Crossing the Chasm

I just finished reading 'Crossing the Chasm' by Geoffrey A. Moore. It is one of those books that you hear a lot about in the high-tech industry and especially in MBA programs (well mine anyway). One of my co-workers even mentioned that it was 'required' reading for everyone at one of his former companies. While I wouldn't call this a 'must read' for anyone in the high-tech industry, I did get a lot of take aways related to product management, marketing and general product strategy that I felt like sharing.

The general concept of the book revolves around bringing high-tech products to the market. His observation is that most products will have a fair amount of success initially with early adopters but consistently struggle making the leap across the 'chasm' to be accepted by the mainstream consumer. Even though the book was written in 1991 (updated in 1999) it still holds very true today; so many products especially in the more recent 'Web 2.0' boom never make it over the chasm and become adopted by the mainstream. I would even argue that recentl successful offerings such as Twitter and Facebook have still not truly crossed the chasm in terms of becoming accepted and used by the mainstream Internet 'consumer'.

What I really liked about the book was his strategy for actually creating and delivering a product that can cross the chasm; by choosing a 'beachhead' target market and aggressively positioning your product to attack that market. It really got me interested since I have been more and more interested in Product Management as a career path. I can think of so many products that I've been involved with which are great technical ideas but struggle to really address the needs of any specific target user. This book give some great concrete examples of how to find your 'beachhead' market and then go after it with a 'whole product' solution.

Another aspect of the book which I liked was his skepticism of quantitative market data for unknown and new markets. The example he uses: "It will be a billion dollar market in 1995. If we only get 5 percent of the market ..." struck me because I've seen others using that same logic and been tempted to use it myself in analyzing markets and industry for business plans. He gives some good examples of how to use market data (and lack of it) to make a 'high risk low data decision' as to what market is best to attack.

My only real gripe with the book is that the examples are getting rather dated so its tough to even recall who those companies are (most have gone under or been acquired) at this point without looking them up. Also I'm not sure the chapter on sales and distribution channels is really applicable today particularly for Internet based products.

All in all I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to anyone starting a business or developing strategy for new products. This will definitely be one that I keep on my shelf to read again throughout my career.

My Summer Vacation

So I remember doing one of these as a kid for school and thought it'd be a good thing to do before my brief respite from classes is over in two months.

1. Post Guides to GuideSpot
   We released GuideSpot.com in the beginning of this year but I have yet to really get into actually using it by creating some guides. Feels like when you are constantly fixing bugs and adding features sometimes you can get disconnected from how the site actually gets used. I want to re-visit my 'Guide to Denver Brews' and add a guide about the process of building my arcade cabinet.
   
2. Blog Once a Week
   The all too common 'I got too busy to post' definitely applies here. Since I have some time off I want to post a bit about some of the things I've learned in classes over the past months and projects I've been working on.
3. Read at Least Two Books
   I have 'Crossing the Chasm' about a third of the way read so I want to finish that. Also want to finish 'Good to Great' and 'The Omnivores Dilemma' before I head back to classes.
4. Re-write my Resume
   My resume hasn't been overhauled since I was leaving my first job over three years ago. I want to get it a bit less technical and more product focused so when I get closer to graduation I have something ready.
5. Continue Taking Photos
   I got a new Nikon D40 camera a few weeks ago and have taken some interesting (to me) photos with it so far but want to keep getting out and experimenting with it. Hopefully that will give me some good experience before I head out to Denmark for my study abroad program in June. I'm tacking going camping at least twice on to this one and hopefully hiking as well.
6. Run Three Times a Week
   I've gotten started with this already but I want to continue running so I can shed some of the pounds I've gained doing work and school non-stop for the past year and a half.
   

Well thats about it, hopefully this post will be a good place to revisit my goals and see if I can meet them all while I'm out of classes.

Welcome Mat

So classes ended last night; our group did a presentation on a new product concept for my company Local Matters. It went really well, even got a few good ideas for the product from my classmates and professor. However, I think we could have done a bit better in two areas:

• Market Size - We had some rough numbers of number of movers but didn't go into how many Realtors were out there. We also didn't project how much of the market we hoped to capture in order for the product to be viable.
  
• Financials - I think having a break even point and also some idea of how that equates to market capture rates would be good. Also some specific monitization numbers as far as what we would expect to charge realtors, how much ad revenue we could expect for each product in the customers hands.

I might try and work on these items a bit more as I have time. Almost seems like one could take this idea and spin it off into a company!

Slogan for 2008

With a recession on the horizon I think we need a new slogan for 2008:


Forget another rate cut...

Colt 45... "It works every time!"

Go back to bed, America

So I saw a commercial for the new American Gladiators coming soon to NBC (with Hulk Hogan as host no less, he must need some money for legal fees):

I found it greatly amusing, and thought back to this clip by Bill Hicks:

Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America - you are free to do what well tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!

Show me the Gold

So today Alan Greenspan came out with some statements as to how he would handle this current housing 'crisis'. His solution:

"Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this," Mr Greenspan said. "It's far less damaging to the economy to create a short-term fiscal problem, which we would, than to try to fix the prices of homes or interest rates. If you do that, it'll drag this process out indefinitely."

Then in this same statement he says the following:

He said he was "most concerned" about the risk of inflation moving up, particularly over the medium term, and said it was "critically important that the Fed is allowed politically to do what it has to do" to keep inflation down.

Is it just me or are those two comments completely contradictory? So we should print some more money up to help homeowners and at the same time fight inflation? And on top of all that, its really Greenspan that started this mess. So Greenspan, what happens when the money we hand out to these people is worth half its value in 6 months?

This type of logic, combined with how linked the market has become to these Fed decisions should really be a wake up call. Sadly I don't think we'll get that until we are at a point where the damage is irreversible. Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it? Oh wait, the same thing is happening with our environment...

On another note, check out Tea Party 2007 today!

Apparently today is a bad day for the Financial Sector as evidenced by my Google Finance widget:

I knew the sub-prime situation was bad but damn! ;)