there is simply an insufficient marketplace of available dollars to sustain the firm.
Having flirted with going cash-flow positive (especially during the months following one of the early market big orders), the trend is now reversed, and the enterprise is accelerating into increasingly negative cash flow. Worse still, mainstream competitors, who up to this time had paid no attention to the fledgling entry into their market, now have caught sight of a new target, experienced one or two major losses, and set their sales forces in motion to counterattack.” (47) 7

8. Geoffrey Moore
“To enter the mainstream market is an act of aggression. The companies who have already established relationships with your target customer will resent your intrusion and do everything they can to shut you out. The customers themselves will be suspicious of you as a new and untried player in their marketplace. No one wants your presence. You are an invader.
This is not a time to focus on being nice. As we have already said, the perils of the chasm make this a life-or-death situation for you. You must win entry to the mainstream, despite whatever resistance is posed. So, if we are going to be warlike, we might as well be so explicitly.” (48) 8

9. Geoffrey Moore
“That’s it. That’s the strategy. Replicate D Day, and win entry to the mainstream. Cross the chasm by targeting a very specific niche market where you can dominate from the outset, force your competitors out of that market niche, and then use it as a base for broader operations. Concentrate an overwhelmingly superior force on a highly focused target. It worked in 1944 for the Allies, and it has worked since for any number of high-tech companies.” (49) 9

10. Geoffrey Moore
“The sole goal of the company during this stage of market development must be to secure a beachhead in a mainstream market—that is, to create a pragmatist customer base that is referenceable, people who can, in turn, provide us access to other mainstream prospects. To capture this reference base, we must ensure that our first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives.
To do that, we must ensure that the customer gets not just the product but what we will describe in a later chapter as the whole product—the complete set of products and services needed to achieve the desired result. Whenever anything is left out from this set, the solution is incomplete, the selling promise unfulfilled, and the customer unavailable for referencing.” (50-51) 10

11. Geoffrey Moore
“One of the keys in breaking into a new market is to establish a strong word-of-mouth reputation among buyers. Numerous studies have shown that in the high-tech buying process, word of mouth is the number one source of information buyers reference, both at the beginning of the sales cycle, to establish their ‘long lists,’ and at the end, when they are paring down their short ones.” (51) 11