The Chasm - a Bit of Security for July 11, 2024

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Crossing the Chasm
A Bit of Security for July 11, 2024
Geoffery Moore published “Crossing the Chasm” in 1991. It’s now in its third edition. What’s he talking about? The gap between the early adopter coterie and the wider market. Getting your organization’s message out to that wider market space is a very difficult challenge for a start-up. We’ll discuss how to make that leap.
IT start-ups begin with a cool technological capability. Once that initial proto-product works (to some extent) the developer looks for an environment to try it out. A very early adopter may hear about it in a discussion forum, or from a post on social media, but most often it’s word of mouth from the developers and their immediate contacts that get the prototype installed somewhere. At that point, the developer confronts the first gap – between what the thing does and what it’s for. At that point, the developer has to think deeply about the value of the tool or product in customer terms. And if the developers cannot do that, the product will go approximately nowhere.
I worked at one start-up that had a really great idea, a form of an editor that could run remotely in many different environments, with logging. Imagine you get the opportunity to spend two minutes with the CIO of a company. Her’s your elevator pitch: “Hi! I’ve got a universal editor with logging! Want to buy it?” The CIO says, “Here’s one minute and forty-five seconds back. No.”
The company took a deep think session to figure out what problem lots of IT organizations had, which this product could actually help with. Here’s the revised elevator pitch: “Lots of organizations have many users running on lots of kinds of platforms, locally and remotely. It could help solve a lot of problems to be able to securely edit all these identities, figure out which ones were legitimate, which ones were obsolete, and which ones brought some unnecessary risk. We can solve that.” CIO says, “Tell me more.”
The biggest problem a start-up has is communicating the business value of the product to the non-technical buyer. This applies to prospects and to prospective investors. If you can’t explain why your product will help a business solve a problem, all the technical doo-dads don’t mean a thing. At some point, you ay encounter someone in the organization who wants to know the secret sauce, and you may choose to reveal some of what the magic is, but that’s not the discussion you want to have. The last thing a vendor should do is invite a feature-by-feature comparison of their brand-new offering against field-tested, work-hardened technology that someone already has familiarity with. At some point, the buyer may seek out alternatives. You should understand your market. You should have a SWOT analysis for future product development, for discussions with potential investors, and for strategic grounding, But a SWOT analysis is not a sales tool.
To cross the chasm, build a bridge of understanding, fortified with customer testimonials, to illustrate the business value of the product. Simple words and clear concepts will get you far.
Crossing the Chasm
A Bit of Security for July 11, 2024
How does a start-up reach a wider potential audience? It takes hard work. You have to build a simple, clear story of the business problem you solve, then solve it. Listen to this -
Let me know what you think in the comments below or at wjmalik@noc.social
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