Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore)

Moore relies on the Everett Rogers diffusion curve and inserts an abrupt break between early adopters and early majority. The point is that the original curve is continuous. No jumping. The disruption that Moore describes appears when you look at companies that had initial traction and then crashed. This raises a simple question: what was the normal failure rate for startups in that context?

Without this comparison, part of what seems like “falling into the abyss” may simply be the failure that is so normal in this world of startups. Weak product, too small market, bad timing, bad execution. The book does not offer a control group. It does not compare companies that followed the sequential achievement model with companies that grew in another way. It does not demonstrate that vertical focus increases the chances of success.

The pattern may have been real in that period. But B2B technology at the time relied on direct selling, cumbersome implementation that took months, long sales cycles, and little verifiable social proof. This “abyss” may be less a universal psychological characteristic of buyers and more a consequence of how products were sold at that time.

We are not discussing the classic pattern of the product that finds fans but stalls when it comes to institutional adoption. The symptom is known: pilots that don’t convert, infinite sales cycles and compliance requirements that change levels between testing and purchase. The phenomenon is real. The debate is about what really causes this and what is the best solution to cross this chasm.

Moore wrote before the commercial web, before SaaS, before product-led growth. In self-service and mid-market categories, the cost of testing has fallen dramatically. Many tools come via corporate credit card, individual use and quick validation in days, not months. In heavy enterprise sales, this helps get started and prove value. But it does not eliminate procurement, security audit and change management processes. The “abyss” can change location instead of disappearing.

Today there is much more social proof available than there was in 1991. Verified reviews, active user communities, public cases and signs of reliability reduce the difficulty of evaluating whether the product really works. This reduces the risk perceived by the pragmatic buyer and changes what needs to be ready from the beginning. Instead of a fixed psychological barrier separating customer profiles, you may be looking at an operational transition: from individual and informal use to official company standardization, from free experimentation to compliance with corporate policies.

In consumer products and network effect categories, growth often ignores the B2B roadmap that inspired the book. Facebook grew from university to university. Although there was some logic to this expansion, the central dynamic was social network density, not vertical conquest in Moore’s sense. Expansion occurred where there was a critical mass of students connected to each other. It didn’t follow the logic of “completely dominating Stanford as a vertical beachhead before expanding.”

Slack and Notion have spread from the bottom up within organizations. One user started using it, the entire team adopted it informally, and the company only later “discovered” that there was already an established standard. In the pandemic, Zoom captured simultaneous demand in schools, businesses, families and governments at the same time.

None of this proves that the “abyss” does not exist. It proves that the shape of the problem changes radically when the way of distributing and validating products changes. In some markets, what you call a “chasm” may just be the moment when you trade spontaneous, organic growth for growth that needs institutional approval and formal budgeting.

Moore argues that the ‘early majority’ does not buy technology in isolation. Buy complete solution to a problem. That’s why you need a “complete product”: responsive support, integrations with existing systems, clear documentation and, ideally, implementation partners. This point remains relevant in high-risk purchases, especially when the software touches critical processes. But the completeness requirement is neither fixed nor uniform across categories.

In many modern situations, you don’t need everything ready from day one. You need completeness to standardize and scale usage within the enterprise, not to get started. Many products have grown up doing one thing very well, with a narrow scope. Dropbox started out simple and focused only on synchronization. Instagram also launched with minimal product.

What changes is the work being done, who makes the purchasing decision and what is the risk involved. For developers, a good documented API is worth more than a perfect visual interface. For a remote team during a pandemic, video reliability was worth more than adjacent project management features. “Complete product” is always relative to the context. The practical question is: complete for whom, at which stage of the purchasing process, under what level of risk?

The risk of the book is not the vocabulary it created. That’s when he becomes the only lens to interpret growth problems. Founders with organic traction across multiple segments can artificially restrict growth because they “need to pick one vertical and dominate it before expanding.” They may reject real business opportunities that were working because they do not follow the prescribed sequence. And they may interpret any slowdown in growth as “we have reached a structural abyss” when the real cause is more mundane.

Confusing positioning. Poorly defined ideal customer profile. Weak acquisition channel. Onboarding that loses users. Inadequate pricing. Or simply a product that doesn’t deliver the promised results.

There is also an inverted survival bias, little discussed: companies that have focused too much on the wrong vertical. How many startups missed important market windows while executing their sequential conquest strategy with discipline? They delayed natural expansion, letting more agile competitors capture available territory. The theory tends to make visible only those survivors who “got it right.” It leaves invisible those who “focused too much” in the wrong place and broke before becoming a case study.

The book captures insights into how certain B2B products sold in a specific historical period. This was extrapolated to “how every technology is adopted always, everywhere”. Even in contexts that seem similar to the 1980s — physical hardware with high switching costs, software that requires deep integration into critical legacy systems, complex enterprise sales with long cycles — there is no guarantee that the sequential win strategy will work better than other approaches. The context may seem similar, but market dynamics, competition and buyer expectations have changed.

The best approach is to diagnose the specific barriers that prevent your product from expanding. Is it a lack of trust and credibility? Is it the difficulty of technical integration? Is it a high switching cost for the customer? Is it the need for network density to work? Is it compliance and corporate procurement processes?

Each type of barrier points to a different solution. Build social proof and success stories. Improve product and onboarding flow. Redesign channel strategy. Completely change the sales model. Or adopt PLG to overcome part of the perceived risk. Sometimes the best answer really is narrow vertical focus. Sometimes it’s rapid horizontal expansion capturing demand where it appears. Sometimes it’s bottom-up growth ignoring institutional buyers.

“Crossing the Chasm” is valuable as a conceptual map of a specific type of growth problem. It’s just not the universal constitution of technology adoption. And the honest test is to ask, on a case-by-case basis, whether your “chasm” is really an inherent structural barrier to the market, a temporary operational difficulty that can be resolved, or simply a fancy and comforting name for well-known execution problems.