The classic startup strategy of the startup wedge sounds perfect in theory. Start narrow in your market with a tight feature set. Get traction and a secure foothold in your chosen niche. Then expand your product footprint and market share as you gain strength and conviction in the scale of your ambitions. But what if the very act of driving that wedge is what keeps you from growing like you should?
The wedge can be a path to success, but it can also be a trap. Once you drive that thin wedge into the market, you can get stuck in three different ways:
Brand Identity
The way you define yourself to the market at the start becomes the company you are in the market’s mind, forever. Once you say "we are this thing," breaking out of that brand identity box becomes extraordinarily difficult. The market's perception of you becomes your destiny. And the deeper your wedge goes, the harder it can be to change that perception.
This isn't just about marketing — it's about the actual DNA of your company. Your initial market position shapes everything: the features you prioritize, the customers you attract, the talent you hire, even the metrics you optimize for. Once these patterns set in, they're incredibly hard to break.
Business Model
In a similar way, the business model you start with can become your model forever. It gets set in stone. And that influences the decisions you make — about your product, your GTM strategy, who you hire, and more. Even if you want to expand into new areas, it’s incredibly difficult to make those longer term calls once you’re established as a player in a particular space.
An absolutely defensible call for the short term — focusing on your core offering — won’t get you where you want to go when you want to step meaningfully beyond it. You become a victim of your success. The more effective your wedge, the more trapped you become.
It’s the innovator's dilemma in action. Your success in your initial market creates strong economic incentives that make it nearly impossible to do anything dramatically different. The snowball effect of recurring revenue is a magical thing — until that snowball starts rolling faster and you can't change its direction.
Cultural Inertia
As companies grow around their initial offering, they develop fixed ways of working. Teams get built, processes get established, and changing direction becomes increasingly hard. It's not just about having the will to change — it's about the practical reality of redirecting an organization that's been optimized for one thing to suddenly do something quite different.
You hire employees with the specific skills that support your wedge. You create processes that are optimized for driving it in. You build a culture that rewards doing that one thing really well. Then when you try to expand, you find that everything — from your talent to your tools to your workflows — is optimized for something else. This optimization goes much deeper than we think before we try to shift it.
Breaking Free
At Day.ai, we're taking a different path. Instead of building a thin wedge, we're going after a bigger goal from the start. We're building an AI-native CRM from the ground up — not just a meeting assistant. Not just one piece of the puzzle. We’re after the whole thing.
Instead of getting boxed in by our brand identity, we're staking a big claim from the start about who we really are and what we're going after, long term. When we talk about building a fully featured, AI-native CRM, we're not trying to expand beyond some smaller vision we had at the start. We're delivering on the bold vision we had from day one.
Rather than letting our business economics trap us, we're running lean as a team for as long as we can. We know when we choose an economic model, we now work for that economic model. We’re intentionally choosing the economic model that we believe will allow us to optimize for the right things.
We’re fighting inertia by keeping our team small for as long as we can. We agree with Sun Tzu that great results can be achieved with small forces. Because our team is so small, we can move fast and be nimble, much more so than any large organizations we might find ourselves up against. We can more easily pivot, we can try a new model, we can change our minds. It's easy to try a new feature, improve it, or take it down. Because we’re intentionally small, inertia isn't our problem. We’ve got agility and speed on our side.
A Different Kind of Hard
Our approach isn't necessarily easier or smarter or better somehow, it's just that we’re choosing a different kind of hard. Building something bigger from the start means accepting more upfront complexity and uncertainty. More risk. But for an AI-native company like ours, we think it makes sense.