Chasing every opportunity sinks you
Faced with the size of the mainstream market, companies lose focus and chase every opening. They end up unable to offer a complete, buyable proposition to any one cautious buyer, so they win none.
Business
Word of mouth needs mutual references
No company can pay for every marketing contact, so every program depends on chain reactions where customers tell each other. That only works within a group whose members actually reference one another. This is the real reason to segment a market.
Secure a trusted channel first
When moving into the mainstream, the top goal is a sales channel the cautious buyer is comfortable buying through. This comes before revenue, profit, press, and even customer satisfaction, because without it the product cannot reach those buyers at all.
Behavior-changing products face a gap
Attitudes toward new technology only matter when a product forces people to change how they work or to modify things they already rely on. Ordinary upgrades that ask for no new behavior spread smoothly. Products that demand change hit a break in adoption that upgrades never meet.
Visionaries and pragmatists buy differently
Early buyers purchase a leap: they foresee an order-of-magnitude gain and will tolerate rough edges to get it. Mainstream buyers want evolution, not revolution, a productivity gain for existing operations that keeps the old ways intact, and they refuse to debug someone else's product. The same customer company can be either kind of buyer, so a sale to one is fundamentally different from a sale to the other.
Early buyers can't vouch for you
Because enthusiasts and visionaries want such different things from cautious buyers, their enthusiasm does not carry over as a reference. That is why the jump from early adopters to the mainstream is the point where most new ventures fail, even after an enthusiastic start.
Win one niche completely first
Pick a single segment big enough to matter but small enough to win, and pour all resources into dominating it. Make something a few people completely love rather than something many find pretty good. Then use that won group as the base for reaching the next one.
Sell the whole solution
The breakthrough core product gets you noticed, but cautious buyers need their problem solved end to end. Surround the core with everything else required, often supplied through partner alliances, so the solution works out of the box.
Create your competition to position
How a product is positioned is the single largest influence on whether someone buys. Deliberately define who you are being compared against, so that for your target customer your offer looks like the only logical choice and buying feels easy.
Market leaders get forgiven
Customers give the leading supplier second and third chances that rivals never receive. Once one company becomes the default, buyers stick with it through stumbles, which makes reaching leadership in a segment worth so much.