Why take niche-and-next approach to cross the chasm?

Challenges to cross the chasm

1. Lack of customers
2. Existing customer’s payment cannot cover the next period
3. Unaligned demands from different visionaries
4. Competitions from alternatives
5. Unsatisfaction from investors

Analogy to Invasion of Normandy

Analogy: it’s aggression, as the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, Our long-term goal is to take over the mainstream market that is currently dominated by an entrenched competitor.

Solution: focus on a niche market that is

1. Readily achievable
2. Leverage-able for long-term success

If we do not take the niche, we do not worry about our next targets.

Why niche-and-next strategy?

The niche-and-next strategy is counterintuitive and thus hard to stick to. If we do not adhere to it, it is like lighting a fire without kindling.

Reference-able customers are satisfied ones

It is ==fatal== to be a sales-driven company; our company should be a market-driven one. Unfortunately, following this strategy takes discipline because leaders can hardly resist the temptation to make short-term money.

The sole goal of the company at this stage should be creating a pragmatist customer base that is reference-able for the mainstream markets.

To achieve the goal, we must ==ensure the first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives with the whole product — a generic product that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy.== The key indicator of this effort is the word-of-mouth reputation among buyers.

Be a niche market leader to sell to pragmatists

Another reason to be niche focused is that we need to achieve market leadership because pragmatists customers want to buy from market leaders. However, you are small and are still crossing the chasm, so the only available strategy is to take a “big fish, small pond” approach.