When WiseWire became part of Lycos, the portal race was at full speed. Whatever one portal launched, the others had to match within weeks. A feature that took a quarter to ship arrived after the market had already decided. I did not need a book to tell me I was in a tornado. I was standing in one.
Geoffrey Moore gave that moment its name in Inside the Tornado. Pragmatists buy pin by pin. Then the whole market tips at once. His warning was that the rules reverse. Before the tornado, you win by building exactly what a few customers need. Inside it, that instinct will kill you. Stop tailoring and start shipping. The company that ships the most becomes the standard.
Lycos: speed was the operating rule.
I had brought the phrase “speed is life” out of naval aviation. Inside Lycos it became the operating rule. We did not have time to build the perfect version of anything. We built the good version, shipped it, watched what happened and shipped again. Jim Gilliam built an MP3 search engine in one weekend. I tell that story in The MP3 Weekend.
We also bought our way through, because building everything was too slow. WiseWire was one of those acquisitions. Later, Sangam Pant, who ran operations, and I did a deal with Fast Search & Transfer to strengthen our search. We grew the unit’s revenue from $75 million to $135 million.
Speed keeps you in the tornado. Speed alone does not make you the winner.
The winning strategy does not just change as we move from stage to stage, it actually reverses the prior strategy.
Where I got it wrong.
Speed kept us in the tornado. It did not make us the winner. A tornado crowns one leader, the company whose product becomes the standard. In the portal race, that was Yahoo for a while. Then search changed the game, and a company that did not exist when the race began took the crown. Running fast inside someone else’s tornado is different from setting the standard of your own.
Lycos Clubs taught me the same lesson in miniature. We launched first, to an audience we already had, and the product was very complicated. Yahoo Clubs came about six months later, did less and took off like wildfire. The standard went to the product a pragmatist could understand in one look.
Internet Venture Works taught me the opposite mistake. In 1999 the work felt like riding a rising tide, and we staffed up quickly. But the shoppers we depended on were pragmatists, not yet ready to buy a heavy bag of dog food from a website. The market was hot. The tornado had not arrived. Tornado rules only pay once the pins have fallen.
Habits inside the tornado.
- Check the pins firstBefore you switch to tornado rules, confirm that pragmatists are buying, not only visionaries.
- Ship the good versionThe perfect version arrives after the market has moved.
- Remove friction from the channelAt Lycos, distribution deals mattered as much as features.
- Protect the team’s orientationBrief before the work and debrief after it, so the team moves fast without moving blind.
- Name whose tornado it isSetting the standard, or running fast inside someone else’s? Both are worth doing. Know which.
Quick answers.
What is the tornado in Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption life cycle?
In Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore describes the period after a market crosses the chasm when pragmatists stop buying segment by segment and the whole market tips at once. Demand outruns supply, and the company that ships the most tends to become the standard.
How should a company behave inside a tornado market?
Rob Frasca draws on his years running a Lycos unit during the portal race: ship the good version, remove friction from the channel and protect the team’s orientation. He adds two cautions from his own losses. Speed keeps you in the tornado but does not make you the winner, and tornado rules only pay once pragmatists are actually buying.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter VII, Execution Under Fire.
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Inside the Tornado (HarperBusiness, 1995). Quoted wording checked against Goodreads. Source