Beyond The Chasm
Adrian Sutton
Alex Iskold has an interesting article “Rethinking ‘Crossing The Casm’” which asks how to maintain the interest of early adopters in the face of such an overwhelming number of new products:
According to Wikipedia in 2006, Tom Byers, Faculty Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, described “Crossing the Chasm” as “still the bible for entrepreneurial marketing 15 years later.” It is certainly a powerful and proven theory, but it does need to be adjusted. The fact that so many things are thrown into the market changes things. Early adopters are enticed by new things much more often today than 15 years ago. Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition.
It seems to me that the answer is classic Porter’s 5 Forces1 – you need to negate the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products and invest in areas that don’t have exceptionally intense competitive rivalry. In other words, you need to build a product that is not just compelling now, but also has something that competitors can’t easily add.
The first thing to realize is that the early adopters in one niche are usually different people to the early adopters for a different niche. There are some people always on the look out for a new social network that aren’t interested in a new chilli source. So you need to pick a niche to invest in that doesn’t have such intense rivalry that makes it so difficult to maintain attention.
More importantly though, whatever industry you’re investing in, you need to make sure that you have some key advantage over the other players – maybe you happen to know more about music categorization than anyone else (Pandora), maybe you have awesome peer to peer networking technology that massively reduces bandwidth costs (Skype and now Joost), maybe you have a massive farm of servers which makes hard drive space insanely cheap for you (GMail) or maybe you just have key relationships that give you a unique channel to market. There has to be something that you have or that you can acquire that other people will take time to acquire and it has to be a game changer. Then design your product to make the most of that strength. You’re creating barriers to entry for your competitors and making it harder for them to take over from you.
To reduce your threat to substitute products you need to provide some benefit to your users that makes it hard for them to switch. The old technique for this was to lock in their data but that’s generally frowned upon these days2 so you’ll have more success with things like building a community around your product or even just building a brand name for yourself. If no one ever got fired for buying your product, you’re in a really nice position.
The most important thing to do though is to keep innovating. Just because you got the attention of the early adopters doesn’t mean you should kick back and wait while they carry you across the chasm, you have to keep working hard to keep them happy, to keep providing remarkable aspects to your products that maintains their attention. You have to keep doing what you did to get their attention only different – keep inventing cool stuff, but not the same stuff you’ve already invented, that’s old and boring.
In buzz words, to cross the chasm you have to invent a purple cow to get the early adopters attention then milk that cow while inventing the blue and green cows, followed by the flying horse and a silent rooster to keep giving your sneezers something to sneeze about until everyone catches the cold. Clear?
1 – actually, just basic business but Porter's 5 forces gives me a simple framework to categorize strategies by↩