Book · How companies get built
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore · 1991
Why products that delight early adopters so often fail to reach the mainstream — written in 1991 and still the best explanation of a failure mode angels see constantly.
Why it is here
The central observation is that early adopters and the mainstream market want fundamentally different things: the first group wants a breakthrough and will tolerate roughness, the second wants a complete, safe solution to a familiar problem. The gap between them is where an enormous number of promising companies stall.
For an angel this maps precisely onto a specific diligence situation: a company with enthusiastic early customers, excellent qualitative feedback, and growth that has quietly flattened. The question is not whether the product is good but whether the next group of buyers wants the same thing.
The examples are decades old and the mechanism is not. If anything it is more relevant now, because the early-adopter population for technology products is larger and therefore takes longer to exhaust.
Read it if
You are looking at a company whose early customers love it and whose growth has slowed.
Skip it if
You need contemporary examples to stay engaged — this one requires patience with 1990s technology.