Crossing the Chasm
Early adopters and regular users are two different audiences, and most products die in the gap between them.
Why PMs should care
Early adopters put up with rough edges because they find the novelty rewarding on its own. They'll forgive a broken empty state, a clunky login, a settings page that looks like it was designed in a meeting. The next group — the early majority — won't. For them, rough edges don't feel charming. They feel like warning signs that the product isn't safe to rely on.
The gap between these two mindsets is where a lot of beloved products with passionate fans quietly die. The team keeps shipping for the audience they already have, instead of for the one they need next.
The move that crosses the gap is counter-intuitive: stop adding features for a quarter and spend the time polishing what's already there. For the early majority, adoption is almost entirely about whether the product feels reliable. Nothing else matters as much.
Example in product work
A crypto product has 50,000 die-hard users on Twitter, a Discord with six thousand daily messages, and a community that will defend it at any dinner party. It still fails to convert retail.
The homepage says 'permissionless infrastructure for a sovereign financial future'. The onboarding asks you to choose between seven wallet types before explaining what a wallet is. For early adopters, this signals depth. For the early majority, it signals 'I will lose my money here'.
Crossing the chasm means rewriting the homepage to 'Buy Bitcoin in 3 minutes', hiding six of the seven wallet types behind an advanced setting, and accepting that your Discord will lightly riot. It's almost always worth it.
What to do when you see it
- Early adopters put up with rough edges — the novelty is its own reward.
- Regular users don't. For them, rough edges feel like warning signs that the product isn't safe to rely on.
- Most beloved products with passionate fans die in this gap, because the team keeps shipping for the audience they have instead of the next one.
- The move that crosses the gap is counter-intuitive: stop adding features and spend a quarter polishing what's already there.
Sources & further reading
- Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey A. Moore, 1991An overview of Moore's 1991 book on his own site — the chasm between early adopters and the early majority.
- Geoffrey Moore — author's own siteMoore's own page on the Technology Adoption Life Cycle and the chasm model.