Notes on Chasm Crossing

Struggling to sell more? Thinking of giving up?

One possibility is that you're finding yourself in the dip in this diagram

Found some early adopters. Great! That means you've found value.

Getting to mass market probably means letting go of what you love best about your service and experimenting to find the positioning, messaging and channel that works. This never stops being hard. It can feel like killing your idea.

Early adopters of cars were people who loved taking the engine to bits at the weekend. So were car manufacturers. It's fun to nerd out with your early adopters! They'll put up with loads of inconveniences too.

But selling to mass market means crossing the chasm. The mass market wants to buy a safe, reliable result; they don't want to learn about how the result is achieved. Car manufacturers had to let go of what made the cars cool to them, and they had to work on infrastructure, removing constraints that made car ownership just too much faff for 90% of the market.

Next: when you talk with folks in the mass market, zip it. Don't tell them anything about your service's cool features and technology. Shhh! Listen for the projects they're trying to get done. If they mention something you can help with, share the case study of a previous customer and the results that customer got.

In short: don't sell your product. Find a repeatable case study and sell that.