Crossing the Chasm
Technology adoption lifecycle and go-to-market
Navigate the technology adoption lifecycle and cross the chasm from early adopters to mainstream market. Based on Geoffrey Moore's framework, this skill helps your AI agent craft go-to-market strategies for each adoption phase.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/crossing-the-chasm --global 
Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore View on Amazon
02 What it is
What is the Crossing the Chasm skill?
Crossing the Chasm gives your AI agent Geoffrey Moore’s book as a field manual for the moment early-adopter momentum stops converting. It locates your product on the adoption lifecycle, picks a beachhead segment narrow enough to dominate, specifies the whole product pragmatists require, and rewrites positioning for buyers who want a solution rather than a vision.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from Crossing the Chasm — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
Reach for it when
Early adopters signed enthusiastically, and the next tier of buyers keeps asking for references you can’t produce.
Sales is chasing six verticals at once and has not won completely in any single one of them.
Deals stall on “who else in our industry runs this?” rather than on price or missing features.
Your pitch still leads with the technology, and cautious buyers hear risk where you hear advantage.
Reach for something else when
The category is crowded and you’d rather sidestep the fight. Blue Ocean Strategy redraws the competitive factors.
Your product only works once other users show up. Cold Start Problem is built for network launches.
You can’t yet say what you are or who you beat. Obviously Awesome settles positioning first.
The plan you’re executing is a goal list with no diagnosis. run Good Strategy Bad Strategy first.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Identify where my product is on the adoption lifecycle using crossing-the-chasm skill
Define a beachhead segment strategy for crossing the chasm using crossing-the-chasm skill
Create a whole product plan for our target segment using crossing-the-chasm skill
Reposition our messaging for early majority pragmatists using crossing-the-chasm skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Four Strategy & Growth skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Strategy & Growth skills08 Questions
Before you install.
How do I install the Crossing the Chasm skill?
Run npx skills add wondelai/skills/crossing-the-chasm --global. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Crossing the Chasm skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.
Which book is the Crossing the Chasm skill based on?
It packages Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore — silicon Valley's top go-to-market strategist for 30+ years. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering the technology adoption lifecycle, the chasm and beachhead segment. It sits in the Strategy & Growth part of the library.
What is the chasm, exactly?
It is a gap in who the buyers are, not in how many. Early adopters buy a vision and accept an unfinished product as the price of a head start. The early majority buys a proven solution, wants references from companies that look like theirs, and treats going first as a risk. Your existing customer list carries almost no weight across that boundary, which is why momentum evaporates right after your best quarter.
How is this different from the Blue Ocean Strategy skill?
Blue Ocean asks which market you should be in; Crossing the Chasm asks how to win the one you have already entered, and in what order. Blue Ocean reconstructs an industry’s competitive factors so rivals stop mattering. Moore assumes the category exists and treats your problem as sequencing — which single segment to own completely, and what has to be true before the mainstream will buy. Reach for this one when you have paying early adopters and stalled growth.
Do I need to have read Crossing the Chasm first?
No. The skill carries the working parts: the lifecycle segments and how each buys, the criteria for scoring a beachhead, the whole-product checklist, and the language shift that mainstream buyers respond to. What the book adds is the target-customer characterization work and the long worked examples that teach you to recognise a stalling market before the numbers say so. The page links the current edition if you want it.
Does this apply outside enterprise technology?
It fits best where buying is considered, referenced, and risky — enterprise software, hardware, regulated tools — because that is the world Moore built it from. The lifecycle logic still travels to consumer products with real switching costs, but beachhead selection assumes identifiable segments whose members talk to each other. If your growth comes from users attracting other users rather than from references, Cold Start Problem describes your situation better.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install Crossing the Chasm, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/crossing-the-chasm --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account