Narrow it down is advice everyone gives and nobody can act on.

Two questions underneath it are actually decidable: what a narrowing has to CONTAIN, and whether one exists for you specifically. Only the second can come back as no.

The second is the half I care about. We built the analysis so it can refuse — if every remaining slice still needs enterprise sales, still needs a conversation, or still runs through a platform you said no to, it says so and does not invent a wedge.

That instruction exists because inventing one is easy and rewarding. A plausible narrowing can be produced for any idea in a sentence, it reads like insight, and you cannot tell it from a real one until months have gone.

The thing I did not expect: most refusal triggers are read off the FOUNDER rather than the idea. An idea that narrows beautifully for someone who will get on calls has no wedge at all for someone who will not. So is this too broad has no answer in the abstract, and a generic post cannot know which of those you are.

Of the 7 things a wedge is asked to contain, 4 are actually enforced, and I derived that list rather than copying it out of a prompt — blanked each field in turn and watched which ones the invariant refuses to pass. The other 3 are asked for and not policed, and I published that too, because a guarantee is only as good as its stated edge.

The mandatory one people skip is the explicit what-this-is-not. A narrowing you have not stated as a cut is an emphasis: everything you kept in reserve is still in the product, still on the roadmap, still in the conversation with the first customer who asks.

Writing the anti-position down is what makes the next twelve decisions cheap. Somebody asks for the adjacent feature and the answer already exists.

And a named buyer means specific enough that you could go and find twenty of them this afternoon. The most common fake narrowing is a broad idea with a narrower adjective in front of it.

One practical reorder that cost me nothing: write the anti-position BEFORE the pitch. It is faster, and it tells you immediately whether you are actually giving anything up.

The derivation and both field lists: https://whittleos.com/guides/my-startup-idea-is-too-broad