The whole truth about the Abyss model: Early markets and how to be if you made a mistake

Abyss model

Hello everyone, I would like to talk about such a thing as the Model of the abyss, Jeffrey Moore, who is known to many, but I would like to give examples and talk about the nuances of the model.



Now, wherever you look, all have become scientists: they have stocked up with literature, they read the Internet. Do not ask anyone, and they know about the technology adoption curve, and in general they understand everything: “... yes, we know! There are innovators, early followers, there is an early market, and there is a late one, renegades and ruffians — well, where would it be without them? Yes, there is a gulf between the early and main markets, which needs to be jumped! ”They know. Jump. Only, it happens, dive. And why? Because the summary was read, and the contents were not mastered. Therefore, I wrote this note. The point is that the important things you need to know about the model of the Abyss do not always lie on the surface.





Immediately make a reservation - the model works only with innovations that interrupt the usual way of life . If these improvements are linear, and in no way change your usual way of life - the model is guaranteed not to work.

Here is an example: the Nestle company produces new, unrealistically tasty low-calorie flakes! Of course, this is a cool and tasty product, but you both had breakfast and will have breakfast in the morning. War, as they say, war, and food on schedule. You will buy this new pack, but your world will not change. Breakfast will get better or tastier - yes, but for the world to change - it’s very doubtful.

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Or let's say we talk about things like Google Glass. Or remember the release of the iPhone in 2008. Agree, Jobs gave the world a good kick. The iPhone has completely changed the attitude and approach to mobile devices: it can “make” your day: you become more maneuverable, more productive, easier to lift. Similarly, the concept of Google Glass will change your perception of the world with augmented reality. You may no longer have to be in the office all the time, or your way of communication will change drastically. We will have to change a lot in our usual life, start doing something differently, not like before, this is good and bad at the same time. On the one hand, Wow, on the other hand, not quite in the current concept of your life - sometimes annoying :). This is called interrupting innovation.



One of the most important ideas that I would like to convey, which is carried by Jeffrey Moore, is that the market is not very stable .

- The market, that is, it is not there, that is, it is not there again, then ... and so on.

- Abysses exist not only between early followers and the early majority.



That is, do you understand? Then you are rich, then no, then again, just found a niche, again something went wrong - this is our limitation, it will always be so. We must accept it.

As I said before, Moore described that the markets you are entering are segmented and in order to release a product, we must take into account the interests of the current segment and use different strategies.



In this article I will try to describe in detail what is happening in the Early Market, something Moore talked about, something personally from me.

Early markets:

Innovators => Technological enthusiasts

What an enthusiast thinks about products and how to feed him:

- Do not care how it looks product;

- The technology itself is important;

- To give cheaply or conditionally free of charge, under the NDA;

- Need feedback;

- Joint improvements;



First, it’s just a pleasure to deal with such people. They do not refuse to help themselves and are well versed in the subject of conversation. But under two conditions:

- You must have a breakthrough innovation.

“It should not be expensive, for these geek enthusiasts still believe in free nishtyaki.” No need to upset them. In general, advice from your own experience: do not be afraid to give a lot for free. This creates an image of self-confident people who know what they are earning. When day X comes and those who once came to you for free "nishtyak", finally get rich, they will surely remember you and buy the product. Or, if the day X never comes, and they do not get rich, they will always feel the deepest gratitude. And on occasion, not once or twice will tell about you.



The second thing you can get from enthusiasts is the exits to the “big people.” If they have the right connections, they can help you with a recommendation. Concluding the topic of enthusiasts, I will stress - these are poor, but in their own way ingenious people. Therefore, it makes no sense to make money on them, but they are a reliable source of the first improvements.

Early followers => Seers

They do not need evolution. They need a revolution or a nuclear breakthrough. These guys firmly believe in technology and want to somehow use it for their personal purposes. Look at people who are young enough, but at the same time a couple of years as they occupy a management position. They are always ahead of the locomotive, they always need the most. And they will be the first to shake their companies to try your innovation. These guys have a “Dream” with a capital M.



This may be HR, who wants to put English learning to a new level and will require investing company budgets in services like Livemocha or Duolingo.



As soon as you understand what this market segment lives in, you can earn your first money.

Danger! Early followers

Important!!! Remember, these guys are easy to sell the idea, but then it is very difficult to please. They are dreamers. So do not try to do everything - today's strategy may be rejected tomorrow with a new one. Do not speak too harshly - it infuriates them and is certainly perceived as an attempt to "close" the bare wires with their own hands :)



Two such rules will always work with such explosive dreamers: a safe environment and the sequence of results delivery. Though they are visionaries, they are not fools. For them fit things associated with piloting. Try to improve the part, not all at once: introduce innovation into the department or automate a specific business process.



Tip: if your business is related to automating someone, and this is your first contract, offer a phased, project work. Do not try to tell everything in one breath and sell everything. Here you can help Agile-approach. If you have a web service, use the Trial period model (everything is free and available, but limited time is a sort of demo version of the full functionality). Do not use Freemium (limited functionality in the free version). Create a safe environment for early followers. Work "tightly" and consult for free. Remember: the success of their implementation is identical to the success of your company.

Early Followers - Pushers

Another important point. There is such a subspecies as the early followers - pushers. You will recognize them at once by two simple signs. They, pardon, awl in the ass - this is the first. And second, if they started using your product (whether b2b or b2c is important), they have everything urgently and seven Fridays in the week. Sometimes they promise a lot of money for speed and monstrous late fees (“we will not pay” or “we will leave you”). Exhale - you make the product for most, not just your first customers. Here it is useful to remember about Agile and Lean thinking. Every time you are forced, check yourself by checking the checklist:

- Can mere mortals work 40 hours a week?

- What the client asks you is useful only for him or does he add value to your product too?

- Do not forget, on the basis of the first two points, that every new increase in your product should be of benefit to the client (perhaps, just not to the extent that the early follower was “noticing”).

How to find early followers?

You can search for them, but this is a bad idea. The search for the seer is a pull of reality behind the ears. On the one hand, the real seers must find you themselves. Just be available. Let the whole world know about your work. There is an opinion, especially in Russia (most likely, an echo of the Soviet mentality and the Cold War), that you need to be as closed and top-secret as possible, otherwise the evil competitor will take your idea and the business will surely be bent. In fact, it is not. I personally ruined two startups due to complete conspiracy. It is difficult to work (and even harder to find customers) if it is impossible to know about you. Keep a blog, participate in social life! Tell about problems and methods of solving them, report on successes and achievements, announce plans for the future. Create a reason to find you.



On the other hand, they are called seers for a reason. As a rule, these guys or "graze" in a near-business get-together, where they contact technology enthusiasts (be it a technical director, the smartest technical engineer or systems engineer), or communicate with geeks obsessed with gadgets (if we are talking about technology b2c market). Often, seers receive information about new features from there. Therefore, it is important to build good relationships with the first type of early market.

Common mistakes with early markets

If you have done what I described above correctly, then the market will unfold in that very state of “The market is there.” But! As always, there are typical mistakes. I would even say - demotivators that make young innovators / entrepreneurs turn around and run from the market. In the modern approach, many have begun to use the word Pivot - turn (inspired by the Lean Startup crowd). That is, your idea is simply deployed on the market, the startup "does not take off." Below we will talk about typical Pivot in early markets and how to live with it, what to do with it.

Sales did not go.

For example, a company is a complete layman in marketing. They are not lucky, and they have no experienced marketer from a successful IT-company. This is quite normal for the current start-up industry (and for me as well - I have experience, but every time I retrospect that I did something on a whim and it happens, which is not quite right). Of course, sometimes this is due to the inexperience of employees, but if it is honest ... If you sell a revolution every time, and nobody has done this before you, then even the most venerable marketer will not help. And the point here is not that you do not know how to “push” your product. The fact is that you are trying to sell something wrong! In the wrong place at the wrong time.

What to do:

Recall the principle of Guy Julius Caesar: "It is better to be first in the village than the last in Rome." Just look for a smaller segment. If pride convinces that you are a big fish and this pond is too small for you, remember the golden words - there will be the largest fish for every fish. Everything is relative. To enjoy the size, either grow in breadth (which is difficult in the early markets), or choose a smaller reservoir.



Swim in a small pond, gain weight and think about how to move to a bigger pond.

Remember: if sales do not go - it does not mean that there is no market (Well, that is, it happens, of course :), but it is still worth proving). This means that your path will not be as bright and sparking as Facebook, Kaspersky and the like. Your path will be thorny and will require a lot of strength, but it can lead to the same tremendous success, which marked Zuckerberg and his company. And we should not forget that nobody has canceled the strategy of forcing “reservoirs”. Think in advance what your route will be - from the pond to the lake, from the lake to the sea, from the sea to the ocean ... (I don’t say what it will be exactly as you come up, but if you don’t think, it will not be how) Otherwise you can stay in the pond for a long time and watch it dry out.

Phantom products.

Despite the fact that the Abyss model has existed for about 25 years now, right now there are a lot of such problematic products. Most of them are led by people brought up by Stephen Blank and his student Eric Rees, who promote the topics Customer Development and Lean Start Up. Call for validation of ideas as early as possible, as in the cases of Customer Development in the book of Steve Blanca. His moral, “Don't start developing a product until a customer arrives,” certainly works fine in all cases with Enterprise Solutions, but it creates a set of problems that are deadly for other markets.

What is going on?

An entrepreneur, as we said just above, sells the “Dream” to an early follower. Sells prospect! And he, an early follower, buys it. But the stage of work with technology enthusiasts is not worked out , and many questions about the development of this product are not prepared. A good entrepreneur may be able to get out on one or two pilots for his customers, but ... as relations with the market develop, such untested approaches will invariably slow down the company. As a result, the solution created during the piloting phase cannot be called a scalable and replicable product. Even despite the fact that you are strongly focused on the needs of the customer, it is unlikely to provide you with a good recommendation.

What to do:

Russian national hockey team in 2013 for the first time

in the history of the national team with a bang lost the United States with a score of 8: 3.

To the journalists' question about the reasons for the loss, the captain of the Russian national team answered:

“I don’t know what to say to you ... We are crap!”

- First of all, stick your ego entrepreneur away. Admit your mistakes, lost money and, most importantly, confess the fact to your investors!

- Look at the product. Assess what has already been developed (not so important, whether it is a code base or a methodological guide) and understand how to make a small product out of it. Let not the whole "Dream", but to solve a specific client problem.

Life has cracked.

Or here's the situation: you have already released a product, technical enthusiasts have accepted it and helped to improve it, but for early followers it is not possible to develop a sufficient set of capabilities that Dream has formed in it, and they are already waiting and dreaming what kind of breakthrough this will provide them. This is the same quantum market, but here it is not. That seems to be, but no. Enthusiasts and early followers crack. Still not gone, but already a crack.



What happens next? People put a couple of trial versions of your product, but do not undertake to completely switch to this system. Since a breakthrough effect is no longer expected, our Seers think more about risks than on profits. This leads to the fact that the company either completely collapses sales, or drift at the level of self-sufficiency.

What to do:

As in all other cases, the entrepreneur's ego is his only enemy in saving the company. Begin to think soberly and fight the desire to continue to do "my offspring, I wanted to see him like this." I have already spoken about products that interrupt and not interrupt the usual way. But he did not say that if your product is interrupting, this does not make it brilliant. If he has a non-revolutionary character - accept this, take a secondary position in the market and become an addition to current services, using the channels of real leaders. If your product is a revolution, then get down from the skies of cool technologies and solve at least one real problem with your product. Prove that your Revolution is good enough to turn the market over to market use.



Example AlternativePlatform company:

Company AlternativePlatform, Perm. Started as a technology company. I developed an engine that allows you to do three-dimensional graphics and implement business logic on the client side - in a browser with Flash support. The product is really revolutionary, changing the way both game developers and experienced users. The main idea was to develop technology and sell licenses. The world of geeks and technology enthusiasts accepted this idea, a startup from Perm was supported by Adobe itself. However, sales did not grow, investors' money was running out, the crisis of 2008 aggravated the situation. The company “stopped” and thought: “What else can be done on our super-revolutionary technology?”. I thought and made a project called TankiOnline.com, which brings tens of millions of dollars a year, and the alternativePlatform technology base has become an open source engine used by many browser game developers, asking for advice from the parent company.