Scaling Up, Crossing the Chasm and Category Design: what was still missing?
Updated: Oct 15
You've heard of all three: Scaling Up, Crossing the Chasm, Category Design. Maybe you've read the books. Maybe you've tried one or two. And growth still feels harder than it should.
My copy of Play Bigger has two notes in it. A long-time friend gave it to me over breakfast, when he came to Melbourne to launch the book, and wrote: "You always Play Bigger!" Co-author Al Ramadan signed it too.
I've worked with all three. I coached with Scaling Up. I advised on Category Design. I used Crossing the Chasm myself while building a start-up. Each one gave founders something real.
And in every room, something was still missing. So why do founders who use good frameworks still stall?
What does each framework solve?
Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore, 1991) is about who you win first. Moore describes a gap between the early adopters who buy on vision and the mainstream buyers who buy on proof. You cross it by winning one narrow segment, a beachhead, and using it as the base for the next.
Scaling Up (Verne Harnish, 2014) is about running a growing company. It is built around four decisions: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. Its tools, such as priorities, a meeting rhythm and numbers the whole team can see, help a leadership team stop relying on the founder to hold everything together.
Category Design (popularised by Play Bigger, 2016) is about becoming what the authors call the category king. I call it the category leader: the default choice in its category. They report that the category king takes 76% of its category's market cap. You get there by defining the problem and the category so clearly that buyers see you as the obvious answer.
None of these is wrong. Each one solves a real part of the problem.
What was still missing in Crossing the Chasm?
I used Crossing the Chasm while I was part of a start-up, and later as an executive working with the group's portfolio companies. It gave founders a shared word, beachhead, and the discipline of committing to one segment before the next.
Moore gives a checklist for choosing. What I kept seeing was founders who read it and still couldn't make the call. Which segment first, which next, and how one leads to the other. Many didn't know how to choose, and some weren't willing to commit to one.
The book was also written for B2B enterprise technology. It mainly answers the go-to-market question, at one point in a company's growth. A founder who sells through partners, or builds a platform, has to work out the rest alone.
What was still missing in Scaling Up?
As a former Scaling Up Certified Coach, I saw what it does well: priorities, a meeting rhythm, numbers the whole team can see. It is an operating model and a strategy execution system. It helps a company scale its operations.
In my experience it fits best once the business model works and there is a leadership team to run it. Its strategy tools assume a category that already exists. They suit mature categories, where companies compete to stand out from each other. A founder creating a new market, or building a platform business, has a different strategy question. Not how to scale the company in volume, but how to build growth velocity in a direction that matters.
In my experience, its strategy tools have some gaps for how a platform business grows.
What was still missing in Category Design?
Category Design changed how I think about messaging and positioning. It is where you define the problem and change how the market sees it.
I believed in it enough to help bring co-author Kevin Maney to Sydney in 2018, with TechSydney, to introduce it to the startup and VC community. And even then, I saw that something was still missing for early-stage companies.
But early-stage founders are still learning. The insight shifts with every customer conversation. Name the category too early and you can lock in a story before you've found a key part of the puzzle.
And if revenue or traction isn't there yet, a new name doesn't change the product or the sales. For an early-stage company, Category Design isn't the anchor. It can show the direction to head in. Knowing your category does help you cut through. But without traction, it doesn't go further. The authors say this themselves: category design is one side of what they call the magic triangle, alongside product design and company design.
What was the pattern?
Each framework solves part of the problem well. What founders kept needing was the part none of them answers on its own: which part matters for where you are now.
Three clients showed me this. Each needed something different.
A founder was referred to me to fix his category problem. I told him he hadn't crossed the chasm yet, and that I wouldn't take his money to solve something that wasn't the key unlock. His revenue has doubled since our work together.
Another client had already created a category. What was blocking him from scaling in it was execution.
A third was the market leader in revenue but wasn't seen as one. To grow further, and to set the direction of the company, it needed to create the category.
Most founders had heard of all three. Fewer knew how to use them, or when. A good framework, used at the wrong time, doesn't just fail to help. It adds drag. It pulls attention away from what matters now. And when one framework is all you know, every problem starts to look like it needs that framework.
People who own a framework tend to push it to solve everything. I was once one of them, until I saw the gaps. I own one now. It isn't the answer to everything either. It tells me when it isn't, which is how I knew to say no to that first founder. Others might say frameworks are just frameworks, and what you need is a mentor who has done it before. I see it differently. Someone who has done it once may just have been lucky. A framework helps you tell a pattern from a one-off problem. Most frameworks help you solve common problems. The best of both is an experienced person who has learned the frameworks, applied them, and can help you use the right one for the job.
Know the frameworks. Don't be tied to them.
So what did I build?
I stopped choosing between them. The Sofos Concept-to-Category System™ maps these frameworks, adapts and integrates them for start-ups, scaleups, new markets and platform businesses, and fills the gaps between them. The focus isn't the framework.
It's the outcome, and the position you need to reach at each stage. The result is one system that works as a roadmap, from first customers to category leadership. It doesn't depend on any one framework. It starts with the problem to solve.
The frameworks aren't competing. They need an order and an outcome.
One system. One path. Get the sequence right and growth gets easier. Get it wrong and growth creates drag.
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Josephine Too is the founder of Sofos Advisory, helping innovation-led founders fix the right thing for their stage, so growth holds through each transition and builds toward category leadership.
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