Geoffrey Moore
Author of Crossing the Chasm, speaker and advisor
Where to hear and read about Geoffrey Moore1 episode or test
Lenny's PodcastGeoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a marketGeoffrey Moore is the author of Crossing the Chasm and an advisor to B2B technology companies on how markets move from early adopters to the mainstream. The most useful thing to learn from him is to win one narrow segment by selling to the buyer's pressing problem, and to change playbook as the market changes.
It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. It's not going to light the log.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
Geoffrey Moore: the story and the lessons
1Where Moore's chasm model came from
Moore found the chasm by asking why celebrated launches faded. At Regis McKenna, launches reached Fortune and Wall Street Journal covers, then vanished within a couple of years. Companies assumed a visionary reference would win over pragmatists, and it did not.
He calls the standoff the junior high dance problem, since no pragmatist wants to go first.
Moore splits buyers into visionaries and pragmatists, by decision rather than by person. Visionaries need one magic ingredient and tolerate a buggy product if it is an order of magnitude better. Pragmatists need a product that works and copy what their peers buy.
The same person can be a visionary on one purchase and a conservative on another. Pragmatists distrust visionaries partly because they clean up the messes visionaries leave.
Moore treats his frameworks as patterns to test, not guarantees. He says the models guide a search for what to look for as a market evolves, and loose use of them can give false comfort. Disruptive innovation has no history, so you project a possible one and try to make it true.
He sees a third-party advisor's job as calling time out and asking for an outside-in view. One early founder named the Fortune 500 as the beachhead, which he calls an inside-out view.
Moore admits the model fits B2B and that he misjudged consumer. He says the chasm model covered about 95% of tech in the 20th century. After the dot-com bust, consumer computing arrived, and B2C can now be the core of innovation with B2B an afterthought.
He says Google's plan to save every search sounded to him like the dumbest idea, and he was wrong. For B2B he still calls the book the most reliable playbook after 30 years.
2How Moore says to pick a beachhead segment
Moore wants a segment big enough to matter and small enough to lead. It should fit your crown jewels, offer a path to about $100 million in five years, and let you hold 30 to 50% share within two years. A billion-dollar segment is too big to lead.
Define it by one geography, one industry and one profession, because those people talk to each other. He says to ask whether you could win the top 20 customers. "Big enough to matter, small enough to lead and a good fit with your crown jewels."
Moore says to lead one segment because ecosystems form around leaders. Oracle is still the database leader 40 years on because its ecosystem organized around it. Aim to get three to six reputable companies in one segment to pick you, so the rest see the standard.
He compares splitting across segments to running in several primaries: votes in Vermont do not count in New Hampshire.
Moore starts with one marquee visionary customer, then looks elsewhere for the beachhead. A famous customer with an executive sponsor who can fund the work puts you on the map, since nobody notices a win with an unknown. Nine in ten sponsors send you to purchasing, so look for the tenth who is tired of the status quo.
Expect heavy project work with services. The visionary's own industry is usually not the beachhead, because visionaries want an edge over rivals, not to help their industry.
Moore starts looking for a beachhead when one account has gone all in. The trigger is a major account that has gone all in on the new technology and will talk about it, not a revenue figure. Visionaries like to talk, while pragmatists must go through legal to give permission.
A good reference is a radiating one, who talks about you when you are not in the room.
Moore validates a beachhead by trying to win two more deals in three months. He says not to rely on research. Run a modest campaign aimed at one use case and bet three months on closing two more deals with the same pattern.
Talk to the economic buyer who controls access to the trapped value, not only end users, who complain but cannot sponsor a purchase. A segment campaign reaches about 200 people, so it is cheap next to mass marketing.
Moore grows by adjacency, like a fire catching what sits next to the kindling. The next segment is either the same customer with a new use case, which reuses references, or the same use case in a new customer base, which reuses partners. Done well, this can take a company from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Documentum began with pharma drug approvals of 500,000 pages, where each day lost cost $1 to $2 million of patent life. It then moved to chemicals, oil and gas leases, and Wall Street financiers.
3How Moore sells to pragmatic buyers
Moore tells founders to shut the laptop and sell to the customer's problem. In the bowling alley, open by saying you have worked with people in their industry, there is a serious problem around X, and you think they may have it. Then get them talking.
Take notes by hand so they see you capturing their words. Recording is unwelcome because they may criticize colleagues. Moore compares it to a doctor who asks about your pain instead of showing a film of an operation. "Shut the God damn laptop."
Moore builds lead generation around named symptoms of the problem. An ad asks whether you have seven symptoms of fatal churn, so responders arrive pre-qualified. A BDR confirms the pain and finds who owns it, then a diagnostic call lets the customer do most of the talking.
The BDR may learn it is Harry, not Mary, who has the problem, and books the meeting with Harry.
Moore says pragmatists act on a compelling reason to buy, not a better pitch. Pragmatists take meetings but never say yes. Look for a pain the sponsor's boss has noticed and where the current fix is failing, which forces them to move faster than they want.
Founders answer a stalled deal with a sexier demo or deck, which is the wrong response. Examples of compelling reasons include ransomware, a child struggling at school, and a legal problem. "They don't say no. They just never say yes."
Moore positions as the specialist technology leader who respects the incumbent. The incumbent knows the business but lacks the new technology, and technology competitors lack commitment to the domain. The claim is that you are the technology leader committed to this one problem.
Do not ask the customer to kick out the incumbent, only say it cannot solve this problem. Anyone who enters your quadrant gets fought, so aim to be beyond compare.
Moore sells on value with a guarantee and does not discount before the chasm. Chasm buyers are making risk-bearing decisions, and a discount does not lower that risk. It can raise it, since buyers may expect less support or a change of scope.
The offer is to take the problem off the table and not leave until they are satisfied. He jokes about heart surgery at 9.99, bring a coupon. "Discounting does not reduce risk."
Moore hires diagnostic domain experts, not enterprise salespeople, to cross. Enterprise reps are used to horizontal coverage selling. For the chasm he wants someone closer to a sales engineer, diagnostic and committed to the integrity of the problem and solution.
Enterprise sales hires fit later, when the company pursues enterprise deals.
4Moore's four market stages and their playbooks
Moore gives each stage of adoption its own playbook. The early market runs on projects for a visionary sponsor. The bowling alley runs on repeatable solutions, the tornado is a land grab, and Main Street is about expanding services.
The pitch moves from shared belief ("We believe what you believe") to need ("We need what you have") to envy in the tornado ("We want what they have").
Moore says qualifying on budget is right in the tornado and wrong earlier. In the early market you must create budget, and in the bowling alley you must redirect it from the old band-aid fix. In the tornado budgets appear everywhere at once.
Departments then spend and usually stay with the vendor they pick. Gorillas such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle and Microsoft emerged in the nineties, and a company that is not number one retreats to a niche as a chimp.
Moore says teams fail by staying with the playbook they are good at. A project model in the bowling alley will not repeat, so no ecosystem forms. A solution model in the early market overinvests in one customer, and the visionary pulls you off your roadmap.
The right response is not hard to see. The trouble starts when the market moves on and the team does not. "I have been successful with this playbook, the market has moved to the next phase, but I'm really good at the old playbook"
Moore frames the early-market story as trapped value. Investors want a technology wizard, a working demo and a vision of the value the innovation releases. The world typically gives you about 10% of the value you unlock, so a billion-dollar company needs about $10 billion of trapped value.
Airbnb unlocked people's homes. Uber unlocked the backseat of the car and a free labor force with it.
Moore says product-led growth cannot cross the chasm but excels at expansion. Freemium attracts end users before economic buyers, and telemetry shows what people really do. It shines on Main Street, where the next purchase carries little risk.
Every product-led company, Atlassian included, ends up building a sales team to win enterprise deals. He likens crossing by product alone to curing Covid by leaving vaccines in public places.
Moore reads generative AI through the phase of each use. Microsoft Copilot is a risk-free add-on to Office 365, so it is Main Street. Salesforce's copilots come closest to the tornado.
A specialized pain is a bowling alley use. His example is Khan Academy tuning tutoring for teachers whose classes now span five grade levels after the pandemic.
5What Moore says about funding and crossing
Moore sees venture money as a way to raise the company's value state. Investors fund you so the next round prices two to three times higher. Great demos and good hires do not count unless the next round prices higher.
Many companies died last year because they assumed there would always be another round. "The purpose of this money is to change the value state of your company."
Moore says you have crossed when you are a going concern that funds itself. A going concern has loyal customers, a partner ecosystem that brings deals, a working CAC and LTV, and an operating model, usually at roughly $10 to $20 million. The test is cash flow positive, not GAAP profit.
You may still raise to chase global dominance, but on your own timeline. Chasm money removes the risk that the company fails, and bowling alley money buys the journey from about $10 million to $100 million.
Moore says to avoid venture capital unless cost or speed forces it. Aim for cash flow break-even, starting with customer-led projects. Raise only if the technology is too expensive to self-fund, such as GPUs and training large language models, or the product will catch fire before you can spend two or three years finding your way.
He notes most VC-funded companies do not work out, and founders often earn less than if they had bootstrapped. "Just because you want to do a startup doesn't mean you need venture capital."
Moore estimates one round can dominate a use case in 18 to 24 months. A severe problem means you sell on value, and the segment is cheap to reach. He says entrepreneurs find it hard to sell a narrow fix, such as third grade math, when their product can do anything.
He calls himself an English major doing math, so he treats the 18 to 24 months as a rough guide.
Moore cites obsessive service as how Figma won its first customer. Figma's team drove back an hour or two after a visit to Coda, then called Krypton and reported the Wi-Fi broken, and fixed it anyway. They also fixed trivial bugs to keep that team happy.
A larger company would say it will put you in the queue.
6Moore on the entrepreneur's life and impact
Moore says life never gets easy after the chasm. The problems only change. Users differ, the platform keeps moving from data center to cloud to Kubernetes to edge AI, and he expects a new headache every week.
He adds that so much software exists that being truly disruptive is less likely.
Moore tells entrepreneurs to aim for a great living and then impact. He thinks being an entrepreneur matters more than ever, because software-enabled technology is at the core of any solution that scales to a world problem. He says to skip billionaire as a goal.
He says he could use $10 million, probably $20 million, but not $100 million. Someone gifted enough to start an original software company is a scarce resource, so don't waste it.
Moore wrote The Infinite Staircase to ground ethics in a secular origin story. The book knits the Big Bang and the Darwinian account into 11 stairs of emerging complexity. It gathers 25 years of his reading, with no original research.
He argues that ethics come from below, from mammals nurturing their young, so values like love are built into us and need not come from a divine creator.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
Moore explains how B2B startups move from early adopters to the mainstream by picking a narrow beachhead segment, selling to the customer's problem, and switching go-to-market playbook at each of four market stages. The payoff is a concrete test for a segment, a sales approach for each stage, and a clear sense of when you have crossed the chasm and no longer depend on the next funding round.
Moore found the chasm by asking why celebrated launches faded. At Regis McKenna, launches reached Fortune and Wall Street Journal covers, then vanished within a couple of years. Companies assumed a visionary reference would win over pragmatists, and it did not.
He calls the standoff the junior high dance problem, since no pragmatist wants to go first.
Moore splits buyers into visionaries and pragmatists, by decision rather than by person. Visionaries need one magic ingredient and tolerate a buggy product if it is an order of magnitude better. Pragmatists need a product that works and copy what their peers buy.
The same person can be a visionary on one purchase and a conservative on another. Pragmatists distrust visionaries partly because they clean up the messes visionaries leave.
Moore treats his frameworks as patterns to test, not guarantees. He says the models guide a search for what to look for as a market evolves, and loose use of them can give false comfort. Disruptive innovation has no history, so you project a possible one and try to make it true.
He sees a third-party advisor's job as calling time out and asking for an outside-in view. One early founder named the Fortune 500 as the beachhead, which he calls an inside-out view.
Moore admits the model fits B2B and that he misjudged consumer. He says the chasm model covered about 95% of tech in the 20th century. After the dot-com bust, consumer computing arrived, and B2C can now be the core of innovation with B2B an afterthought.
He says Google's plan to save every search sounded to him like the dumbest idea, and he was wrong. For B2B he still calls the book the most reliable playbook after 30 years.
Moore wants a segment big enough to matter and small enough to lead. It should fit your crown jewels, offer a path to about $100 million in five years, and let you hold 30 to 50% share within two years. A billion-dollar segment is too big to lead.
Define it by one geography, one industry and one profession, because those people talk to each other. He says to ask whether you could win the top 20 customers. "Big enough to matter, small enough to lead and a good fit with your crown jewels."
Moore says to lead one segment because ecosystems form around leaders. Oracle is still the database leader 40 years on because its ecosystem organized around it. Aim to get three to six reputable companies in one segment to pick you, so the rest see the standard.
He compares splitting across segments to running in several primaries: votes in Vermont do not count in New Hampshire.
Moore starts with one marquee visionary customer, then looks elsewhere for the beachhead. A famous customer with an executive sponsor who can fund the work puts you on the map, since nobody notices a win with an unknown. Nine in ten sponsors send you to purchasing, so look for the tenth who is tired of the status quo.
Expect heavy project work with services. The visionary's own industry is usually not the beachhead, because visionaries want an edge over rivals, not to help their industry.
Moore starts looking for a beachhead when one account has gone all in. The trigger is a major account that has gone all in on the new technology and will talk about it, not a revenue figure. Visionaries like to talk, while pragmatists must go through legal to give permission.
A good reference is a radiating one, who talks about you when you are not in the room.
Moore validates a beachhead by trying to win two more deals in three months. He says not to rely on research. Run a modest campaign aimed at one use case and bet three months on closing two more deals with the same pattern.
Talk to the economic buyer who controls access to the trapped value, not only end users, who complain but cannot sponsor a purchase. A segment campaign reaches about 200 people, so it is cheap next to mass marketing.
Moore grows by adjacency, like a fire catching what sits next to the kindling. The next segment is either the same customer with a new use case, which reuses references, or the same use case in a new customer base, which reuses partners. Done well, this can take a company from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Documentum began with pharma drug approvals of 500,000 pages, where each day lost cost $1 to $2 million of patent life. It then moved to chemicals, oil and gas leases, and Wall Street financiers.
Moore tells founders to shut the laptop and sell to the customer's problem. In the bowling alley, open by saying you have worked with people in their industry, there is a serious problem around X, and you think they may have it. Then get them talking.
Take notes by hand so they see you capturing their words. Recording is unwelcome because they may criticize colleagues. Moore compares it to a doctor who asks about your pain instead of showing a film of an operation. "Shut the God damn laptop."
Moore builds lead generation around named symptoms of the problem. An ad asks whether you have seven symptoms of fatal churn, so responders arrive pre-qualified. A BDR confirms the pain and finds who owns it, then a diagnostic call lets the customer do most of the talking.
The BDR may learn it is Harry, not Mary, who has the problem, and books the meeting with Harry.
Moore says pragmatists act on a compelling reason to buy, not a better pitch. Pragmatists take meetings but never say yes. Look for a pain the sponsor's boss has noticed and where the current fix is failing, which forces them to move faster than they want.
Founders answer a stalled deal with a sexier demo or deck, which is the wrong response. Examples of compelling reasons include ransomware, a child struggling at school, and a legal problem. "They don't say no. They just never say yes."
Moore positions as the specialist technology leader who respects the incumbent. The incumbent knows the business but lacks the new technology, and technology competitors lack commitment to the domain. The claim is that you are the technology leader committed to this one problem.
Do not ask the customer to kick out the incumbent, only say it cannot solve this problem. Anyone who enters your quadrant gets fought, so aim to be beyond compare.
Moore sells on value with a guarantee and does not discount before the chasm. Chasm buyers are making risk-bearing decisions, and a discount does not lower that risk. It can raise it, since buyers may expect less support or a change of scope.
The offer is to take the problem off the table and not leave until they are satisfied. He jokes about heart surgery at 9.99, bring a coupon. "Discounting does not reduce risk."
Moore hires diagnostic domain experts, not enterprise salespeople, to cross. Enterprise reps are used to horizontal coverage selling. For the chasm he wants someone closer to a sales engineer, diagnostic and committed to the integrity of the problem and solution.
Enterprise sales hires fit later, when the company pursues enterprise deals.
Moore gives each stage of adoption its own playbook. The early market runs on projects for a visionary sponsor. The bowling alley runs on repeatable solutions, the tornado is a land grab, and Main Street is about expanding services.
The pitch moves from shared belief ("We believe what you believe") to need ("We need what you have") to envy in the tornado ("We want what they have").
Moore says qualifying on budget is right in the tornado and wrong earlier. In the early market you must create budget, and in the bowling alley you must redirect it from the old band-aid fix. In the tornado budgets appear everywhere at once.
Departments then spend and usually stay with the vendor they pick. Gorillas such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle and Microsoft emerged in the nineties, and a company that is not number one retreats to a niche as a chimp.
Moore says teams fail by staying with the playbook they are good at. A project model in the bowling alley will not repeat, so no ecosystem forms. A solution model in the early market overinvests in one customer, and the visionary pulls you off your roadmap.
The right response is not hard to see. The trouble starts when the market moves on and the team does not. "I have been successful with this playbook, the market has moved to the next phase, but I'm really good at the old playbook"
Moore frames the early-market story as trapped value. Investors want a technology wizard, a working demo and a vision of the value the innovation releases. The world typically gives you about 10% of the value you unlock, so a billion-dollar company needs about $10 billion of trapped value.
Airbnb unlocked people's homes. Uber unlocked the backseat of the car and a free labor force with it.
Moore says product-led growth cannot cross the chasm but excels at expansion. Freemium attracts end users before economic buyers, and telemetry shows what people really do. It shines on Main Street, where the next purchase carries little risk.
Every product-led company, Atlassian included, ends up building a sales team to win enterprise deals. He likens crossing by product alone to curing Covid by leaving vaccines in public places.
Moore reads generative AI through the phase of each use. Microsoft Copilot is a risk-free add-on to Office 365, so it is Main Street. Salesforce's copilots come closest to the tornado.
A specialized pain is a bowling alley use. His example is Khan Academy tuning tutoring for teachers whose classes now span five grade levels after the pandemic.
Moore sees venture money as a way to raise the company's value state. Investors fund you so the next round prices two to three times higher. Great demos and good hires do not count unless the next round prices higher.
Many companies died last year because they assumed there would always be another round. "The purpose of this money is to change the value state of your company."
Moore says you have crossed when you are a going concern that funds itself. A going concern has loyal customers, a partner ecosystem that brings deals, a working CAC and LTV, and an operating model, usually at roughly $10 to $20 million. The test is cash flow positive, not GAAP profit.
You may still raise to chase global dominance, but on your own timeline. Chasm money removes the risk that the company fails, and bowling alley money buys the journey from about $10 million to $100 million.
Moore says to avoid venture capital unless cost or speed forces it. Aim for cash flow break-even, starting with customer-led projects. Raise only if the technology is too expensive to self-fund, such as GPUs and training large language models, or the product will catch fire before you can spend two or three years finding your way.
He notes most VC-funded companies do not work out, and founders often earn less than if they had bootstrapped. "Just because you want to do a startup doesn't mean you need venture capital."
Moore estimates one round can dominate a use case in 18 to 24 months. A severe problem means you sell on value, and the segment is cheap to reach. He says entrepreneurs find it hard to sell a narrow fix, such as third grade math, when their product can do anything.
He calls himself an English major doing math, so he treats the 18 to 24 months as a rough guide.
Moore cites obsessive service as how Figma won its first customer. Figma's team drove back an hour or two after a visit to Coda, then called Krypton and reported the Wi-Fi broken, and fixed it anyway. They also fixed trivial bugs to keep that team happy.
A larger company would say it will put you in the queue.
Moore says life never gets easy after the chasm. The problems only change. Users differ, the platform keeps moving from data center to cloud to Kubernetes to edge AI, and he expects a new headache every week.
He adds that so much software exists that being truly disruptive is less likely.
Moore tells entrepreneurs to aim for a great living and then impact. He thinks being an entrepreneur matters more than ever, because software-enabled technology is at the core of any solution that scales to a world problem. He says to skip billionaire as a goal.
He says he could use $10 million, probably $20 million, but not $100 million. Someone gifted enough to start an original software company is a scarce resource, so don't waste it.
Moore wrote The Infinite Staircase to ground ethics in a secular origin story. The book knits the Big Bang and the Darwinian account into 11 stairs of emerging complexity. It gathers 25 years of his reading, with no original research.
He argues that ethics come from below, from mammals nurturing their young, so values like love are built into us and need not come from a divine creator.