The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion
Grow segment by segment along adjacencies — same customer new use case, or same use case new customer.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Once you dominate one beachhead, you expand not by broadening but by knocking down adjacent pins. Adjacency has exactly two legal forms: the same customer with a different use case (references carry you), or the same use case in a different customer base (partners carry you). Non-adjacent expansion is a match held under a log — the fire never transfers.
Origin
Geoffrey Moore's bowling alley model, introduced as the expansion phase after Crossing the Chasm and developed further in Inside the Tornado.
Core principles
- 01Adjacency form A: same customer, different use case — expand on the back of your customer references.
- 02Adjacency form B: same use case, different customer base — expand on the back of the partners who built the first use case.
- 03The bonfire rule: hold the match in one place until the kindling catches, then transfer to a log that is actually touching it.
- 04The bowling alley can carry a company from tens of millions to hundreds of millions; in specialised industries (e.g. computer-aided design) it can reach a billion.
- 05Each new pin is still a full segment — geography, industry, profession, use case — not a loosening of focus.
How to run it
- 1
Win the head pin outright
Do not attempt a second segment until you have dominant share and a partner ecosystem in the first. The kindling has to be burning before you can light anything else with it.
Watch out The 'I just need more customers, any customer' instinct is what keeps companies stuck in the chasm.
- 2
Map the two adjacency axes from where you stand
List (a) other painful use cases your existing customers have, and (b) other industries/professions with the same use case you just solved. These are your candidate pins — everything else is a log in another room.
Pro tip Look for segments with a structurally similar compelling reason to buy, e.g. regulatory or documentation burden.
- 3
Pick the carrier: references or partners
For same-customer/new-use-case, your existing customer references do the selling. For same-use-case/new-industry, your partners do — the integrators who built the first solution will say 'we serve another segment, let's bring you in there too.' Choose the pin where the carrier is strongest.
Pro tip Partner-led adjacency is often faster because partners have their own commercial motive to widen the footprint.
Watch out If neither a reference nor a partner naturally bridges you into the new segment, it is not adjacent.
- 4
Repeat until the category goes horizontal
Keep knocking pins until the market itself declares the technology is for everybody — at which point the tornado starts and you switch playbooks entirely.
Pro tip The tell for the tornado is customers saying 'we want what they have' rather than 'we need what you have.'
In the wild
Documentum started in pharma (500,000-page new drug approvals, patent-life loss worth $1-2M a day). Then chemicals adopted it for standard operating manuals and regulatory demands. Then petrochemicals — oil and gas — for lease and leasehold documents critical to their reserves. Then Wall Street, financing those companies, realised they were 'paper from wall to wall'.
→ Each step was a new segment, but the use cases were close enough that references and partners carried Documentum across, compounding it into a category leader.
Moore's analogy for why non-adjacent expansion fails: starting a fire is not running a match back and forth under a log. You put down kindling and crumpled paper and hold the match in one place until it catches.
→ If the kindling is here and the log is in the other room, nothing burns — no matter how many customers you chase.
Common mistakes
Expanding to a non-adjacent segment because the deal was available
A logo in an unrelated industry with an unrelated use case gives you no reference transfer and no partner leverage. You pay full customer-acquisition cost again and get no compounding.
Treating expansion as 'going broad'
The bowling alley is a sequence of narrow dominations, not a widening of the target. Going broad before the tornado dissolves your fish-to-pond ratio in every pond at once.
Is it for you?
Best for
B2B companies that have won one beachhead and are deciding where to grow next, typically $10M-$100M ARR
Not ideal for
Companies whose category has already gone horizontal — switch to the tornado land-grab playbook instead
From the transcript
“so adjacent means either it's the same customer with a different use case or it's the same use case in a different customer base”
“it's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log”
“if you light the fire and the piece of kindling is here but the log is you know in the other room that that doesn't…”
From the episode
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market