I think it's twisting the meaning of crossing the chasm to insist it means you have to be doing traditional enterprise sales. Twilio, along with Atlassian and others showed that you could build a business by marketing directly to developers and bypassing the C suite.
I've got a friend who is very plugged into the enterprise telecom world. He's been using Twilio since the beginning and told me that no one in that world even knew what Twilio was until two years ago. Now he sees telecom execs being routinely asked what's your strategy to respond to Twilio?
I did not insist anything about "doing traditional enterprise sales."
I said that when a company successfully crosses the chasm, it has established a leading positition in a mainstream market.
What that mainstream market is or the channels the company uses to win it is entirely dependent on its products and the landscape of products it either must displace (in an exiting market) or pre-empt (in a new market).
For example, Facebook crossed the chasm after it opened up beyond .edu and pushed MySpace into complete irrelevance.
Salesforce, when it closed a huge deal with Merrill Lynch (I think), made "the cloud" safe for everyone.
And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm, despite a $25b IPO.
And arguably, neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.
> And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm, despite a $25b IPO.
I think it is a bit too early to call this one. I'd rather give Evan Spiegel and his team a few more quarters to see what they've got in store against Facebook now with IPO money in the bank.
> And arguably, neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.
Granted you qualified your statement with "arguably", but why do you think this when there is no corollary for "tweeting" outside of Twitter's service? If Twitter goes belly up today, who will step in their place?
I don't mean to say that Snap won't cross the chasm, just that it hasn't yet.
If it had, its position against Facebook would have been strong enough that Facebook would not have been able to clone its core feature into Instagram and cause Snap's growth to stall.
Twitter is a more interesting question.
Twitter's product and position are unique, yes, but IMHO, the company pursued a market (advertising) where they had no clear advantages over Google or Facebook.
The result of that mistake has been stagnation. Barely evolving product, flat user growth, declining revenue growth, and no clear path to long term profitability.
In other words, Twitter not only did not cross the chasm...they fell into it and got stuck.
I've got a friend who is very plugged into the enterprise telecom world. He's been using Twilio since the beginning and told me that no one in that world even knew what Twilio was until two years ago. Now he sees telecom execs being routinely asked what's your strategy to respond to Twilio?