In 1995 I showed the same product to two of the most powerful firms in finance. At Merrill Lynch, the chief executive slapped his hand on the table and told me nobody would ever trade stocks on the internet. Two weeks later, at Charles Schwab, the room leaned in and signed a contract. Same pitch. Same product. One saw a fad. The other saw the future.
The arc tells you where an industry stands. It does not tell you who is buying. For that I use a second lens, the adoption curve. Geoffrey Moore wrote it down for technology, building on the sociologist Everett Rogers. Innovators come first. Then early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and finally the laggards.
The crack in the curve.
Moore’s insight was that the curve has a crack in it. Between the early adopters and the early majority sits the chasm. Early adopters are visionaries. They tolerate rough edges. They want to be first. The early majority are pragmatists. They buy only what is proven, complete and already in use by people like them. They want to be safe. The things that win visionaries are exactly the things that frighten pragmatists.
A company can be celebrated by early adopters and still die, because it never learned to sell to the people who make up most of the market.
A successful crossing is how high-tech fortunes are made; failure in the attempt is how they are lost.
Moore’s way across is specific. Pick one narrow segment of pragmatists with a painful problem, the beachhead. Win it completely and knock over the next pin. Enough pins tip the market into a tornado, then Main Street.
I watched a population walk across it.
NETworth showed me the left side of the curve before I had a name for it. In 1994 our users were mostly other students and a handful of curious early adopters. When we showed it to people who understood markets, some dismissed it as a toy. Others went quiet. I learned to watch for the quiet ones. When a smart person goes quiet in front of something new, they are reorienting.
Then the rest of the curve filled in. People told me back then they would never put their account information on the internet. Today nearly everyone does. We are deep in the late majority now. I watched a whole population walk across that curve in a single career.
Where I got it wrong.
I learned this curve at WiseWire and still lost a product to it, because I did not apply it to myself. At Lycos we built Lycos Clubs for innovators. Every option. Every feature. Yahoo Clubs came six months later and did less. A pragmatist could understand it in one look. Moore had a name for what Yahoo shipped: the whole product. Simplicity was not a style choice. It was what crossing the chasm required.
Read your curve.
- Place your buyersDraw the curve. Mark where your actual buyers sit.
- Mark who you depend onMark the people you ultimately depend on. If the two marks sit on opposite sides of the chasm, you have found a gap.
- Name the beachheadOne narrow segment of pragmatists with a painful problem.
- Write the whole productList everything that segment needs to succeed without calling you.
- Read both clocksWhere is this industry on the arc? Where is this customer on the curve?
Quick answers.
What is the chasm in the technology adoption curve?
Geoffrey Moore’s name for the gap between early adopters, who are visionaries, and the early majority, who are pragmatists. Rob Frasca notes that a company can be celebrated by early adopters and still die on the wrong side of it.
Why do some customers adopt a new technology and others refuse it?
They sit at different points on the adoption curve. Rob Frasca saw it in 1995, when Merrill Lynch called the internet a fad and Charles Schwab signed on for the same product two weeks later.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter VI, Seeing the Shift.
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (HarperBusiness, 1991; 3rd edition, 2014), Part I. Quote wording checked against Graham Mann’s book notes (grahammann.net). Source
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition (Free Press, 2003). Source