Geoffrey Moore: evaluation

Transcript context

The tendency when you're in the chasm is, "I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find," because we need revenue. It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. It's not going to light the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, little crumpled up paper, and you hold the match in one place until the fire starts. That's why adjacency is so important. If you light the fire, the piece of kindling is here, but the log is in the other room. That doesn't work. 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, it still feels like people continue to reinvent many of the lessons that Geoffrey uncovered and shared in a 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 lifecycle, 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 at 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 everyone. 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. They do popups 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.…

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