The Product Wedge: How To Scope Your Initial Product

Most early-stage founders hit a wall in recruiting new customers, and when that happens there are two general approaches you can take:

The first is to double-down on marketing. Some swear by ads. Others will tell you to slap an “invite friends” button in your onboarding flow, or create FOMO with a waitlist. At my last startup, an investor suggested I hire someone to join hundreds of Facebook groups and post links to our product. Growth hacking!

These tactics can be effective when paired with the right product. But once the initial wave of post-launch customers subsides, one naturally wonders, “is the product right?”

Which leads to the second approach to increase growth, changing the product. Now, you might think I’m talking about pivoting your entire company, but that’s not it. Just because your product isn’t organically taking off doesn’t mean your entire idea is bad. Maybe you just didn’t find the right starting point. So what can be done? Instead of pivoting, consider sharpening the leading edge of your initial product into the shape of a wedge.

A wedge?

Yes, a wedge! In the physical world, wedges are used to concentrate a lot of force into a narrow point, which creates a mechanical advantage that’s useful for breaking into dense surfaces that are ordinarily impenetrable.

Like, for example, the mobile video market:

Before anyone cared about blowing up on the For You page, TikTok’s initial wedge into the market was they (and their precursor, Musically) were one of the first apps to make it easy to record a video on your phone that was set to music. Teenagers came for the tool, but then they ended up staying for the network—and brought us all along with them.

This example (just one of forty-ish that we cover in this post) perfectly reflects the two core principles that make wedges work:

Some value propositions are easier for new customers to adopt than others. To get someone to buy into the whole concept of a For You page, you need to educate people on what TikTok is and, realistically, they probably need to see several TikToks in the wild before they will be tempted to download the app. But if your friend used a tool to create a music video and sent it to you, you don’t need to learn anything.
Some value propositions are easier for new companies to deliver than others. Even if you could get people to easily buy into the idea of the For You page, how are you going to get all the videos and data and machine learning algorithms you need to create a good experience? It’s just not possible on day one.

In other words, a wedge is a part of your early product that’s designed to help startups establish new customer relationships, by virtue of being easy to adopt and feasible for you to deliver on day one—before you have any advantages of scale like network effects, data, cash, etc. Features that make good wedges often don’t have much potential for power, in the Hamiltonian sense (i.e. they won’t support durable profitability) but, counter-intuitively, that’s actually the correct trade-off that most successful businesses often make in their early days.

The “thin edge of the wedge” strategy was initially popularized by Chris Dixon in 2010, and to me the most interesting thing about it is how almost every single successful company you can think of to some degree or another had a wedge, yet wedges are under-theorized and hardly mentioned in the traditional business school literature. Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that sequencing is one of the most important and challenging parts of starting a company, and yet there’s no solid theoretical foundation for how to sequence effectively.

In this article, we focus specifically on product wedges, but they’re not the only type of wedge. Look out for another big post on market wedges in the coming weeks.

So, here we go! This is the definitive list of product wedges you can apply to your business.

The Five Types of Product Wedges

1. Come for the tool, stay for the network

If the value users derive from a service is dependent on other people already using it, then it’s not very valuable at the early stages. Basically, network effects are great, but they have a cold start problem. One way to solve this is by building tools that provide stand-alone value, even if there is no network of users around the tool, or if the network is too small to matter. The key is to translate single-player usage into a network of some sort.

Here are some examples of tools that offered stand-alone value before they could take advantage of network effects:

Instagram. Early on, it was key to Instagram’s growth that you had a reason to use the product in single-player mode (filters) and it let you share those photos to other networks like Twitter and Facebook where your friends could see them, and then ask you what app made that photo look so cool. But soon it stopped mattering so much that you share the photos elsewhere, and this network effect made Instagram a great business.
Substack. When the first Substack publication launched back in the fall of 2017, the main value proposition was that the platform made it dead simple to build a paid subscription newsletter business. There was no real benefit to being a part of the Substack network, because it didn’t exist. But now Substack is working to change that.
Nest. (Yes, the thermostat!) Nest’s original vision was to be the hub of the connected home, with an ecosystem of connected devices on one side and a network of homeowners on the other. But of course that’s a big target, so they decided to start by making a tool. It didn’t quite work, because they got bogged down in the initial wedge and failed to translate it into a network, but it’s an interesting case study nonetheless.
Notion / Roam. They are both great single-player organization tools that are valuable when used alone, but become much more powerful when used in groups. (Come for the note-taking organization structure, stay for access to other people’s thoughts?) Notion is further ahead, but Roam is close behind and focused on a unique niche.
Github. At first it was just a useful place for you and your team to keep your source code, but over time it became an indispensable platform that every developer had to use, because all the other developers were there. Very difficult to unseat!
Salesforce. It started as a relatively simple cloud-based CRM, which was easy for new companies to adopt. But then the network of plugins, extensions, and consultants quickly helped entrench Salesforce as the single source of truth for a wide variety of business data.
Shopify. At first it provided a really simple way to sell stuff online, but then as its user count grew, a whole ecosystem of plugins and 3rd party developers flourished, which made the Shopify platform more valuable. Additionally, Shopify is taking first tentative steps towards connecting customers with stores, through their Shop app.
Figma. When Figma initially launched, they pitched it as “a design tool that works in your browser.” This was great because you can send your designs to colleagues without them needing to install software, it just worked in their browsers. Over time, as more designers specialized in Figma and tools and integrations were built on top of Figma, the network of “Figma-compatible resources” (like people and tools) became a bigger part of the value proposition.
Every. For writers, our value proposition for now is about our editorial services, but as we grow our audience it will also be more and more about the distribution we can give writers to readers.

(Interesting side note: Product wedges aren’t just good for establishing relationships with customers, they’re also great at building new relationships with any type of counterparty: suppliers, channel partners, etc! Any partner you need to do any sort of deal/transaction with is going to be dependent on the same fundamental forces we outlined above—how easy is it for them to adopt, and how feasible is it for a startup to deliver.)

2. Come for the content, pay for the product

This is perhaps one of the most visible forms of wedges at the moment. It’s also known as “linear commerce,” a term coined by Web Smith at 2PM. The premise behind this wedge is that it’s hard to get attention with a product, but content—because it’s free and designed to aggregate attention and trust from a specific type of person—is a much more efficient route to build new relationships with users. Once people love your content and you have a way to reach them, you’ve established a distribution channel and a trusting relationship that you can use to sell a product.

Glossier. This is the category-defining example. They started as a beauty and skincare blog, built a loyal reader base, and then borrowed on that credibility to launch a massive global beauty brand with millions of potential customers—their readers.
Pretty much all influencers and creators. The vast majority of top creators on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram monetize by selling products. This can be anything from t-shirts to makeup to hamburgers.
Barstool. Whether you love or hate this abrasive sports media brand, they certainly know how to create a community. Their fan base, known as “Stoolies,” truly buys into the “us vs them” mentality that Barstool preaches, and turns to merch purchases to show their loyalty to the various personalities, podcasts, or specific accounts that they follow. In what might be the magnum opus of the brand’s outreach, Dana Bahrawy, who rose to fame off of videos of him drinking beer, managed to sell $1.5 million worth of merchandise within the first 10 days of his “Zillion Beers” line with the company early last year.
Celeberity businesses. Kanye West is maybe the perfect example. From Grammys to Gap: the hip-hop star managed to create one of the most loyal fan bases ever assembled by consistently dropping genre defining albums and constantly staying in the pop culture spotlight. By leveraging his influence, he has been able to create a fashion empire that led to a series of massive deals with Nike, Adidas, and then Gap that resulted in him becoming one of the few hip-hop billionaires. (Of course, Kanye is not the only celebrity to leverage their audience into new lines of business. But, ya know, he’s Kanye.)
Zillow. Started as a media site allowing prospective homebuyers to browse homes for sale, monetized by allowing real estate agents to advertise. Now they’re pivoting to actually buy and sell homes from consumers.