Wedge

A wedge is the narrow, sharp entry point you use to break into a market: one acute problem for one specific group that you solve better than anyone. Rather than launching a broad platform against entrenched competitors, you drive a thin wedge into a gap they ignore, win that beachhead, then expand outward from a position of strength.

For a lean founder, the wedge is a survival strategy. You can't out-feature an incumbent, but you can out-care about a slice of the market they treat as an afterthought. A good wedge is specific enough that the target instantly recognises themselves, painful enough that they'll pay, and underserved enough that you can win without a war chest.

A few ways this plays out in practice:

• Say you're a CRM going up against Salesforce. You don't beat them head-on; you wedge into one underserved niche, like high-volume sales teams who live in the phone, and run that whole motion in a lean, fast tool such as Close. Win the callers, then widen.

• Say your wedge is "booking a sales call should feel effortless for solo founders." You start with that one job, picking off prospects with a sharp, branded scheduling page in Lemcal instead of trying to be a full ops suite on day one.

• Say you're breaking into a market through founder-led content rather than ads. Owning LinkedIn for one niche audience with Taplio is the wedge; the product expansion comes after the audience trusts you.

The move after the wedge is the wedge-to-platform expansion: use the trust and data from the first job to earn the next adjacent one. Get the wedge wrong, too broad, too crowded, too mild, and even a great product stalls. Narrow beats broad when you're small.