Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

... the tendency when you're in the chasm is, "I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find," right? And because I, we need, we need revenue, right? It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. (laughs) I mean, it's just... It's not gonna light the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, a little crumpled-up paper, and you hold the match one place until some- the fire starts. And that's why adjacency is so important. If you light the fire and the piece of kindling is here, but the log is, you know, in the other room, that, that doesn't work.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Geoffrey Moore. Geoffrey is the author of maybe the most influential and important book on go-to-market ever written, Crossing the Chasm. Even though it's sold over a million copies, still feels like people continue to reinvent many of the lessons that Geoffrey uncovered and shared in his seminal book. In our conversation, we discuss why it's so important to get very narrow with your initial audience, how the bowling pin strategy helps you get past early adopters, what the specific go-to-market playbook is for every stage of the adoption life cycle, why using the wrong playbook during the wrong phase will slow you down, also the seven deadly sins of trying to cross the chasm incorrectly, also how to sell your product to different personas, why you don't need to focus on the problem and the pain when you're selling to early adopters, plus some real good life advice that I didn't expect. Geoffrey has so much wisdom to share if you're building a B2B company, and I'm really excited to bring you this episode. With that, I bring you Geoffrey Moore after a short word from our sponsors. Let me tell you about CommandBar. If you're like me and most users I've built product for, you probably find those little in-product pop-ups really annoying. "Want to take a tour?" "Check out this new feature!" And these pop-ups are becoming less and less effective since most users don't read what they say. They just want to close them as soon as possible. But every product builder knows that users need help to learn the ins and outs of your product. We use so many products every day, and we can't possibly know the ins and outs of every one. CommandBar is an AI-powered toolkit for product, growth, marketing, and customer teams to help users get the most out of your product without annoying them. They use AI to get closer to user intent, so they have search and chat products that let users describe what they're trying to do in their own words and then see personalized results, like customer walkthroughs or actions. And they do pop-ups too, but their nudges are based on in-product behaviors, like confusion or intent classification, which makes them much less annoying and much more impactful. This works for web apps, mobile apps, and websites. And they work with industry-leading companies like Gusto, Freshworks, HashiCorp, and LaunchDarkly. Over 15 million end users have interacted with CommandBar. To try out CommandBar, you can sign up at commandbar.com/lenny, and you can unlock an extra 1,000 AI responses per month for any plan. That's commandbar.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. And hundreds of other companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently launched AuthKit, a complete authentication and user management service. It's essentially a modern alternative to Auth0, but with better pricing and more flexible APIs. AuthKit's design is stunning out of the box, and you can also fully customize it to fit your app's brand. It's an effortless experience from your first user all the way to your largest enterprise customer. Best of all, AuthKit is free for any developer up to one million users. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Geoffrey Moore, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.