Chasm

Products stalling after a strong start is not new. What was missing was a way to describe it. Early users pile in, word spreads, and then new signups simply stop. Teams usually blamed one of two things: not enough marketing, or a product that was not finished yet.

So they did more of what had worked. Double the ad budget, ship ten more features. The numbers stayed flat. Twice the spend brought in twice the visitors, but the share of them who stuck around fell by more than half, so the money went out and nothing came back. Planning meetings kept stalling at the same point. Someone would say this exact approach worked last year, someone else would say last year was different, and neither side could name what had actually changed.

In 1991 Geoffrey Moore reframed the stall as a shift in the market rather than a failure of execution or budget. The people who bought the product early and the people who have to buy it next are different kinds of buyers. The first group treats being ahead of everyone else as the payoff, so a half-finished product is an acceptable trade. The second group is trying not to get burned, so it looks for evidence that somebody else already took the risk. An argument that wins over one group reads as a warning sign to the other. "Nobody is doing it this way yet" is the appeal for one and the disqualifier for the other. That is why the same pitch, delivered the same way, closes one deal and gets no reply on the next.

The five-block split itself comes from earlier research on how a new technology spreads through a population. What Moore added was the observation that the blocks do not hand off to each other smoothly.

The gap between those two groups is the chasm. The word comes from geology, where it describes a deep split in the ground. The image fits because the far side is clearly visible and there is still no path across. Testimonials collected on the near side do not count as evidence on the far side, so growth does not taper off gently — it cuts out in a single quarter. The gap sits exactly where the product life cycle moves from introduction into growth.

Six terms sit under the chasm in two groups. One splits the market into the people who adopt at different moments. The other covers the strategy for actually getting across.

Adopter groups divide the same market into five blocks by when they take a product on. Nobody stays in one block permanently. A person who is first in line for a new developer tool is last in line when the accounting system changes. The position comes from what someone has at stake with that particular product, not from personality.

1. Innovators adopt because a thing is new, full stop. They are two or three percent of a market and they find breakage interesting. The revenue is irrelevant, but they are the first signal that the product works at all.
2. Early adopters want a concrete advantage from moving before everyone else. A product that is half built is fine with them as long as it solves their problem. Nearly all early revenue and early testimonials come from this block.
3. The early majority follows once something is proven. They are roughly a third of the market and they ask for evidence that a company like theirs is already running on it. Revenue only gets large here, so whether a product becomes a business is decided by whether it reaches this block.
4. The late majority moves only after something has become the default. They decide when not switching starts costing them, and they pick whatever is cheap and low-effort.
5. Laggards resist to the end. Chasing them burns budget, so most plans leave them out.

What the early majority asks for is completeness, not a longer feature list. Beyond the product being good, the move has to be safe: a way to bring existing work across, someone to call when it breaks, and an answer for whatever the company's own rules require. All of it has to be in place before a purchase gets approved. Early adopters fill those gaps themselves — they write their own migration script and ask an engineer when documentation is missing. The early majority has no reason to do that work, because the tool they already have is getting the job done.

The split falls between blocks 2 and 3. Going from 1 to 2 is easy because both groups are hunting the same kind of advantage, so the same pitch carries over. Going from 2 to 3 flips the basis of the decision. Early adopters buy to be different from everyone else; the early majority buys to be the same as everyone else. The line that worked best on the near side becomes the reason to pass on the far side. Push the same product with the same message through the same sales motion and the count of people crossing over drops to nearly zero.

Moore saw a crack between every neighbouring pair, not only this one. Between innovators and early adopters sits the question of whether the advantage can be shown in numbers. Between the early majority and the late majority sits the question of how much handling the thing takes. Those cracks close with a change of pitch. The one between blocks 2 and 3 needs the sales motion and the scope of the product to change together, which is why it earns a name of its own.

The strategy group covers how to cross. It holds one term, the bowling alley. Instead of going after the whole market at once, you take one narrow niche and own it completely, then use that win to move into the adjacent niche next door, one at a time. The name comes from hitting the head pin squarely so the pins behind it fall in sequence. Since what the early majority wants is a company in its own situation that succeeded first, filling one narrow segment end to end is how that evidence gets built. For a collaboration document tool, that might mean skipping the general market and taking only an industry where every edit has to leave a record — biotech companies running clinical trials, say — then building out the audit trail and approval steps that industry demands until nothing in that segment beats you. Narrowing looks like giving up reachable market, but it is the only way to reach completeness inside a single quarter, and completeness in one segment is what produces the reference customer that opens the next one. Aimed at everyone, a team finishes the quarter without having finished anywhere.

"The numbers we have came from early adopters. We haven't even hit the chasm yet."

A warning against reading current growth as proof of mainstream demand. The early blocks buy first by definition, and their demand guarantees nothing about the next block.

"We need a reference customer before we can cross. Without a case study nothing gets approved."

The early majority decides on evidence that someone else went first, so publishable customer stories have to come before anything else.

"Is this really the chasm, or is the product just not good?"

Pushing back on a team that may be blaming a market stage for a problem of its own making.

At Pagedeck the word first came up in the quarter after the Series A. New team signups had been climbing thirty percent a month, then sat at five percent for two quarters running. Ravi doubled the ad budget and only drove the cost per signup up. Sofia went back through her call notes and pointed out that the questions had changed. People used to ask what the product could do; now they asked which companies their size were running on it, whether there was security documentation, and whether their existing files would survive the move intact.

Mia read that as the audience having changed. The teams that had bought Pagedeck so far were startups that wanted to try a new tool. The ones who had to be reached now were companies that would not invent a reason to switch on their own. Grace decided to spend a quarter on customer stories and migration tooling instead of new features. Eight items in the backlog slipped, and publishing three case studies from customers in the same industry moved to the front. Nobody in the room liked the trade, because every one of those eight features had been requested by a paying customer. The point Mia kept coming back to was that all eight requests had come from the near side of the gap.

The most common mistake is reading the chasm as a stretch of time you wait out. Described as a stage between introduction and growth, it sounds like a checkpoint that arrives in sequence. In practice far more products stop there than get across. A split in the ground is not something you pass through; it needs a bridge built on purpose, and the bridge is made of case studies, completeness and a narrowed target rather than months on the calendar. Teams that sit and wait keep living off revenue from a few hundred early accounts while adding features, and then conclude there is no market left at the point the money runs out. The market was there the whole time. What was missing was any reason for the people in it to move.

The opposite mistake also shows up: calling every growth stall a chasm. A good name feels like a diagnosis, and an explanation that puts the cause outside the team is easier to hear. But growth stops for many reasons. The price may not match the market, people arriving from ads may be leaving on the first screen, or even the early adopters may be quietly churning. For this to be the chasm, existing users have to still be doing fine while only the character of incoming buyers changes. Check whether retention among earlier customers is holding, whether sales questions have shifted from features to evidence, and whether rejections now sound like "too early for us" instead of "this doesn't work." If none of the three holds, the thing to fix is the product or the price, not the story. Skipping that check is expensive in a specific way: the team spends a quarter producing case studies for a product that people were leaving for reasons a week of work would have fixed, and comes out of the quarter with the same flat chart plus a marketing bill.