“Everything for everybody” loses investors in three minutes: the go-to-market wedge strategy they kept asking for
“We can do everything for everybody” is the fastest way to lose an investor in three minutes. I watched it happen, live, more than once in one evening.
On May 19 Charles and I co-hosted the eighth edition of Spark Tank. The format is brutal by design: each founder gets three minutes to pitch, then about a minute and a half of feedback from a panel of investors. Nine founders on the list, six investors on the panel, me among them. By the end of the night one note had come up so often it felt like the theme of the show.
What's your wedge?
The note every investor gave
Different investors, different backgrounds, different sectors. A deep tech fund, a family office, an operator who'd spent years in M&A. They disagreed about plenty. They didn't disagree about this.
The pattern in the founders who struggled was the same: broad positioning. A platform for every industry. A tool for every team. An AI that does whatever you need. Every time a pitch went wide, an investor pulled it back to one question: where do you start?
One investor said it as plainly as it can be said. He wanted to hear which customers would create the most traction first, because, in his words, “saying we can do everything for everybody. Loses me quick.”
Why three minutes exposes it
In a long meeting, a broad pitch can survive. You have time to walk through use cases, and the investor can find their own wedge in your story. In three minutes you can't. Breadth sounds like you haven't chosen yet, and an investor hears “hasn't chosen” as “hasn't found product-market fit.”
A wedge is commonly defined as winning a big market by first capturing a tiny part of it, or a big share of a small adjacent market. The point isn't that the niche is the business. The point is that the niche is where you can be undeniably good, fast, with proof an investor can check.
The founder who answered “microsurgery first”
The best exchange of the night came from a founder building head-mounted displays for surgeons. An investor asked the wedge question directly: which surgery do you enter with, or are you trying to run the gamut?
The answer was immediate. They started with microsurgery, because it's a smaller niche market, but also the most discerning. Win the surgeons who are hardest to please and you've earned the right to go everywhere else.
That answer does three things in one sentence. It names a specific starting customer. It explains why that customer, not just which one. And it implies the expansion path without having to pitch it. That's the shape you want.
Standard of care in a niche, then expand
Another founder in the medical space framed it differently, and just as well. Their device is aimed at one specific, expensive category of fracture. The line: “We want to become a standard of care in the, in this niche and then expand.”
Notice how that sounds to an investor. It isn't small. Standard of care is an ambitious goal. It's just ambitious about one thing first. And they had proof inside the niche, which is the other half of a wedge: in their trial, patients followed their weight-bearing prescriptions 74% of the time, against 21% in the control group on the existing standard of care. One niche, one number, one reason to take the next meeting.
Look at what else the panel rewarded that night. Hardware companies were generally well received. The AI and software companies faced harder questions about defensibility, and patents and technical moats came up again and again. My read: when your product is easier to copy, a sharp wedge matters even more, because the niche you own is part of your moat.
How to write your wedge sentence
After the show I went back through the pitches that landed. The good wedge answers all fit one template:
We start with [one specific customer] because [why they're the hardest or most valuable to win], and once we own them we expand to [the next ring].
Test yours against three questions:
- Could an investor name ten companies that fit your starting customer? If not, it's still too broad.
- Is there a reason that customer goes first, beyond “they're easy”? The best wedges are the most discerning buyers, not the most desperate.
- Can you show proof inside the wedge right now? Traction in one niche beats ambition across ten.
And cut every slide that talks about the expansion before the wedge is proven. Investors will ask about the big market. Let them. A founder who has to be asked about the big market sounds focused. A founder who leads with it sounds like they haven't started.
The other notes worth stealing
Besides the wedge, the feedback that came up most that night was about delivery: too many slides, low energy, poor lighting and camera setup. The best presentations had a crisp problem statement, strong visuals, and traction up front. For platform businesses, the investors also wanted to hear a clear distribution plan, which is really the wedge question asked a different way: who first, and how do you reach them?
If you want to test your wedge sentence on real investors before you need to, the cheapest way I know is to pitch it in front of a panel and listen to what comes back. You can pitch on a show.
Frequently asked questions
What is a wedge in go-to-market strategy?
A wedge is the narrow starting market you can win decisively before expanding. It is commonly defined as capturing a tiny part of a big market, or a large part of a small adjacent one, first.
How narrow should my initial market be?
Narrow enough that an investor could name companies in it, and specific enough that you can show proof there now. The strongest wedges are often the most discerning customers, like starting with microsurgery before other surgery.
What is the difference between a wedge and a beachhead?
They are close cousins. Beachhead usually means the first market segment you land in; wedge stresses that the entry point is chosen to open the path to a much bigger market.