7.0 What Wedge Means
The Wedge stage begins when a company has found something real - a specific customer segment, a specific problem, and design partners who use the product because it works rather than because they like the founder - and ends when that something has been made repeatable. Most B2B Enterprise companies enter this stage with somewhere between three and seven design partners and exit it somewhere between $1M and $3M in annual recurring revenue. The exit is not defined by the revenue number. It is defined by whether the company can win deals predictably in a defined segment without the founder personally driving every step.
Two things are true at Wedge that were not true at Founding. The first is that the product works for someone - a specific someone, in a specific context, doing a specific job. The second is that the company has not yet proved this can be repeated. A wedge that produced three customers might produce three hundred. It might also produce no more than three. The Wedge stage is the period during which that question is answered.
This is the stage at which the CPMO function is most often hired into the company for the first time, or the stage at which a founder begins to hand off pieces of the loop to specialists. The decisions made in this transition shape the company more than the founder usually realizes. A premature handoff produces a company whose loop is run by people who do not yet know the wedge well enough. A delayed handoff produces a founder who becomes a bottleneck and a company that cannot move past the wedge it has found.
