Find Your Wedge
Look for the expense your customer is already paying, not the smallest slice of your vision.
A wedge is one problem somebody is already spending money to work around. Most founders go looking for something else. They take the five-year vision and cut off the smallest piece of it, which gives them a smaller diagram with fewer boxes and still nothing a buyer can act on this quarter.
Where you look decides what you find. Slicing the vision is desk work. Finding the wedge means going out and locating an expense that already exists.
Look for the workaround
A gap in a market is something nobody built. A workaround is something a customer built badly because they had to, and it arrives with a name, an owner, and a number attached.
You can see them by asking what people do today. A spreadsheet passed between six people with a tab for each region. A contractor who invoices every month for the same cleanup. A script one engineer maintains that nobody else can read. A hire made specifically to absorb the mess. Each of those is a budget line already approved for your problem. The demand exists; your job is to redirect the spend, which is a shorter sales cycle and a much easier conversation about price. The buyer can tell you what the current answer costs without borrowing a word of your language.
Broad ambitions make weak wedges for that reason. “Help teams collaborate” describes a market and names no expense. “Stop the field team from quoting off last quarter’s price sheet” names the person, the failure, and the money.
At Heroku the workaround was a person. Four Rails developers who wanted their application on the internet needed somebody to configure servers, so they hired him, borrowed him from another team, or lost their weekends to it. The product answered that with one command: you pushed your code and the application was running. Everything Heroku eventually became sat on top of a wedge you could explain in one sentence to a developer who had just lost a Saturday.
Make sure it finishes the job
The wedge has to end somewhere the customer recognizes as done. If your software finds the bad invoices and somebody still has to open each one and correct it, you’ve sold a report and the work stayed where it was. If it catches the error before submission and routes the exception to the person who can clear it, the problem is off the buyer’s desk.
Map the job from the moment the problem shows up to the moment your buyer stops thinking about it, then take the smallest span you can own without handing the hard part back. The final stretch is usually the dull part: single sign-on, an integration with whatever system holds the real record, an import that tolerates messy data. None of it appears in the vision deck. It’s what separates a purchase from a project, and a project needs a sponsor and a timeline, which is how a wedge deal becomes a nine-month evaluation.
Prefer the one that’s hard
Several candidates usually qualify. Take the one that’s painful to build.
A wedge that’s easy for you is easy for the company with forty engineers and an existing relationship with your buyer, and they will ship it as a checkbox at renewal. Depth is the only protection a narrow product has. You want the piece where the demo looks simple and the reason it works took two years because side features are usually bad, and a good narrow product beats a bad side feature for a long time.
Let customers point at the next one
Once the wedge works, you don’t need a strategy offsite to find the second thing. Watch the handoff. Customers export your output somewhere. They keep a spreadsheet open beside your product. They reach for a particular tool the moment they close yours. Three accounts ask for the same integration in one quarter. That adjacent job already connects to the value you deliver, which makes it safer than a use case invented to make the market slide bigger.
Write your wedge down as four lines: the buyer, the workaround she pays for now, what that costs her a year, and the measurable result that tells the customer the job is complete. Founders can usually fill in the first line and the last. The cost line is the one that comes back empty, and an empty cost line means you’re still looking at a gap.