“Flywheel” is one of those words that ages badly unless the loop is real and the surfaces are smooth. Real loops begin with a sharp wedge, keep friction low between steps, and deliberately recycle the output of one step as the input of the next. The shape below has worked across several B2B products without becoming theater.
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Wedge: a single painful job with a fast proof. Pick a job whose success you can demonstrate in days, not quarters. Ship an implementation checklist with receipts, not case‑study poetry.
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Proof → Reference: publish an honest one‑pager with numbers (before/after) and a quote you didn’t write. Turn this into a “pattern” doc for your field teams: personas, crisp triggers, common objections, the one metric that moves.
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Reference → Pipeline: operationalize the pattern in outbound and content. Sales sequences map to the triggers; content maps to the objections. Resist the urge to add five personas before one sings.
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Pipeline → Product: wire what the market reveals back into the roadmap. Every lost deal with the same missing capability is a gift; every win with the same workaround is a tax.
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Product → Wedge expansion: extend from the wedge into the next job that your best customers already ask you to do. If you jump to a new industry or a new buyer before compounding, you are not a flywheel; you are a water feature.
Stories from the field:
We helped a safety tooling startup with a clear wedge (reduce time to investigate a flagged incident by 50%). The first reference came from a customer who measured with a stopwatch and sent us the spreadsheet unprompted. We turned that into a “pattern” doc and handed it to SDRs and AEs. The pipeline that followed wasn’t bigger because we spammed more; it was better because it lined up with a job and a number.
In contrast, a dev tools team tried to launch three wedges at once to appease a board. The content team wrote eight personas in a month and nobody could remember who the hero was. Deals advanced on charisma and stalled on fit. We killed two wedges, rewrote the pattern, and the flywheel finally spun because there was only one handle to grab.
Be generous here. Share references with peers, even competitors, when it improves trust in the category. Kind ecosystems feed better loops than defensive ones. It turns out that momentum is social as much as it is mechanical.