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Crossing The Chasm

Know which side of the chasm you're on — and run the playbook that gets you across.

How it works

A corpus-grounded GTM engine over a shared tech-adoption-lifecycle backbone, drafted from Geoffrey Moore's canon (Crossing the Chasm / Inside the Tornado, the Four Gears model). Two modes: diagnose reads where you sit on the High-Tech Market Development curve and scores the Four Gears; playbook runs the beachhead → whole-product → bowling-alley sequence to cross.

You bring

{ mode: diagnose|playbook, product, traction? }

You get

diagnose → { stage, stage_evidence[], gear_scores[], weakest_gear, recommended_motion } · playbook → { stage_placement, chasm_diagnosis, beachhead, whole_product_gaps[], bowling_alley[] } — cited to Moore's constructs

Use it for

See it work

example output

Mode: playbook · product: an AI code-review SaaS with strong early-adopter buzz that isn't converting to enterprise.

Crossing the Chasm — playbook

Product: an AI code-review SaaS; loved by early-adopter dev teams, but the pipeline stalls at enterprise. Mode: playbook. Corpus-grounded, cited to Geoffrey Moore's constructs.

Stage placement

At the chasm. Visionary/early-adopter traction (bottom-up dev signups, enthusiast champions) has not converted into pragmatist, whole-team standardization. Classic early-market-to-mainstream gap.

Chasm diagnosis

Early adopters buy a change agent and tolerate rough edges; pragmatists buy a proven, complete solution with references. Your champions can't drag a risk-averse org over the line alone — the pragmatist pipeline stalls because there's no dominant reference segment yet.

Beachhead (D-Day target)

  • Segment: mid-size fintech engineering orgs (200–800 devs).
  • Target customer: the platform/DevEx lead accountable for code quality and audit trails.
  • Compelling reason to buy: regulated code review with an auditable trail — a "must," not a "nice."

Whole-product gaps (Levitt/Moore)

  • generic: core AI review works — covered.
  • expected: SOC 2, SSO/SAML, role-based access — gap, table-stakes for the beachhead.
  • augmented: CI/CD + ticketing integrations, policy-as-code controls — gap.
  • potential: benchmarking + compliance reporting across teams — future.

Bowling alley (adjacent segments in sequence)

  1. Healthcare/health-tech eng orgswhy adjacent: same audit/compliance buying logic.
  2. Public-sector contractorswhy adjacent: the security story transfers directly.
  3. Large enterprise platform teamswhy adjacent: the toppled regulated segments become the references that de-risk the broad market (toward the tornado).

Cited to Moore: Technology Adoption Life Cycle, the chasm, Whole Product, bowling alley.

Run it on your data

Call it on your own inputs — over the API, or hand it to your AI agent via MCP. Discovery is open; running it is metered.

REST  POST /api/bicycle/crossing-the-chasm
MCP   crossing_the_chasm

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