In 1996 I was a founder trying to figure out why customers loved my product and still would not buy it.
WiseWire had a problem, and it was not the technology. Ken Lang and I were building machine learning, intelligent agents and collaborative filtering years before most people had heard those words. The system worked. It also needed serious computing horsepower, and it asked customers to trust software to decide what they should read. A few people loved it on sight. Most people did not know what to do with it.
When Geoffrey Moore’s book became the book everyone in technology was reading, they brought Moore himself in to teach their companies. We held sessions in Pittsburgh. Then we sat with the author and asked him where we stood.
I remember the argument more than the slides. Moore drew the curve and asked us where we stood, and why. He did not accept the first answer. Half the room said we were still in the innovator phase. The technology was too powerful, too new and too much of a black box for anyone but the true believers. The other half said we had moved up to early adopters.
Nobody in the room claimed we were crossing the chasm. We were not.
Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is difficult.
From where we stand to how we cross.
So the second half of our sessions was about how to cross. Which segment of pragmatists had a problem painful enough to take a chance on a black box? We already had a strong sense of who our natural owners were. The beachhead question and the natural owner question turned out to be the same question.
The answer was Lycos. It was a search engine with no directory and no labor to build one by hand. WiseWire could build a directory with software. That usage deal later became the sale of WiseWire to Lycos.
What I carried out of the room.
That session changed how I think. I have used the curve on every company I have built or backed since. But carrying a tool is not the same as using it. Years later I debriefed two of my losses, Internet Venture Works and Lycos Clubs, and found the curve had been in my hands the whole time. I had learned it at WiseWire. I should have applied it to myself.
That is the lesson of the room. Ask where you stand, and do not accept the first answer. Then ask it of yourself.
Ask where you stand.
- Draw the curveInnovators to laggards, with the chasm in between.
- Mark where your buyers sitThen ask why. Do not accept the first answer.
- Mark who you depend onIf they sit on the far side of the chasm from your buyers, you have found a gap.
- Name the beachheadOne segment of pragmatists with a problem painful enough to take a chance on you. Then ask who would want to own it.
Quick answers.
How did Rob Frasca learn the adoption curve?
In 1996 his investors brought Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, to teach their portfolio companies in sessions in Pittsburgh. Rob Frasca, then building WiseWire, has used the curve on every company he has built or backed since.
Was WiseWire crossing the chasm in 1996?
No. Rob Frasca recalls that half the room placed WiseWire with innovators and half with early adopters. Nobody claimed it was crossing the chasm. The work became finding a beachhead, which turned out to be Lycos, the company that later bought WiseWire.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter VI, Seeing the Shift.
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition (Free Press, 2003), chapter 1, opening line. Wording checked against the Library of Congress sample text of chapter 1 (catdir.loc.gov). Source