Linear #010: Building Wedge Products, Self-Interest Selling, The Story of Robinhood

One vertical SaaS breakdown. One 'how-to'. One business story. In your inbox once a week.

Luke Sophinos

Mar 06, 2023

Happy Sunday folks!

Another episode of the linear newsletter here.

Let’s dive in!

One Vertical SaaS Breakdown:

Building Wedge Products

Nine out of ten entrepreneurs I meet want to build a platform or an Operating System (OS) for their space. That’s great. You should have that type of vision.

The reality is building a platform or OS takes a long time, and A LOT of learnings. Learnings that you don’t have yet.

It’s not the starting point.

Every great platform starts with an initial wedge product.

WTF is this ‘wedge’ product?

A wedge product is the initial tool you launch. It’s your “get-in-the-door” product. It’s the most important. It must be relatively easy to deploy, have fast time to value, and be a reputation-prover.

For Toast it was inventory management.
For Procore it was project management.
For CourseKey it was time & attendance.

Wedge products solve very specific problems in a relatively short amount of time. They are easy to use and they offer a magical experience for the customer. They should have very little or strongly inferior competition.

The wedge product gets you in the door at hundreds of businesses. They enable you to build a great reputation within your space. They enable you to LEARN so much about your customer and your market.

Once you’ve successfully deployed your wedge product into hundreds of businesses, your customers should have already informed you what your next product offering needs to be. Something that has even MORE pain than the initial problem you solved.

The playbook from here is simple (execution is not). Build a suite of products, all that are jump-off points from your initial wedge. Scale ARR. Then your suite of products will begin to evolve into the ‘platform’ or OS of the market. The initial vision you started with.