That Startup

If you're building B2B software right now, find the 300 companies that need exactly what you do. Not the 30,000. Sell deep. Price for value. Stay in your lane. Veeva hit $1.85B in revenue in 2021 with that exact playbook. #B2B

In 2021, Veeva Systems closed deals with 4 of the top 5 pharma companies from a single NYC office. They did it with a 40-person sales team. Their competitors had 400+. The number that explains it: $1.2M average contract value.

The real lesson: Veeva never tried to be a horizontal CRM. They picked life sciences in 2007 and never left. By 2021, switching costs were so high that a pharma CTO told investors leaving Veeva would cost more than staying. That's the moat.

During COVID, when every SaaS company panicked and discounted, Veeva raised prices. They justified it by shipping Vault CDMS in 2021 specifically for clinical data. One product. One vertical. One problem solved completely. Revenue jumped 26% that year.

Most people think enterprise B2B sales is a volume game. More reps. More calls. More pipeline. Veeva did the opposite. They cut their prospect list to under 300 companies globally and went deeper on each one.

In 2015, Xiaomi sold 1M phones in SEA in 90 days. No retail stores. Just Facebook groups and flash sales. Fans became distributors. The product never touched a shelf until it already had a waitlist.

In 1994, MTV moved its HQ from midtown to Times Square. Not for real estate. To hire street kids, skaters, and club promoters as producers. The avg age of staff dropped to 26. Ratings doubled in 3 years.

Before the next disruption hits your revenue: Map which customer segment is already using your product without your full attention. That's your lifeline. Preply found theirs just in time. #startups

In 2020, Preply's revenue dropped 40% overnight. Language tutoring. Live sessions. Cancelled corporate contracts. Everyone assumed edtech won during COVID. Preply nearly didn't survive it.

The lesson isn't 'pivot fast.' It's that your best customer during a crisis is rarely who you planned for. Preply had consumers on the platform already. They just weren't prioritising them. The data was there before the crisis hit.

CEO Kirill Bigai made one brutal call. Stop chasing enterprise. Go direct-to-consumer, fast. They rebuilt pricing, repositioned the tutor marketplace, and ran hard at individual learners stuck at home. Revenue recovered by Q3 2020.

The narrative: COVID was a gift to edtech. The reality: most European edtech companies saw B2B revenue collapse in Q1 2020. Companies froze training budgets immediately. Preply's entire enterprise pipeline vanished in 6 weeks.

In 2000, Bid or Buy launched in South Africa with 3,000 listings. No investors. No press. Just sellers who couldn't reach buyers outside their city. Today it processes $100M+ in transactions yearly. Africa's marketplace myth: "no market exists." The market was always there.

In 1999, Salesforce rented a fake apartment in SF. They called it a "headquarters" to impress NYC enterprise clients. Marc Benioff knew B2B buyers trusted addresses, not ideas. They closed $1M in deals before having a real office.

Most founders chase investors to compete. Vembu built a talent pipeline no competitor could copy. Find the constraint in your industry. Then solve it in a way that looks weird from the outside. That's your moat.

In 2001, Zoho had no marketing budget, no VC money, and zero name recognition. They competed against Salesforce anyway. Today they do $1B+ in revenue and have never taken outside funding. Here's the move nobody talks about 🧵

This wasn't charity. It was a structural advantage. Zoho's cost per engineer was a fraction of Silicon Valley. So they could price products cheaper than Salesforce and still profit. The talent strategy WAS the business strategy. #startups

Vembu started Zoho University in rural Tamil Nadu. Kids from poor families. No college admission. No prospects. He trained them himself and paid them salaries while they learned. Their cost base dropped dramatically. Their loyalty was absolute.

Everyone assumes Zoho won on product. The real story: founder Sridhar Vembu made a decision in 2005 that most CEOs would never make. He hired engineers straight out of high school. No degrees. No credentials. Just raw talent.

In 2000, Bid or Buy launched in South Africa with $50K. The dot-com crash wiped out their funding. Founder Rolf Delport sold his house to keep it alive. Today it's done over $1B in transactions.