Crossing the Chasm
Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
by Geoffrey A. Moore
Editorial review
The book that gave Silicon Valley a vocabulary — early adopters, the chasm, the bowling alley, the tornado. Moore's framework still drives B2B go-to-market strategy a generation later.
AI-distilled summary
Geoffrey Moore extends Everett Rogers's diffusion-of-innovations model with a key insight: between early adopters and the early majority lies a chasm where most technology products quietly die. He prescribes a focused, beachhead strategy for crossing it — pick one segment, dominate it, then expand.
Key takeaways
- 1
Most failed startups die in the gap between visionary early adopters and pragmatic mainstream buyers.
- 2
Cross the chasm by picking a narrow beachhead segment and owning it absolutely.
- 3
The whole product, not the core technology, is what mainstream buyers buy.
- 4
References inside a single segment compound; references across segments do not.
The right reader
B2B founders, product marketers, and anyone selling a new category to skeptical mainstream buyers.
What it touches
How it reads
Strategic, technical, foundational.
Reading difficulty: Moderate
