Hey Reader,
At the end of any sales call, there is only one question that matters. What became riskier for them if they didn’t buy?
If you can answer that clearly with the least amount of bias "their current process is failing, waiting now has a real consequence" then you have a wedge.
If your honest answer is “not much” then you have to ask, what doubt stayed symmetrical. Did the status quo still feel fine, did they doubt you and inaction equally?
When doubt is symmetrical, nothing moves, if nothing becomes riskier for your prospect by the end of the conversation, then you probably gave a demo vs sold a thing.
...and you are probably blaming something else, and you certainly need to rework your clarity doc.
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If your differentiation can be described as "just that, but nicer, but easier" you don't have a wedge, you have a feature list.
It’s not to say that “just that, but nicer” is not enough, it might be, but in that scenario you have to overcompensate with founder enthusiasm, velocity, and land grab in the hope you grow into your wedge.
The founder wedge is simple. The buyer believes you’ll actually solve the problem, not because your product is perfect, but because working with you is dramatically better for something.
“Where else will I get three MIT grads to obsessively focus on fixing my business problem?” is why so many San Fran startups get pilots. What company would reject insane brain power, done for nearly free, by a group of people who have a lot riding on the result.
Outside of San Fran, you need to replicate that. Maybe your founder wedge shows up as responsiveness, adaptability, trust, ease. Everything you can offer through brute force. Respond to Slack within 2 minutes. Promise their feature in prod within the week. Do everything for them to make sure they onboard without pain. And most of all, they actually believe you won’t abandon them once they sign… because the sales rep is also the support rep is also the success rep is also the engineer is also the product lead (you!).
Your competitor might have better features, be more mature, a less risky bet, but if you can give them trust, trust that you will make it work for them, then you have a shot - which is the foundation of founder-led sales.
This is a real wedge for early-stage founders, and it’s insanely powerful for a brief amount of time, however, as some of you will likely feel... there are only so many apologies you can make to an early customer that took the risk.
The second danger is not realizing founder-led has an expiration, we can ignore it for a moment but this obviously doesn’t scale. And we’re not talking about mega scale. We’re talking about 10+ customers and the cracks appear.
So use the founder wedge to buy time while you build a product, distribution, or economic wedge that actually scales knowing you are on borrowed time.
The alternative is try to find a real wedge?!
Most founders, when trying to understand why sales aren’t working as expected, think it’s price, product, positioning, or problem. They think of it as a GTM problem when very often it's because you need to move from buyers buying because your thing is better to buyers buying because not doing so is risky.
I sometimes struggle with defining the wedge and not defaulting to features or gaps - generally there are two ways to think about whether you have a wedge, both kinda the same thing, so pick whichever helps you.
The Mechanics (What It Does)
A real wedge does at least one of these, ideally all!
- Changes the buyer’s mental model
- Introduces risk in not acting
- Collapses a form of doubt
The Properties (What It Has)
A real wedge has all three of these:
- Urgency (makes delay expensive)
- Asymmetry of Doubt (they doubt inaction more than they doubt you)
- Displacement (replaces something real)
If your differentiation doesn’t do these things, it’s not a wedge. It might still be great, you might still get the sale, but it’s not a wedge, it’s just interesting, and interesting looks like a buying signal, but isn't, because there is no urgency attached.
This ties to one of the best ways to sell is to show something to a prospect they didn’t know to be true. Because the moment that happens, the entire dynamic changes. And that comes from one of those three mechanics above.
The demo may well have gone great, the prospect thought it was cool, maybe not seen before, a good approach, definitely worthy of their time. All theoretically positive signals. But DOES. NOT. CONVERT. Capturing attention is not the same as presenting something they have to buy.
You didn’t change or reorder priorities because you didn’t make the buyer re-evaluate the cost of doing nothing.
If your sales have long education cycles, normally start with a pilot (a pilot is just questions unanswered), and buyers can “wait and see” then it means you have a problem, and it could be around this concept of urgency.
And maybe a wedge is not always linked back to a feature or outcome or something product-based, because in reality, a wedge is really any reason a buyer cannot ignore you.
1. Product Wedge The thing you built is categorically different.
2. Distribution Wedge How you reach customers creates unfair advantage.
3. Economic Wedge Your cost structure makes you unbeatable on price or accessibility.
4. Timing Wedge The market shifted and you were there.
Most founders obsess over product wedges (building something better) getting to PMF but there are multiple routes to urgency that could work for you.
So just say it. I don’t have a product wedge, and I haven’t figured out my distribution, economic, or timing wedge yet.
That’s fixable. We are just trying to show a buyer something true about their world that makes not acting feel riskier than acting.
If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
- James
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