Why Great Products Stall Between Early Fans and Real Growth

Most products do not fail because the idea is bad. 

They fail because they never make the jump from enthusiastic early users to the people who just want things to work.

This gap was described decades ago by Everett Rogers and later refined by Geoffrey Moore. 

Early adopters and mainstream users behave very differently, even when they like the same product.

Early adopters chase novelty and power. They enjoy figuring things out and will tolerate complexity if it unlocks capability. The early majority wants reliability, predictability, and reassurance that others like them are already using it. They are not looking to build workflows. 

They want finished ones.

Where teams go wrong

Many teams assume adoption is linear. Add features, polish later, and the market will follow. In reality, adoption is a cultural handoff. When products miss that shift, they fall into familiar traps.

Some simplify too late, staying tuned to expert users while easier alternatives win the mainstream. Others simplify too early, stripping away the depth that gave the product gravity in the first place.

Early adopters also tend to skew feedback. They are vocal, articulate, and deeply invested. That makes them easy to listen to and dangerous to overfit for. Mainstream users optimise for mental ease, not flexibility, and they rarely explain what they want in forum posts.

What actually crosses the gap

Successful products change how they frame value. Possibility gives way to outcomes. Power gets packaged as safety. Language shifts from insider talk to everyday clarity.

You can see this in products like Figma, which kept depth for experts while making collaboration feel obvious, or in platforms like Zoom that removed friction without advertising complexity.

Features do not cross the chasm. Expectations do. The products that make it are the ones that translate enthusiasm into comfort and make capability feel approachable rather than intimidating.

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