Win through segmentation before scale

You want to have a target segment that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead and a good fit with your crown jewels. That's the formula.

The easiest way to take over a great big market is to define a segment of the market that is underserved by the market leader.

"The chasm" refers to Geoffrey Moore's framework describing the difficult transition period between early adopters and mainstream customers in technology adoption.

The tendency when you're in the chasm is, 'I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find,' because we need revenue. It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. It's not going to light the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, little crumpled up paper, and you hold the match in one place until the fire starts.

That's why adjacency is so important. If you light the fire, the piece of kindling is here, but the log is in the other room. That doesn't work.

If you're a category leader, if you're like Oracle and Databases, you're 40 years in. You're still the leader, because the ecosystem organized around you. But when you're little, the only way you can get an ecosystem to organize around you is to go after a segment where you're a big fish in that pond.

"The fit" refers to product-market fit, the degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand.

Do we have the fit in the specific segments? And how strong that fit is. In the company's journey, the first year, we just focused on, 'Can we get the fit...' In the first two years, we focused on, 'Can we get the fit in the early stage startup segment?'

"Bowling Pin" refers to Geoffrey Moore's go-to-market strategy of targeting one market segment first, then expanding to adjacent segments sequentially.

We are here for SMB. That's what we're doing. This is not a go-to market strategy. This is not like, 'Oh, we're going to conquer SMB first,' this is not Bowling Pin, this is not Geoffrey Moore.