Week 15: Geoffrey Moore and the Crack in the Curve

For most of the early history of high-tech marketing, the adoption of a new product was drawn as a smooth curve.

The picture came from Everett Rogers, whose 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations synthesized hundreds of studies into a single shape. He found:

A new idea spreads through a population in stages. Innovators go first. Early adopters follow. Then the early majority, the late majority, and finally the laggards. 

Plot the groups by when they arrive and you get a bell curve. Plot the total who have adopted and you get the familiar S. The shape implied a story. Momentum builds, each group hands off to the next, and a good product rolls through the population like water finding its level.

That picture was useful. It was also, for the purpose of a founder trying to build a company, dangerously incomplete.

Geoffrey Moore noticed what the curve was hiding. The groups Rogers described do not hand off to each other cleanly. There are cracks between them, places where the logic that won one group does nothing for the next. And one of those cracks is not a crack. It is a chasm.

The Chasm

Moore published Crossing the Chasm in 1991. He took Rogers' technology adoption life cycle and asked a harder question. Not how innovations diffuse in general. Why so many high-tech products that looked like they were diffusing suddenly stalled and died.

His answer was that the curve has a gap in it. The deepest gap sits between the early adopters and the early majority. He named the two groups on either side in a way that made the gap legible. The early adopters are visionaries. The early majority are pragmatists. And the two groups buy for reasons that have almost nothing in common.

Visionaries buy on intuition and ambition. They are looking for a breakthrough, an edge no competitor has, and they will tolerate a product that is half-built to get it. They expect to do some of the work themselves. A bug is the price of being first. A missing feature is an invitation. They buy the vision and forgive the product.

Pragmatists buy on evidence and reference. They are not looking for an edge. They are looking for a safe, proven way to improve what they already do. They want the whole product, the complete solution that works on arrival, with support and a track record behind it. And they have one question that decides everything: who else like me is already using this.

That question is the chasm.

Because the people a pragmatist trusts are other pragmatists. A visionary's enthusiasm is not a credential to a pragmatist. It is a warning. The early customers who proved the product was real are the worst possible references for the customers who would make it a business. The startup arrives at the chasm with a list of delighted users and discovers that the list does not transfer. The momentum that felt like proof was proof of demand from one small group whose endorsement the next group discounts.

This is why Moore's contribution was a discovery and not a refinement. Rogers' curve said the groups were sequential. Moore said the sequence breaks at a specific seam, and the break is structural. It is built into who these people are and how they decide. The product does not slow down because it got worse. It slows down because it ran out of the only customers who were ever going to buy it the way it was being sold.

Why the Chasm Mattered

The chasm explained a failure pattern that nothing else explained well.

A company would launch, win a cluster of early customers, raise on the strength of that traction, staff up against a forecast that assumed the curve was smooth, and then watch growth flatten for no reason anyone in the building could name. The product worked. The early customers were happy. The sales team was trying. And the number stopped moving.

The instinct in that moment is to blame execution. Hire a better head of sales. Spend more on marketing. Add the features the last few prospects asked for. Moore's framework said the diagnosis was usually wrong. The company had sold through its visionaries and hit the pragmatist wall. More effort against the same strategy pours resources into a gap that effort does not close. The company is not losing to a competitor. It is losing to a discontinuity in its own market.

Then Moore did the thing that made the book endure. He gave the discontinuity a strategy.

The strategy was the beachhead. Stop trying to cross the chasm everywhere at once. Pick one narrow, specific segment of pragmatists. Not a vertical you find interesting. A segment with a problem painful enough that a small group of pragmatists feel real urgency to fix it. Aim everything at that one segment. Deliver what Theodore Levitt and Bill Davidow had called the whole product, the complete solution that segment needs to fully solve its problem, not the core technology plus a list of someday features. Win that segment so completely that you become the obvious choice inside it.

The whole product is doing as much work in that strategy as the chasm itself, and it is the part founders skip. Moore's argument was not only that you pick the right segment. It was that pragmatists adopt only when the surrounding capability makes adoption safe. The thing they buy is rarely the core product alone. It is the core product plus the integrations, the support, the documentation, the partners, and the proof, everything the segment needs for the problem to be solved with no exposed edges. 

A visionary will assemble the missing pieces themselves. A pragmatist will not. So a startup can have the right segment, the right technology, and still stall in the chasm, because the product it is selling is complete enough for a builder and incomplete enough to frighten a buyer. Finding the segment is half the move. Delivering enough surrounding capability to make that segment feel safe is the other half, and it is usually the more expensive one.

Then use it. A dominated niche produces the one asset the next pragmatist demands. References from other pragmatists. Moore borrowed the language of D-Day. Take the beach first. Secure it. Then move inland to the adjacent segments, each one easier because the last one gave you the proof the next one wanted. He later extended the picture in Inside the Tornado, where the niches connect like a bowling alley and, if the timing holds, tip into the hypergrowth he called the tornado.

The whole edifice rests on one move. Be a big fish in a small pond before you try to be any kind of fish in the ocean. Two and a half decades of founders, product leaders, and investors absorbed that move so thoroughly that its origin disappeared. "Find your beachhead" is now said by people who have never read the book.

What Moore Left Open

Moore did more than name the chasm. He gave founders a methodology for crossing it. Target market selection. Niche identification. Whole product definition. Competitive positioning. These are analytical processes, and they are good ones. The objection here is not that Moore offered no guidance. He offered a great deal.

What he did not offer is a structured diagnostic. A methodology tells a capable reader how to think the problem through. A diagnostic reads a specific venture and returns where it actually stands. Moore built the first. The second was never his project, and its absence is the gap this series is tracing.

That distinction shows up in how the framework gets used. Moore's methodology is most often applied two ways, and both tend to arrive late.

The first is retrospective. A company stalls, someone names the chasm, and the diagnosis explains what already happened. By then the runway is shorter and the forecast has already been missed. The framework is right and the founder is poorer.

The second is strategic, applied by companies with the resources to run it. Crossing the chasm as Moore described it assumes a marketing function. Segmentation studies. Competitive analysis. The capacity to define a whole product and fund its delivery to a single niche while saying no to revenue everywhere else. Moore was writing for high-tech marketing executives at companies that had survived long enough to have those capabilities. The book teaches a sophisticated reader how to deploy resources they already command.

Neither version answers the question a founder has before launch. Is my product positioned to cross. Is the traction I am seeing visionary traction that will not transfer, or does it reach pragmatists who will refer each other. Do I have a real beachhead, a segment whose pragmatists feel enough pain to move, or do I have a thin slice of enthusiasts spread across ten segments with no pain deep enough to anchor any of them. Can I actually deliver the whole product to one segment, or only the core technology to many.

Those are answerable questions. They are questions about a specific venture's assumptions, evidence, and decisions. Moore's methodology points at them. It does not return a reading on any one of them for a particular founder.

There is an equity cost folded into this. The well-resourced company runs Moore's analysis as a matter of course, because it has the people and the budget to do it. The founder without a marketing team can read the same book, follow the same logic, and recognize the same danger, and still lack the structure to turn that logic into an honest reading of their own venture. The strategy is public. The capacity to run it on yourself is not evenly distributed.

Moore gave founders a strategy for crossing. He did not give them an instrument that reads whether a particular venture is positioned to cross before the founder commits the next year of their life to finding out.

What This Means for Founders Now

Start by distrusting your own traction.

Early traction is the most dangerous evidence a founder collects, because it is real and it is misleading at the same time. The customers who showed up first showed up because they are visionaries, the people most willing to buy something unproven. Their enthusiasm tells you the problem is real to someone. It does not tell you the problem is real to the larger group whose money builds the company. Reading visionary demand as mainstream demand is how founders walk confidently into the chasm.

So the question is not whether people are buying. The question is who is buying, and whether the next group will treat them as a reason to buy or a reason to wait.

Three diagnostics make that concrete, and all three are about evidence, not optimism.

The first is the reference test. Look at your happiest current customers. Would a cautious, risk-averse buyer in the same segment treat them as proof, or discount them as early and unusual. If your best references do not transfer to the buyer you need next, your traction is trapped on the wrong side of the chasm, and selling harder will not move it.

The second is the beachhead test. Name the single segment whose pragmatists feel the problem most urgently. Not the biggest market. The most acute one. If you cannot name a segment that specific, or if your early customers are scattered across many segments with no concentration anywhere, you do not yet have a beachhead. You have a hope that breadth will substitute for depth. It does not.

The third is the whole product test. For that one segment, list everything they need for the problem to be fully solved, not partially solved. Then ask what fraction of it you actually deliver today. The distance between the core product you have and the whole product they require is the distance you have to fund before the segment will adopt. If that distance is invisible to you, it is not small. It is unexamined.

None of these tests delivers a verdict. A thin beachhead is not a death sentence. It is a more specific problem than the one you started the day with. An incomplete whole product is not a failure. It is a development list with a deadline attached. The point is to read where you actually stand, honestly, while you still have the runway to act on what you find.

The shape of the crossing has changed since 1991, and it is worth seeing how. Product-led growth, open-source ecosystems, and platform marketplaces have given pragmatists new sources of the safety they require. A startup that plugs into AWS, Salesforce, or Shopify can borrow institutional trust it has not yet earned. Bottom-up developer adoption can serve as the reference a pragmatist once demanded from a peer. None of this removes the chasm. It relocates the proof. The pragmatist still refuses to move without evidence from a source they trust. What has changed is where that evidence can live, and that a startup can sometimes furnish part of the whole product by standing on someone else's. The three tests still hold. They just have more places to look for an answer.

This is what the Go-to-Market and Market pillars are built to make legible. The Market Pillar holds the question of which specific, reachable segment has the problem urgently enough to act, which is Moore's beachhead question stated as a working assumption you can test. The Go-to-Market Pillar holds the question of whether the path to your first customers is the path to a repeatable one, which is the chasm question asked before you hit the chasm. The framework pulls Moore's market-level insight apart into the venture-level assumptions a founder can examine this week, on their own startup, before the curve has a chance to teach them the lesson the expensive way.

Moore proved the curve has a chasm in it, and he showed founders the strategy for crossing. Whether yours is positioned to cross is a reading you can take now, before the curve teaches you the lesson the expensive way.

Theoretical Takeaway

Moore's contribution to the argument this series is building is the discovery that technology adoption is not a smooth curve. There is a structural discontinuity between the early adopters who validate a product and the early majority who build a market, and that discontinuity has stranded countless startups that mistook early adoption for mainstream demand. The two groups buy for incompatible reasons, and the endorsement of the first does not transfer to the second. Moore named the chasm and built a methodology for crossing it: segment selection, the beachhead, the whole product. What he left open is the diagnostic. He gave founders a strategy. He did not give them an evaluative instrument that reads whether a specific product and segment are positioned to cross, or whether the traction in hand is visionary demand that will strand them. The strategy has been public for a generation. The reading of where a particular venture stands, and the structured work that follows from it, is what no current framework scaffolds and what this series is built to name.

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Next week: Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge. We know more than we can tell, most expert judgment cannot be written down as instructions, and the founder-level reasoning this series cares about is largely tacit. Polanyi proved it exists. He did not say how to develop it in someone who has not yet acquired it.

Originally Published in the Startup.Ready. Foundations of Innovation Series at https://www.startupreadinessscore.com/essays/moore-crossing-the-chasm 

Original Publication Date: June 14, 2026

Last Updated: June 14, 2026

By Dr. Shaun P. Digan, MBA, PhD

Sources

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey A. Moore, HarperBusiness (1991; 3rd ed. 2014)

Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, Geoffrey A. Moore, HarperBusiness (1995)

Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M. Rogers, The Free Press (1962)

About the Author

Dr. Shaun P. Digan is the founder of Startup.Ready and the creator of the Startup Readiness Framework, a research-based system for evaluating and strengthening the foundations of early-stage startups. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville and has spent 15 years teaching, advising, and consulting with founders. In this series, The Foundations of Innovation, he writes on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from all of them.