Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey A. Moore · 1991
Marketing
Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products
Geoffrey Moore identified the critical gap — the chasm — between early adopters who embrace new technology and the mainstream market that follows. Most tech companies die in this chasm. Moore's framework for crossing it, by targeting a specific niche and dominating it before expanding, became the go-to playbook for technology marketing.
Context & Background
Moore built on Everett Rogers's diffusion of innovations theory to explain why promising technologies so often fail to reach the mainstream. The problem isn't the technology — it's the marketing. Early adopters buy for different reasons than the early majority, and the strategies that work with one group actively repel the other.
The chasm lies between early adopters (visionaries who buy unproven products) and the early majority (pragmatists who want proven solutions). Moore's crossing strategy: choose a beachhead segment (a specific niche you can dominate), create the whole product (everything the pragmatist needs, not just the core technology), and use reference-based marketing (pragmatists buy what other pragmatists have validated).
The book has been continuously updated through three editions and remains the standard text on technology marketing. Its vocabulary — chasm, beachhead, bowling alley, tornado — is standard in Silicon Valley. Nearly every tech startup's go-to-market strategy is influenced by Moore's framework.
