Over the next two weeks, we’ll dive deeper into Crossing the Chasm, a concept coined by Geoffrey Moore to describe the leap products must make from early adopters to mainstream success. The Chasm is the massive divide between these markets, where many businesses go to die. Stick the landing, and you’ve got a chance. If not, don’t blame the marketing department—it’s likely a product problem. But you’ll be in good company with the likes of Spotify Car Thing, New Coke, and Segway.
On opposite ends of this adoption curve lie two homegrown concepts: Napoleon’s Nightmare and Eastwood Ravine.
First up, Napoleon’s Nightmare.
What you need to do with an early version of your product is Cross the Chasm, and this is where a cushy marketing budget can help. Ad dollars provide a running start, but even then, it’s not guaranteed.
Most new products and services never make that jump across the chasm. They die a fiery death in the massive ravine that has claimed so many wonderfully useless products. Bona fide geniuses and innovators are left staring down at their darlings, smashed to bits on the rocks below. They just shake their heads in disbelief.
But, crossing the chasm is no easy task. Speed, approach, and angle all need to be assessed. And even then, most companies barely make it. They arrive on the other side bruised and battered.
Influencers can help, but like Evel Knievel, their flashy lead-up often falls short, never reaching the promised land.
And those are the products that had a chance.
Napoleon’s Nightmare
Geoffrey Moore describes a standard adoption curve, but we see two other scenarios that fall on the extreme ends of standard.
The most common mistake is that of perception. A miscalculation of the market.
Have you heard of Juicero? They aimed to revolutionize home juicing with a high tech, Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Fresh, no hassle, nutritious juice.
The problem? It was expensive, sure. But when people realized the proprietary juice packs could be squeezed by hand—just like baby food pouches—the writing was on the wall.
The company went bust and became a symbol of overtechnification.
Do you know what the most popular juice in the world is? That would be the mighty orange juice. And do you know how much technology you need to make some orange juice?
Juicero was a solution in search of a problem. Premade juice is abundant and easy, and the gadget actually increased complexity.
Crash and burn.
Good ideas spread through genuine connection and impact. It’s the same with products that cross the chasm—they transform their users by addressing problems, not creating them.
For Juicero, the early majority wasn’t big enough to sustain the business.
I call this scenario Napoleon’s Nightmare after Napoleon Dynamite’s big air on the sidewalk in front of his home.
Napoleon’s Nightmare is a business with no upside, and little chance of crossing the chasm, because no real chasm exists. There is no market, no customer, at least not in the size and shape required to make the business viable. Although the downside is limited, you can still smash your nuts, and that’s real pain, just not Evel Knievel pain.
To cross a chasm, and ensure it’s a chasm worth crossing, you need to select your target market. Ask yourself, who is it for?
You’ll notice on the graphic below that the area under the curve represents the number of customers.
In Napoleon’s Nightmare, we don’t have many customers. The truth is, smashing your nuts is preferable to landing that jump and deluding yourself into decades of work, all the while thinking you are this close to something big.
If you cross that itty-bitty chasm, you’ve still got pain ahead, because you’ve got no customers ahead.
That graphic looks a little like this:
The chasm in Napoleon’s Nightmare is crossable, but the adoption curve is tiny. Just a blip, maybe your parents cheering you on, followed by almost no early majority and beyond. The result? A pseudo-successful launch that fizzles out, dies a slow death.
Nightmare’s in the WIld
Companies like Patagonia cross the chasm using a “beachhead,” a landing spot where they can secure part of the market. For them, it was with the environmentally conscious consumer. If that were their only focus, we’d get jackets made with recycled coke bottles that are insulated about as well.
Don’t let all of those recycle bins fool you, a focus on tree huggers is a total nightmare. Just ask I’m Not a Plastic Bag. Sure, the product wasn’t plastic, but it was still trash. The bags became popular until people realized an actual plastic grocery bag was better quality and probably better for the environment. The idea of it spread like a virus, the meme was established, but the market for expensive-cotton-reusable-bags-that-tear-faster-than-your-cheap-plastic-bag is fairly small, no matter how sexy the idea is.
Listen, I love a good fad. I’m down with liver pills and butter coffee. I’m down with green juice too. But the thing with a good fad is that it fades, just like the flu. We grow immune. We realize there isn’t a market.
I’m a chronic early adopter but I’m not much of a Sneezer. A Sneezer is someone who, consciously or not, is spreading ideas like a virus. Early adopters, like innovators, buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle. Segway had Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and that is about it.
Spotify Car Thing had…me.
It was basically a cheap iPod touch clone that played music, kinda like your phone does, but worse and more complex.
And I just had to have it.
Nobody else did.
Maybe Spotify didn’t have enough ad dollars or influencers? Maybe the product was worthless? Or maybe it’s not cool to have your stereo attached to your car vent like an air freshener?
The Juiceros and Car Things of the world? They were solving yesterday’s problems.
Like Napoleon, they’d fooled themselves into thinking the jump, the mission, and the chasm, were bigger than reality. And no amount of sneezing, influencer hype, or venture capital can conjure enough customers.
The better alternative is going big. And that is what we’ll talk about next week when we discuss Eastwood Ravine.
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