Ramit Sethi explains why tech products succeed with early adopters but fail with mainstream customers: mainstream buyers need proof from people like them, creating a chicken-and-egg problem. Jeffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" maps the customer segments and how to bridge the gap.
So this is a great book. It's probably more relevant for tech companies. But Jeff Moore describes this great phenomenon where he describes that a lot of products are able to secure early adopters or sign up early adopter customers. People who are on the cutting edge. People who want the DVD for their preschooler because they only want to have the latest DVD or someone who wants to buy a piece of software because they always want to be on the cutting edge. So there are these early adopter customers, then they're the more mainstream, the laggard customers. People who won't buy something until they're social proof their peers have bought it. They don't necessarily want to be on the cutting edge. They want to make sure it works. They don't want to use anything that has bugs or isn't going developed. And there's a chasm between early adopter clients and mainstream clients. And the reason that's such a difficult chasm to cross and why many sales trajectories plateau at a certain point after they sign up early doctors but are not able to sign up mainstream customers is because mainstream customers only want to buy products if there are other referenceable customers. They want to see testimonials and references from people like them. So they don't want to call the early adopter and say, hey, how do you like this product is working out for you? Because they don't. They distrust the early adopter because the early adopter is an early adopter. So they want to talk to other mainstream customers to hear how their product experience works. But how do you get a mainstream customer until there are other mainstream customers? The chicken egg, bunch of. So you describe that problem. So there is. So I do think. I don't know if this is a specific question, but there is a phenomenon I think when starting businesses and selling products where you can sign up a lot of early adopter clients but you're not able to cross into the mainstream. So I recommend Jeffrey Moore, his follow up book that describes that and how to solve that problem. I'd recommend going to my delicious tag marketing and looking at a bunch of tactics there as well. You tackle the strategy side of it, which is super critical, especially if this is a serious business, especially technology business. And then you look at the tactics as to what can I do creatively for quick wins.
