Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

Moore's central model: the technology adoption lifecycle has a gap — the chasm — between early adopters (who buy on vision) and the early majority (who buy on references and pragmatism), and most technology products die in that gap because the go-to-market strategy that won early adopters does not work on pragmatists. The book prescribes a specific sequence: pick a beachhead segment, dominate it, use it as a reference base to cross into adjacent segments. For product direction the model is the canonical framework for understanding why products with enthusiastic early users stall at scale. The examples are dated (1991 vintage); the framework has not been replaced. Read alongside Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma for the disruption complement and Ries for the validation stage that precedes the chasm.