Going wide is how you avoid going deep

Every builder has the same conversation with themselves.

If I launch in one market, the deck looks small. If I launch in fifty, the deck looks like a real company. Same product either way. Why not fifty?

The deck does look bigger. The product gets worse.

Going wide is one of the most respectable ways to avoid the hard work. It looks like ambition. It feels like ambition. It is, in fact, a polite version of avoidance. Because the moment you spread thin enough, no single instance of your product has to be undeniable.

The standing rule I follow now: launch in one market. Make it undeniable. Then add one more.

In one of my products that means Texas first. Just Texas. Not Texas-and-Oklahoma. Not Texas-with-an-Arkansas-asterisk. Texas, alone, until the product is so specific to the people in Texas that they can't tell whether I built it for them or for the country.

Then Oklahoma. Then a few more. Then the rest, in waves.

The version of me who stood in front of a whiteboard and said fifty states on day one was not the version of me who would have had to answer fifty states' worth of questions on day two.

Width is the easiest thing in the world to promise. It is one of the hardest things in the world to operate.

Three signs you are choosing width to avoid depth.

You can't name the single user in the single market who would cry if your product disappeared.

Your launch announcement is more interesting than your second-week metrics.

You catch yourself describing the size of the opportunity more often than the shape of the customer.

If any of those land, you don't have a strategy. You have a slide deck.

The strange thing about depth-first is that it always feels like you are moving slower than you should be. And then six months in, you realise you have something that actually works for someone, and the wide-launch crowd is still trying to figure out who their product is for.

You don't get a moat by being everywhere. You get a moat by being someone's only answer.

Go narrow. Go deep. The wide part takes care of itself.