Sell wedges, not empires

Stop pitching the empire. Sell the wedge that proves you deserve one.

The fastest path to the big thing is shipping the smallest true thing today.

If you’re in the camp of “start with the smallest possible wedge and expand from there”, this one’s for you:

At the start, founders often mix up two very different jobs:

The story that keeps a team rowing, and the sentence that makes a customer buy.

Vision is the first one. Product pitch is the second.

If you let the first leak into the second, you raise expectations with customers in a way you can't meet early and slow everything down.

Vision is for your wall, your team, your investors.

Customers don't buy visions. They buy the smallest possible fix to their most annoying problem right now.

When you pitch "the best platform for everything," buyers compare you to companies with a decade head start.

They want SLAs, translations, time zones - the full checklist. Your MVP becomes a multi-year project.

In addition, the words you choose set your competition.

Say "customer support platform" and you're fighting Zendesk and Intercom. Say "support for developer tools" and you're in a much more winnable game.

Words aren't just labels - they're the arena you choose to fight in.

This is the paradox of startup positioning: the bigger your vision sounds, the smaller your actual market becomes.

Not because fewer people need it, but because fewer people can imagine buying it from you.

Thus, write two pitches.

Pin the vision to your wall. Then write a product pitch so small it's embarrassing.

One persona. One problem.

If your pitch contains "and," cut it.

In fact, keep cutting until you hear the magic words out of your customers’ mouth: "If you solve that, I'll pay" or "Can I try it now?"

Not after you ask - volunteered. Unsolicited.

If you hear "not the right time" or "needs more features," you're still selling vision. Cut again.

Two guardrails as you do so:

1. Be brutal about real table stakes. What's the actual floor for day one? Find a wedge where that floor is low, or it’s very hard to win.

2. If your pitch becomes a feature spreadsheet, you've lost.

Win on perspective: what's changing about how this work gets done? Why does that change matter? Why are you built for it when others aren't?

The same product can be packaged twelve different ways. Every feature can tell a different story.

For example, in customer service, speed isn't about "100ms response times" - it's about first response to customers, which drives retention, which drives revenue.

Draw those connections. Make them obvious.

Keep the vision during the early days. Visit it daily.

But never let it leak into your sales pitch.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Simon Rohrbach, co-founder and CEO of Plain (>$20M raised from Index and Battery) / former Head of Design at Deliveroo

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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