Wedge, Moat, Machine

I’ve watched plenty of pitch meetings lose the room. A founder opens with a sweeping vision, flashes a giant market slide, then buries everyone in screenshots. No one says “no.” They just stop leaning forward. You don’t need a bigger deck; you need a clearer story. I use three steps that keep both me and the investors honest: Wedge, Moat, Machine. It turns fuzzy momentum into a plan people can test.

The Wedge: small target, big door

The wedge is your narrow starting point. It names a real buyer, a costly problem, and a reason you can win first. Speak plainly. Who buys first, by job title and company type, and whose budget it is. What hurts today, ideally with one image or short description of the broken process. Why now, whether a rule changed, a platform shifted, or a cost dropped. Then say the price and the value in dollars.

Here’s a clean example you can adapt:

We start with mid-market medical clinics on LegacyX. Their insurance claims succeed 62 percent of the time. A ten-point lift is worth about 18,000 dollars a year per clinic. We connect in thirty minutes and bring pre-trained claim models on day one.

This works because it makes the first win feel inevitable. If there are twelve thousand clinics that fit your wedge and you plan to win three thousand over three years at eighteen thousand dollars per year, everyone in the room can do the math with you instead of at you.

The Moat: make copying expensive

The moat explains why a capable rival can’t copy you quickly or cheaply. Think of it as a bill of materials for friction. Say where your data comes from and why you have the right to use it. Describe distribution agreements that pay partners to send you customers and give them a reason not to swap you out. Make the switching pain visible in time lost, history lost, retraining, or regulatory paperwork. Point to unit costs that fall with scale or margins that widen as the mix improves.

If approvals or certifications matter, state which ones you have and how often they renew. A simple time-ladder helps: month one, month twelve, month thirty-six, with one line at each step about what compounds such as dataset size, per-unit cost, add-on attachment rate, or retention. Avoid buzzwords. Don’t wave at “AI plus network effects” unless you can show receipts. A better sentence looks like this:

We capture first-party labels inside the core workflow for every claim. Contracts give us the right to use them. Matching our accuracy would require roughly eighteen months of comparable data collection.

Phrased this way, your defensibility reads as a set of parts investors can test, which is exactly what they want.

The Machine: show the loop that scales

The machine is the loop that scales. Investors fund systems, not slogans, so show how strangers become qualified meetings, how meetings become revenue, and how revenue sticks and expands. Picture a single pipe from channel to meeting, to close, to first value, to expansion, with the numbers pinned above each rung. Include conversion rates, dwell times between steps, and a payback period.

If you have cohort data, show one cohort from month zero to month twelve and name the top churn reasons with what you’re doing about them. Put daylight on pricing. State the main plan, what attaches later, and how margins improve as volume rises or costs fall. A plain example lands well:

Top of funnel is partner referrals plus paid search. Moving from qualified meeting to signed contract takes 24 days. We recover customer acquisition cost in six months. Gross margin improves as inference cost falls, and twenty-two percent of customers attach the analytics add-on in year one. Net revenue retention in our first cohort is 126 percent.

A 12-slide deck that respects the room

All three pieces roll into a tight twelve-slide deck that respects the room.

• Open with a title and a one-line promise.

• Show the problem inside your wedge, the buyer you serve first, and how many of them there are.

• Offer the smallest possible demo or description that proves value.

• Explain why now.

• Lay out the moat layers with that short timeline of how they compound.

• Make the machine visible as one annotated pipe.

• Present the business model and unit economics.

• Share traction with one clear chart or a small case.

• Sketch the roadmap that unlocks the next step.

• Introduce the team in the context of why you fit this problem.

• Close with the ask, including round size, milestones, and dates.

• If you add slides, add proof: a cohort chart, a miniature case study, or a one-screen system diagram that makes the moat obvious.

This structure neatly sidesteps a few traps. A massive market slide without a wedge has no gravity. Feature tours confuse activity with outcomes; buyers pay for solved problems, not screenshots. Vague defensibility invites the worst kind of Q&A. Soft maths on customer acquisition, gross margin path, and payback forces investors to underwrite vibes. The rhythm of wedge, moat, machine pushes you to pick a first hill, pile sandbags around it, and build a repeatable way to take the next one.

When you present this way, the questions you get improve. People ask how fast you can expand beyond the wedge without breaking the machine, which moat layer is strongest today and which needs work, which two hires increase throughput the most, and what breaks first if a rival drops price. These are healthy questions. They accept the premise and press on the risks you should already be managing. You want that meeting, not the one where the debate turns existential and the clock runs out.

Before you send the deck, read it three times with three hats on. Read it like a VP of Sales and check whether the source of leads, the conversion path, and the time to close are easy to see. Read it like a CFO and make sure CAC, gross margin path, payback, and runway are clear enough to repeat. Read it like a buyer and ask whether the problem slide actually stings. If it doesn’t, your wedge is still too wide.

A quick glossary helps keep everyone aligned. The wedge is your first narrow market where you can win now. The moat is the specific set of reasons rivals cannot copy you fast or cheap. The machine is the repeatable process that turns interest into revenue and keeps it. CAC is customer acquisition cost. The payback period is how long it takes to recover CAC from gross profit. A cohort is a group of customers that start in the same month so you can track retention cleanly over time. Short, plain definitions save long, confused emails later.

In the end, this is just a way to respect how decisions get made. Where do you start. Why do you keep the win. How do you repeat it without drama. Answer those three, and your deck stops selling and starts explaining — and explained well is what moves money.