Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

**Geoffrey Moore** (0:00)
The tendency when you're in the chasm is, I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find, right?
Because we need revenue, right? It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log.
It's not like the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, a little crumpled up paper, and you hold the match one place until the fire starts. And that's why adjacency is so important. If you like the fire, the piece of kindling is here, but the log is, you know, in the other room, that doesn't work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:32)
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 to 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.
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Geoffrey Moore, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Geoffrey Moore** (4:07)
Well, it's nice to be here Lenny, and thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:09)
It's incredibly cool to have you on. You've been at the top of my wish list of guests to have on this podcast ever since I launched it. It's kind of surreal to be chatting with you, and it almost feels like maybe this podcast has crossed the chasm now that you're on.