Anthony Pierri 🎸

“Why do I have to pick a niche? Slack didn’t have to pick a niche!” - every founder ever Every startup that’s doing something new faces a challenge when moving from risk-tolerant early adopters to risk-averse mainstream buyers. How do I (the founder) convince the latter to take a bet on my small, unproven company? Unlike early adopters, the early mainstream market wants much more than software. They want: → deep support & documentation → onboarding, training, change management → pre-built integrations → partnerships in their industry → 3rd party support → a fleshed out ecosystem → a compelling use case All these factors reduce the perceived risk of investing time and energy into a startup. This jump from visionaries (who are happy to shoulder the burden of the above list) to the pragmatists (who are not) has been called the “chasm” — a concept popularized by Geoffrey Moore. The traditional path to winning the hearts of the early majority is by picking a niche segment and simply delivering the “whole product” for them (I.e. the software and everything from the list above). The reason you can only do this for one niche at a time is because each segment needs a different set of requirements beyond the software itself — and no small startup can deliver multiple different “whole products” at once. Examples of companies that grew from this strategy are Gusto and Square (as you can hear about in an excellent episode of First Round Capital’s In Depth podcast) and Tesla. However, there is another way that companies cross the chasm: They can borrow credibility from millions and millions of passionate users acquired from a more horizontal PLG approach. It’s one thing to approach a company and say “take a bet on us”… …and another to say “40% of your employees ALREADY use us.” The bottoms up approach has been used very effectively by companies like Notion, Airtable, and Slack. The goal is to get so many users that you’re a household name by the time you approach the majority for more end-to-end adoption. And added benefit — the passionate community effectively creates the “whole product” for you (as we see with the countless user-generated templates, trainings, etc. created by Notion and Airtable users). This second approach requires: 1) a fast time to value for individual and team users 2) that can adopt the product self-serve 3) and be reached through highly leveraged, viral distribution mechanisms 4) and ultimately lead to millions and millions of users #productmarketing #gotomarket #startups