At WiseWire we were living among visionaries. Ken Lang and I had built machine learning that read the news, learned what you liked and fed you more of it. It could also organize information into a directory. A few people loved it on sight. Most people did not know what to do with it. We needed one pragmatic customer with a painful problem. We found it. Lycos was our beachhead.
The word came from Geoffrey Moore. When we sat with him, his advice was disciplined and specific. Do not try to cross the chasm everywhere at once. Pick one narrow segment of pragmatists with a painful problem. Deliver a whole product, everything that segment needs to succeed. Win it completely. Then use it to knock over the next one.
WiseWire: the pain we filled.
In those years the directory was the preferred way to find things online. Yahoo had built its directory by human brute force, with people sorting sites by hand. It worked, but it did not scale. Lycos had the opposite problem. It was a search engine with no directory, and it did not have the labor to build one by hand. WiseWire could build a directory with software. That was the gap.
We filled it with a usage deal. Lycos put our technology to work inside its own business. The beachhead question and the natural owner question turned out to be the same question. The customer with the most painful problem was the company that needed us most.
A beachhead is a place to land, not a place to live.
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It’s like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
Real, and temporary.
The usage deal became a sale, and WiseWire became part of Lycos. Then the internet grew so fast that no directory, hand built or machine built, could keep up for long. Search won. The beachhead was real, and it was temporary. That is normal. You land so you can move.
When I had no beachhead.
I did not always follow my own lesson. At Internet Venture Works in 1999, our customers were private equity firms. They were visionaries. The people who had to use the businesses we built were ordinary shoppers, and most of them were not ready to buy a heavy bag of dog food from a website. We had enthusiastic customers and no pragmatic beachhead. I had learned Moore’s curve at WiseWire. I should have applied it to myself. Debrief Through the Curve tells the rest.
The beachhead inside a company.
Most of the leaders Dr. Zdenka Cumano and I work with at AI Leader Edge are not short on AI pilots. They are short on adoption. The fix is the same. Pick one workflow, one team, one painful problem. Deliver the whole product there, not just the tool: the data, the training, the rules about what the system may decide, the measurement and a person who owns the result. Win it completely. Then move to the team next door. Paul Graham gives founders the same advice in other words: keep the fire contained until it is really hot.
Choose your beachhead.
- Find the painList the segments of pragmatists you could serve, or the teams inside your company. Circle the one with the most painful problem and the fewest alternatives.
- Write the whole productEverything that segment needs to succeed without calling you, not just your core technology. That list is your work.
- Check who is really buyingIf your buyer is a visionary and your user is a pragmatist, you have not landed yet.
- Ask the owner questionWho in that segment needs you most? It may also be your natural owner.
- Name the next pinWrite the segment that shares the most with your beachhead. That is where you move next.
Quick answers.
What is a beachhead market?
A term from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm: one narrow segment of pragmatic customers with a painful problem, won completely with a whole product before moving to the next segment. Rob Frasca adds that a beachhead is a place to land, not a place to live.
What was WiseWire’s beachhead?
Rob Frasca describes Lycos as WiseWire’s beachhead. Lycos was a search engine with no directory and no labor to build one by hand. WiseWire could build a directory with software, and a usage deal with Lycos generated revenue almost immediately before Lycos acquired the company.