Establishing relationships with new users is the hardest part of growing a startup. For consumer products establishing relationships can mean many things: installs, registrations, purchases, or even just getting users to think of your website as a place to go for certain purposes. For B2B products, establishing relationships means getting internal users or testers and eventually contracts and payments. For business development partners – for example API/widget partners – establishing relationships usually means getting functionality embedded in partners’ products (e.g. a widget on their website).
One common strategy for establishing this initial relationship is what is sometimes known as the “thin edge of the wedge” strategy (aka the “tip of the spear” strategy). This strategy is analogous to the bowling pin strategy: both are about attacking a smaller problem first and then expanding out. The difference is that the wedge strategy is about product tactics while the bowling pin strategy is about marketing tactics.
Sometimes the wedge can be a simple feature that existing companies overlooked or saw as inconsequential. The ability to share photos on social networks was (strangely) missing from the default iPhone camera app (and sharing was missing from many third-party camera apps like Hipstimatic that have popular features like lo-fi camera filters), so Instagram and Picplz filled the void. Presumably, these startups are going to try to use mobile photo sharing as the wedge into larger products (perhaps full-fledged social networks?).
Sometimes the wedge is a “single player mode” – a famous example is early adopters who used Delicious to store browser bookmarks in the cloud and then only later – once the user base hit critical mass – used its social bookmarking features. Other times the wedge lies on one side of a two-sided market, in which case the wedge strategy could be thought of as a variant of the “ladies night” strategy. I’m told that OpenTable initially used the wedge strategy by providing restaurants with terminals that acted like simple, single-player CRM systems. Once they acquired a critical mass of restaurants in key cities (judiciously chosen using the bowling pin strategy), opentable.com had sufficient inventory to become useful as a one-stop shop for consumers.
Critics sometimes confuse wedge features with final products. For example, some argue that mobile photo sharing is “just a feature,” or that game mechanics on geo apps like Foursquare are just faddish “toys.” Some go so far as to argue that the tech startup world as a whole is going through a phase of just building “dinky” features and companies. Perhaps some startups have no plan and really are just building features, likely with the hope of flipping themselves to larger companies. Good startups, however, think about the whole wedge from the start. They build an initial user base with simple features and then quickly iterate to create products that are enduringly useful, thereby creating companies that have stand-alone, defensible value.