One of the greatest challenges facing any start-up is “crossing the chasm”: bridging the gap between early adopters and mass-market buyers. Yet many promising businesses struggle even to reach the chasm. Often, founders leap in with money and a dream, only to hit a wall. How can start-up founders diagnose and fix problems in order to arrive at this critical point?

In Reaching the Chasm: How to Drive Your Early-Stage Start-Up to Scale (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025), Edward G. Amoroso provides an indispensable guide for start-ups looking to get off the ground and scale up to the next level. Getting to the chasm, as he illustrates through dozens of real-world case studies, requires long-term vision. Founders must focus on their core belief system―not simply what they do but why they are in business in the first place. Buyers connect with start-ups based on shared beliefs, and any founding team that does not understand this secret will struggle to build relationships with customers. Amoroso shares field-tested guidance for businesses in different spaces and stages on crafting a compelling message, understanding customers, benchmarking against competitors, and leveraging what makes a company irreplaceable. For founders, venture capital teams, private equity firms, investors, and readers with an interest in entrepreneurship, Reaching the Chasm is the road map for early-stage start-up success.

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Edward Amoroso, "Reaching the Chasm: How to Drive Your Early-Stage Start-Up to Scale" (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025)