Product-Market Fit and Crossing the Chasm

Overview

Two distinct questions decide early-stage growth: (1) PMF — do enough users love the product they'd be very disappointed without it? (2) Chasm — can you move from early adopters (tolerate rough edges for novelty) into the early majority (need proven, complete, referenceable products)? Both failures look like "low growth" but differ in cause and cure.

Compose: business-model-canvas · lean-startup · first-principles · probabilistic-thinking

When to Use

Apply when: early traction exists but PMF is unconfirmed; growth stalls after initial good period; deciding next segment; NPS positive but usage flat; an AI-native product loved by developer/early-adopter users stalls at enterprise adoption despite the AI-capex race and frontier-model gains. Not when: no users yet (lean-startup); already-mainstream business scaling proven channels; issue is pricing/sales-process not chasm.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

• Engine mode: user has data → run the PMF + Chasm Audit directly.
• Coach mode: user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.