Jeff Bezos incorporated his company as Cadabra in 1994, bought the domain relentless.com, and renamed the business Amazon in 1995 — after the world's largest river, not after anything on the shelves. The bookstore was the wedge, never the identity. That distinction sounds like branding trivia until you notice what it bought: when the catalog expanded to music, then electronics, then nearly everything, nobody inside the company had to argue that the new category betrayed the story, because the story had never been about books. Relentless.com still points at Amazon today, a small monument to a name deliberately built too big for its first product.

Most founders do the opposite, and the reason they do is that the opposite works first. A sharp niche story is what earns the first hundred customers: early adopters are buying a change, they tolerate rough edges, and they want to hear the product was built for exactly them. Geoffrey Moore named the problem in Crossing the Chasm in 1991 — the early majority that follows is not a larger version of that first group. They are buying a productivity improvement rather than a revolution, they want references from people who look like themselves, and the enthusiasts you spent a year courting are precisely the wrong references.

What turns this into a lock rather than a phase is that the narrow story quietly acquires enforcers. Sales quotes it, the roadmap inherits it, and every request from outside the niche arrives pre-labeled as scope creep — so the evidence that the fence is costing money gets filtered out by the fence itself. Breaking it rarely means abandoning the first market. It means demoting the founding feature from identity back to feature, which costs a team far more in ego than in engineering.