In this solo YouTube presentation, Joshua Fraser explains Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” framework and translates it into actionable steps for modern startup founders. He begins by contrasting early adopters (e.g., iPhone launch line‑waiters) with the mainstream market that needs proven, trustworthy products, and outlines the risk of remaining stuck in the early‑adopter niche. Fraser then illustrates how four well‑known companies successfully crossed the chasm: Duolingo (added gamification, streaks, leaderboards to turn language learning addictive), Shopify (introduced easy‑to‑use templates, one‑click payment processing, and built‑in marketing tools), Zoom (removed friction with web‑based one‑click meetings, superior audio/video quality, and a freemium model), and Discord (expanded from gamer voice chat to community platforms, added text chat, and secured partnerships with Microsoft and OpenAI). For each, he cites growth metrics (e.g., Duolingo’s rise from 3 M to 150 M users, Shopify’s revenue jump from $100 M to $7 B, Zoom’s $60 M to $4.3 B revenue, Discord’s $10 M to $600 M). Fraser distills four core tactics for crossing the chasm: (1) start with a narrowly defined niche of early adopters, (2) make adoption frictionless for the mainstream (freemium, one‑click, gamification), (3) build social proof and trust through KLT (Know‑Like‑Trust) via testimonials, case studies, and high‑profile endorsements, and (4) keep innovating to stay relevant (Kaizen). He wraps up with a concise recap, positions the talk as lesson #13 in his “Hundred Greatest Business Lessons” series, and invites viewers to subscribe, comment, and join his free entrepreneur community.
Chapters
Welcome back, everyday entrepreneurs. I am so excited to talk today about crossing the Chasm. We're going to talk about, like the early adopters of Think about the iPhone. The people who, when the iPhone 29 comes out, are going to wait in line for a week ahead of time to get the iPhone 29, which is full of glitches. I am more of a mainstream buyer myself. Same thing goes with video games, shoes. There's an obsession with this, and those are early adopters. I can think about the early adopters we had for estate as well. I'll never forget when we got State Farm as an early adopter on our program and everyone was willing to work with us after that. It completely changed the game for our business. So a guy named Jeff Moore wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm. It's one of the hardest marketing challenges that any new product faces. It's just good information that has worked in the past with fantastic examples of companies innovating, disrupting and scaling. Let's talk about Crossing the Chasm. We have the early market who loves new technology, and then we have the mainstream market who waits for things to be proven out a little bit. You know, they've been tested, the company is trusted a little bit more, and then they're ready to jump on the bandwagon. And at the very end, you have the laggards who come in very last, you know, the last people that ever sign up for Netflix. Those are the people that we're talking about. So today we're going to go through a handful of real world examples and then just talk about what it actually means to cross the chasm. One of the biggest challenges in marketing that came out of the book was how do you get from early adopters using your product to the mainstream market? And a lot of products fall into obscurity. There are thousands if not millions of products and businesses that are just ideas that could never get outside of the early adopters phase. I think about how estated went through techstars and during techstars, you know, a thousand companies apply to get into that program. Only 10 do. And only out of that 10, one or two are going to end up ever becoming a real company. And I think out of our cohort of 12 companies, there's only three or four that are still sticking around and a couple of them are hanging on by a thread. And so getting from the early adopters to the mass market, that creates the chasm in this. And if your company can't find the mainstream users, it's unlikely it's going to last. And when we get into these examples, I'm going to talk about some of my favorite companies. I love Duolingo. I've been using it for years. It's taught me a ton of cities, Spanish, the way that Du Lingo crossed the chasm. I actually remember this because it was probably in like 2019 and I think I was using it for French then. But the way that they changed was they started introducing these daily streaks. Then they took the gamification further. I could play my little brother in a weekly game of who did the most lessons. And then it was all driven by points and there was a leaderboard that kept me wanting to come back to my app every single day to keep learning. And. And in 2012, Duolingo was still a startup. It was free at the time, but the paid version was very expensive. The only people that were using it were language nerds and students. And there was a free version, but it was clunky and it didn't work as well when they completely changed the game. Going from there in 2013, 3 million users to today having I think over 150 million people on the app and a valuation of over $10 billion. Two was they created gamification to cross the chasm. They made learning almost addictive. I have Duolingo as part of my daily routine as I'm sure anyone else who uses it knows what I'm talking about. So that's how Duolingo crossed that chasm from early adopters into the main market. It was really gamification number two. Shopify one of the greatest Canadian businesses ever built. Initially, when Shopify came out, it was a pretty clunky app. You. You required to have some development or engineers helping you out. If you were just a solopreneur trying to set up a store for your business, you were going to run into some technical challenges no matter what. So what did Shopify do differently that I feel like really changed the game for them? They created easy to use templates for stores that you could just basically look at any other Shopify store and copy the template that they had. The next thing was they added one click payment processing. Getting payment processing for your business, if you're not an entrepreneur yet, can be one of the biggest challenges that you have if you're going to process millions of dollars every year. There's a lot that goes into that. So having a one click shopping system and a billing page that you can just throw into your store makes life a million times easier. And then the last Thing that they do is they built in marketing tools like email marketing, social media marketing. There's a lot of tools within Shopify that you can connect to Google, AdWords or your Facebook ads, or your X ads, or TikTok, whatever it may be. They made this super easy. And that was, you know, I don't remember exactly what year that they really started onboarding like every single store that exists. It was like, we can help any business if you have an online store. We can make it better than what it is right now if you had a custom built out website. And I think in 2013 they did about 100 million in revenue to 2023 they did 7 billion in revenue. And today I think they power like 4 and a half to 4,5 million stores across the Internet. It's insane how massive they've gotten by crossing that chasm. Another great example is Zoom. During the pandemic, everyone freaking lived on Zoom. I remember days I'd be on zoom for like 10 to 12 hours a day. It drove me nuts. But if you rewind Back to like 2013 and you would use Skype or Webex, like I hate WebEx. When RBC, my bank tells me that I need to jump on a Webex call, I just instantly don't want to do it because it's on WebEx. And Skype just didn't have the greatest audio or video quality. But it got the job done. But they were pretty disrupted when Slack came around. And then during the pandemic, Zoom just absolutely took off and it crushed the competition. You were jumping on a Zoom meeting. It was, it was like common language. It's a household name now. And I think for startups we really wanted to have reliable video calls because we weren't together in the office anymore. We weren't having team meetings because we were separated for two years. So that really helped Zoom out. But for Zoom to cross the chasm, originally when they started out with just startups or like really early adopters, to really cross the chasm for them was they had one click to enter the meeting. It was enter your name, enter the meeting. You didn't have to enter an email, you didn't have to download a program. You could do it all web based. It was really easy. The second thing was the first time you ever use Zoom, you probably remembered it because the audio and the video were clearer than any other platform out there, which made it nicer for just like the mainstream users who were going to adopt it. Then the next thing was they had a freemium model Which I haven't talked much about, like the types of different business models yet in the everyday entrepreneur. But deciding on your billing model is crucial in the beginning for every single entrepreneur. And so they had a freemium model where you could join your first meeting or you could have a one hour meeting forever for free. But in 2017, Zoom only had like $60 million in revenue. Considerably smaller company than they are today. In 2023, they did 4.3 billion in revenue. And this is the crazy stat about Zoom. They had over 300 million meetings scheduled almost every single day on Zoom. They removed friction and they made the quality of the product better. We're talking about the last one because I've been using this a lot more in the last couple years of my life and I think it is very disruptive. I think it's better than Slack and I use Google a lot as well. And I do use Telegram a little bit. Primarily I live on WhatsApp because I'm constantly in different countries. But Discord, they started out just for gamers and it was only voice chat. So you were literally just talking to your friends. Kids were talking to their friends on Discord while they were playing video games. Where they crossed the chasm was they started building communities. Then they added their chat feature, and then it was just a general communication app. And then they got some massive partners like Microsoft and OpenAI. And so they went from just being focused on this niche of gamers, which was smart in the beginning, to now it's used for all kinds of businesses. The crypto community loves Discord. It's a really growing business. And I think in 2017 they did about 10 million in revenue. And then in 2023 it was 600 million. And they're over like 175 million active users now. So this business has scaled, it continues to scale, and I think it's going to continue to get a lot bigger. So how do you cross the chasm successfully? Number one, you have to start with a niche. Start with the smallest group of early adopters that you can find. A specific group. You have to grow from there. You have to start to get your first customer, your second customer. It's the most important thing you as a founder and entrepreneur will have to do. Like it is stated, once we got State Farm and Walmart and, and we work with a handful of big companies, then we could go to mainstream and be like, look who we work with. We made this free version of our API. You can look up property data in a handful of clicks and it's easier than any other product in the market. That's what ultimately led us to getting acquired. But we started with a very specific niche. We only wanted to work with insurance companies and provide them with data for valuing homes if you know, emergency happens in them. Number two is make adoption easy to the mainstream. You think about the freemium model with Zoom. You think about the one click payment stuff with Shopify, you think about the gamification with Duolingo. All of these things make it easier for people in the mainstream to, you know, download your app for the first time, buy the first products from you. That's the whole point of this. Number three is you need to build social proof and trust. I yell this from roof atops to businesses that I work with. KLT no like trust. If you want to build a really big business, you have to build know like trust at the bottom line. It's like a foundation of the business. People are not going to trust you if they don't know like and trust you. You need to be out there, you need to share. So you have to take a risk. But the mainstream market needs the proof and so you have to be able to showcase what you built and why it's better than everything else out there. So you can have testimonials, you can have case studies, you can have endorsements from other companies, you can get investors. There's a plethora of ways to do this, and the last but not least is that you always have to keep innovating. If you saw the last video that I made called the Innovator's Dilemma, I talk all about this. If you want to stay relevant and continue scaling and growing, you got to stay productive. You got to keep moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other every single day. And it never really ends in entrepreneurship. But if you love it like I do, it's not really that hard of a thing to do. So to kind of recap all of this for you, crossing that chasm will be one of the most critical and stressful stages of your life. But it's necessary for you to become successful. So you got to find the early adopters who love your product. You got to make it easy for the mainstream to actually start using your product. Then you got to build trust and credibility. And then you got to keep evolving, innovating and growing Kaizen to stay relevant. I think this is number 13 of the hundred greatest business lessons. I've been working on this list really, really hard. It's all going to be given away for free. The only thing I want to do is is hopefully help one entrepreneur learn one thing from one of these hundred videos. If you implement one of these things in your business in the next year, I really hope it makes your business better, makes your life easier, and you can be a happy, healthy human. If you like this, subscribe, leave a comment below and join our everyday entrepreneur school community. It's all free.
