Go Embarrassingly Narrow

The counterintuitive case for building in markets VCs don't understand

Somewhere between Wichita and Baltimore. Ray Hespen was a mining engineer working in the cement business, and the job kept moving him — new city, new region, new apartment. Every time he moved, the same thing happened. Something broke. The maintenance experience was terrible. Not unusual-terrible. Predictably, repeating-pattern terrible.

So Ray called his buddy from high school, David Kingman. “Are you dealing with this too?” David was. Same frustration, different city. That conversation could’ve ended there — two guys complaining about landlords. Instead, Ray started calling property managers. Not to pitch anything. To listen. To ask: what does this look like from your side?

What he heard was worse than he expected. A resident calls about a leaking faucet. The property manager writes it on a sticky note, calls a vendor, leaves a voicemail. The vendor calls back two hours later — the manager is on another call. Meanwhile, the resident calls again, frustrated, and gets a different person who has no context. Someone texts the vendor. Someone else emails the owner. The work order lives in three places and none of them talk to each other. Vendors show up when residents aren’t home. Residents don’t know anyone’s coming. Owners find out about a $2,000 repair after it’s already done. Multiply that by hundreds of units and dozens of vendors, and you get a process held together by voicemails, sticky notes, and hope.

Maintenance coordination was broken — not as a side effect of bad management, but as a structural gap that nobody had built for. The big property management platforms treated maintenance as a line item. A checkbox inside a larger system. Ray saw it as the entire problem.

That decision — to stay narrow, to build only for maintenance coordination and nothing else — is the single most important strategic choice Ray made. It’s also the one that investors questioned most.

“Why wouldn’t you just build for all of property management?”

He heard that in almost every pitch meeting. The question sounds reasonable. It’s also wrong. And understanding why it’s wrong is the key to building a company that lasts.

The Module Nobody Wanted

I should’ve learned this lesson twenty years ago. At Concur, we competed against the ERPs — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft. They all had expense modules. They threw them in for free and made their margins on consulting and customization. Expense reporting was a checkbox to them. A line item inside a bigger system.

Sound familiar?

Concur bet the company on the opposite idea. We woke up every day and thought about expense reporting — just expense reporting — until best-of-breed started beating bundled. We built something extensible but not customizable, so customers didn’t need an army of consultants to upgrade it. The ERPs couldn’t match that because they’d have to care about expense reporting as much as we did. And they never would.

The narrow focus didn’t stay narrow forever. Expense reporting became travel, then invoice, then analytics. Eventually every company on the planet was a customer. But the expansion happened from a position of dominance, not desperation. Concur owned the vertical first. Then the vertical turned out to be bigger than anyone thought.

I should’ve taken that lesson with me. Instead, for years, I told founders to think bigger. Widen the TAM. Don’t limit yourself. It wasn’t until I started working with founders directly — watching them build from places like Rapid City and Wichita, not San Francisco — that I realized I’d been giving the wrong advice. Wider isn’t better. Not here. Not anywhere, really. At Wildfire Labs, we’ve now worked with dozens of founders, and the pattern is painfully consistent. The ones who struggled most went wide too early — “we’re building for all of agriculture” or “we serve the entire real estate industry.” The ones who won went embarrassingly narrow. Maintenance coordination. Cattle lending analytics. Youth sports registration. Markets that made investors squint.

The narrow companies didn’t just survive. They built something the wide companies couldn’t touch.

The Knowledge Flywheel

Here’s what actually happens when you go narrow.

Every customer teaches you something. In a horizontal business, those lessons scatter — one customer is a restaurant, the next is a dentist’s office, the next is a logistics company. The knowledge doesn’t compound. You’re learning about everything and mastering nothing.

In a vertical, every customer teaches you the same thing, deeper. The patterns repeat. The language converges. The workflows overlap. Each conversation makes you smarter about the next conversation, which makes your product better for the next customer, which shortens the next sales cycle.

This is the knowledge flywheel, and it’s the real moat in vertical markets. Not technology. Not first-mover advantage. Not funding. The moat is that you understand the customer’s world so well that a horizontal competitor would need years to catch up — and they’d have to abandon their breadth to do it.

Property Meld didn’t just build maintenance software. Over a decade, they accumulated enough maintenance-specific data to build True Cost — a feature that tells property managers the actual total cost of a maintenance event, including resident impact, vendor performance, and operational drag. A horizontal property management platform couldn’t build that feature if they wanted to. They don’t have the data. They don’t have the workflows. They don’t have the ten years of conversations with maintenance coordinators that taught Ray’s team what to measure.

That’s what depth produces — insight that no amount of engineering talent can shortcut.

The Carbon Copy Test

If Property Meld is the mature example, The Journeyman is the one still proving the thesis in real time.

Tyler Olson and Brennan Holloway are former Marines from Rapid City who ended up running an EMS company in wildland fire. Ten ambulances. Employees scattered across the country. A seasonal, cyclical business where the Forest Service calls and you have fifteen minutes to accept or decline a contract — and if you can’t find a Colorado-licensed paramedic fast enough, you turn down tens of thousands in revenue. They were turning down calls like that multiple times a season.

Their employees were carrying around carbon copies and paper documents. The business management tools that existed were built for general contractors or generic field services. Nothing understood the wildland fire workflow — the seasonal surge, the multi-state coordination, the dispatch urgency, the austere environments where Starlink is your only connection.

So Tyler and Brennan built The Journeyman — a professional connection platform and business management system for wildland fire. Not “emergency services” broadly. Not “field workforce management.” Wildland fire.

Here’s the moment that tells the whole story. Early on, they hired a social media agency to help with marketing. The agency started producing content about being brave, being a hero, answering the call. The founders’ reaction: “Stuff’s kind of cringey.” The messaging missed everything — the vernacular, the culture, the way people in wildland fire actually talk to each other. The agency didn’t know what they didn’t know. Tyler and Brennan did, because they’d lived it.

That’s the vertical advantage in a single anecdote. Domain credibility isn’t something you can outsource. It compresses your sales cycle, sharpens your product decisions, and creates a voice that resonates because it’s real. Fifteen hundred users and seventy-three registered companies later, The Journeyman is proof that the narrow bet works — if you actually know the world you’re building for.

How We Evaluate Verticals

At Wildfire Labs, when a founder walks in and describes their market, we run a simple test. Four questions:

Can you define your vertical in one sentence that makes a customer nod and a VC frown? If the VC gets it immediately, you’re probably not narrow enough. Property maintenance coordination. Cattle lending analytics. Youth sports registration. These all make investors uncomfortable. They make customers say, “Finally — someone who gets it.”

Can you list five things you know about this vertical that a horizontal competitor would need two years to learn? If you can’t, you don’t have a knowledge moat yet. If you can list ten, you’re sitting on a gold mine.

Is the problem intense enough that customers will pay before your product is perfect? Narrow only works if the pain is real. A vertical with mild inconvenience is a hobby project. A vertical where the problem costs people money, time, or sleep — that’s a business.

Does depth compound? Does each customer make the product better for the next one? If the answer is yes, you have a flywheel. If the answer is no — if every customer is a custom job — you have a services business wearing a software costume.

The Caveat

I want to be honest about where this breaks down.

Narrow plus mild inconvenience equals a dead company. Maintenance coordination costs property managers thousands in lost revenue and resident turnover. Cattle lending decisions involve six- and seven-figure sums. Expense reporting at a Fortune 500 company is a compliance nightmare that touches every employee. The intensity of the pain is what makes the narrow bet work.

And there’s a timing question. You expand eventually. Concur did. Property Meld is. But you expand from dominance — from owning the vertical so completely that adjacent moves are natural extensions of what you already know. Not from panic because the original market felt too small.

Where the Quiet Revolution Is Happening

The biggest companies of the next decade aren’t going to come from horizontal platforms trying to be everything to everyone. They’re going to come from founders who know one industry cold — who spent years inside a problem no outsider would notice — and built depth that can’t be replicated.

Cattle lending. Property maintenance. Construction scheduling. Youth sports. These aren’t small markets. They’re overlooked markets. And the founders building in them aren’t thinking about TAM. They’re thinking about depth.

Depth compounds. Breadth dilutes.

If you’re a domain expert sitting on ten years of industry knowledge, wondering whether your market is big enough — it probably is. The question isn’t whether the market is big enough for a company. The question is whether you’re willing to go deep enough to own it.