By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC How can anyone fail to have noticed the sudden prominence of videoconferencing app Zoom since the outbreak of the Coronavirus crisis? Despite facing established competitors like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook in consumer video-calling and Cisco…
Case Study – The rapid rise of mobile banking startup Clairmail By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC “Chasm crossing is not the end, but rather the beginning, of mainstream market development.” “Entering the mainstream market is an act of burglary,…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Among the thirty founder-CEOs of tech scaleups with whom I have worked over the past year or so, I’ve noticed that a disturbingly high percentage are experiencing or exhibiting signs of burnout, sufficient in…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC “To win a race, the swiftness of a dart Availeth not without a timely start. The hare and tortoise are my witnesses. Said tortoise to the swiftest thing that is, “I’ll bet that you’ll not…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC One Problem to Avoid at All Costs: Premature Scaling Today there is an abundance of incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and VC firms to help founding teams avoid the many risks of failure and take full…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Picture the following customer success story. In parallel, note the various dimensions in which the relationship between vendor and customer expands. Further down, I summarize the six possible dimensions in which you may be able…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC One story of visionary buying behavior that I think still sums up the difference between how visionaries behave when responding to disruptive innovations is the tale of how Dell Computer changed the competitive dynamics in…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Altogether now: Applications come first, platform comes second. Not the other way around! In your marketing, on your website, or in front of customers, “platform” is practically a suicidal term until customers have shown that…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Ever since the advent of cheap and plentiful capital following the global financial crisis, a new business model has gradually muscled its way to the forefront, in many cases supplanting the conventional B2C — business…
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC At this point early in the new year, chances are that you’re either (still) celebrating after closing some of the large enterprise sales deals that you had in your Q4 pipeline, or lamenting one or…