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Surviving the chasm
The Gartner Hype Cycle is a brilliant meta-analysis of how the culture
changes.
The technology trigger opens the door for your art, for the contribution
you want to make. It interrupts a pattern.
The Gartner Hype Cycle
In that moment, marketing can help you reach the neophiliacs.
Inevitably, these early adopters will hype your work. Of course they will.
That’s one of the best reasons to be an early adopter.
When the idea is presented to the rest of the market, it can’t possibly
compare to the hype. Hence the trough. This is another way to see Moore’s
chasm. It’s in this moment, when the neophiliacs are bored with you and the
mass market disdains you, that you will most likely lose momentum. This is
the moment when you need a bridge, a new way to step through the culture
with stories that match the worldviews of this new, more conservative
market.
And then, with generous persistence, you can walk up the slope to the
new plateau, the place where you are now indispensable to the masses. A
new pattern replacing the old one.
You might not find the bridge
Years ago, my team at Squidoo launched hugdug.com.
The idea behind HugDug was pretty simple: You could build a page (it
took about four minutes) profiling any product on Amazon that you loved.
If you chose a book, for example, the page would bring in the cover, the
title, and a big button with a link.
You’d add your own review and a bunch of relevant content.
If someone found the page and bought the book, Amazon would pay us a
royalty, and we’d send half of it to your favorite charity. (This was years
before smile.amazon.com, and we were donating twenty times as much to
charity as they do.)
Our bet was that authors would happily promote their books in this way
—it was easier to control than their Amazon page, and they could have
pride in ownership in how the information was presented, not to mention
the philanthropy of it all.
We also hoped that the typical Pinterest fan would find a page like this
not only fun to build, but gratifying, because they’d be helping to raise
money for a cause they cared about.
Our thesis was that we’d be able to put in the work to find the early
adopters, neophiliacs eager to give shiny new things on the internet a try.
We were betting that once they saw that it was working, they’d do it more,
moving us deeper along the long tail, generating thousands of pages.
And that as the word spread, we’d bring in authors, and they’d be
whales, promoting their books like crazy.
And that people who saw any of our HugDug pages would not only buy
at the same rate they’d be buying on Amazon (after all, it was the same
price), but would build their own pages (raising their status because they
were sharing insights among an elite crowd, all in service of philanthropy).
We kept at it for months, but we failed.
I think the main reason we failed was that while we got trial (thousands
of pages were built), we failed to find any whales. There were fewer than
six people who built more than a dozen pages or promoted them very much.
The tension dissipated too quickly. People felt like they had no good
reason to return after a single visit. The long tail was so long that it wasn’t
unusual for a HugDug page to sell zero books in a month. And most people
were hesitant to promote a page, because even though it’s easier now, it’s
still emotionally difficult to push your friends to visit a shopping site online.
The lesson was that a Kickstarter-like success is always more difficult
than it looks. We were naïve in believing that four months was enough time
to create an overnight success. We underestimated how difficult it might be
to create sufficient incentives, and, most of all, we failed to create a tension
dynamic that would have turned our early users into connected ambassadors
who would have turned the ratchet as we crossed the chasm.
We didn’t do enough to tell a story about status, and we weren’t nearly
specific enough about who our first customers would be, what they might
have wanted, believed, and said.
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