Moore's claim is that a category grows in jumps. It passes through four inflection points. At each one, the customer changes so much that the motion which just worked becomes the wrong one. Most founders experience this as a mystery. Same pitch. Same team. Same product. It lands worse than last quarter, out of nowhere.
There are four phases. The early market. The bowling alley. The tornado. Main street. Crossing the chasm is the passage into the second. The tornado arrives when the reason people buy flips from believing your vision to wanting what their peers already have.
1
Early market
Visionaries and technology enthusiasts, buying the vision. There is no budget line for you, so an executive sponsor has to create the funding. Every deal is bespoke and service heavy, because no partner ecosystem exists yet. The model is a project, even if what you sell is a product.
2
Bowling alley
Pragmatists whose current workaround is poor and getting worse. Budget exists, but the workaround already claims it. So you have to redirect it. The model is a solution. You sell it on the problem rather than the product, then extend it to adjacent segments through references and partners.
3
Tornado
The category goes horizontal and budgets appear everywhere at once. Now you want broad sales coverage, a standard product and share. A department that buys from you first tends to stay with you.
4
Main street
The market has commoditized the product, and the budget is annual. Moore's point about this century is that services become the new place of innovation. Taxis existed for a hundred years before Uber converted the product into a service. Tornado is the land, main street is the expand.
