Getting Started
When you launch a company, the early problem space feels less like fighting a dragon and more like fighting a swarm of flies. A dizzying number of decisions and problems swarming around you. Everything is still “flexible” — code for completely undefined.
Product vision. Ideal customer profile. Buyer personas. Use cases. Feature prioritization. Systems architecture. Messaging and positioning. Pricing models. Go-to-market strategy. Hiring plans. Technology stack. Partnerships. Funding strategy. Metrics. Brand. Legal structure. Operational processes.
And dozens more.
At first it feels like all of these things matter. They come at you from every direction, demanding attention. But trying to solve them all is impossible.
Most of them don’t even make sense to solve yet.
You can’t begin to answer those questions until you first understand something more fundamental: What deep pain exists in the market? What is preventing it from being solved today? Who is experiencing it?
Finding the right market to start with is its own challenge. (If you’re interested in how we made that decision, I wrote about it in an earlier piece.) Once you’ve identified the market and begun answering those questions, your core mission becomes much simpler:
How do we become the single best solution to this problem for this customer segment?
Answering that question is the real search for product-market fit.
Until you can answer it, you’re not fighting the dragon yet.
You’re still in the swarm.
Crystallizing the Problem Space
The only way out is to land on a few core assumptions, deeply held beliefs about how the world should work, treat them as true, and build everything around them. Once those assumptions are crystallized, many of the other decisions in the company start aligning naturally.
The challenge, of course, is that you don’t get to invent those assumptions in isolation. They have to be discovered in the market. The best way I’ve found to talk to hundreds of people—prospects, customers, vendors, and operators—then distill the signal from the noise until a coherent, crystalized view begins to emerge.
For us, the crystals were simple and non-negotiable. We wanted to manifest a world where we:
- Solve the hardest integration and internal enterprise-tool challenges
- Do it at dramatically lower cost than the next-best option (even when customers would be willing to pay more)
- Deliver it significantly faster than anyone else
- Offer it as a fully managed service for teams that don’t have (or want) their own integration squad
- Stay laser-focused on a constrained set of industries where we have or can gain expertise, starting with Hospitality, Food & Beverage, and Retail
Once those were locked in, every other decision—product roadmap, hiring, pricing, messaging—started falling into place and your problems start to condense into a new unified form.
Manifesting Your Dragon
With the fundamentals set, the swarm suddenly coalesces into a single, clearly defined beast. The countless small problems that once competed for attention collapse into one central challenge. The problem hasn’t gotten smaller — it has simply come into focus.
Our principles give us a real competitive edge, but they also force us to face a huge challenge: how do you deliver uniquely tailored solutions at this level of speed, quality, and cost at planet-scale? That’s the dragon we face every day. And it feels surprisingly good to finally see it clearly. But it’s also extremely overwhelming, because once the dragon comes into focus, the next question becomes unavoidable: How big is it?
Here’s the math that lets us size our dragon.
Start with our existing customers: sophisticated hotel operators who have already validated our value proposition and told us exactly where our prices need to land for the solution to make sense. Project that same profile across the roughly 220,000 hotels worldwide managed by operators with similar needs. Today we can address only about 25% of their total integration and custom application requirements, which yields a hotel TAM of roughly $4B per year in license revenue from this vertical alone.
Now add vendors. Many hospitality technology providers want to offer pre-built, managed integrations as part of their value proposition to those same hotels. Our early research suggests that vendor demand represents roughly another 2× opportunity, adding another $4B.
Together, that’s about $8B in ARR opportunity within hospitality — still only around 10% of total hotel IT and vendor spend, which feels reasonable for addressing all integration and custom application needs.
But hospitality is just one vertical.
There are dozens of industries with nearly identical integration problems: food and beverage, retail, food delivery, airlines, cruise, casinos, rental cars, ride-share, and e-commerce. And many more with similar structural complexity — healthcare, education, financial services, energy, defense. Across roughly 100 analogous verticals, the opportunity grows to a unified TAM of roughly $800B.
And that’s still a conservative number.
Today, custom development is so expensive and risky that most ideas never get built. Remove the upfront capital cost, guarantee the outcome, and allow companies to kill projects with zero sunk cost if they fail — and suddenly an enormous amount of pent-up demand becomes viable. If even one in three or four enterprise integration ideas ultimately proves valuable, the total market expands dramatically. That pushes the real opportunity to something closer to $5.5 trillion. And this is all before adoption of humanoid bots takes off, which will become a large source of labor for our target industries in the coming years and drastically increase the TAM.
We’re three years in, growing fast — and still represent less than 0.00001% of that opportunity.
This makes the dragon even more clear: How do we scale our operation by roughly 3,500,000×? That’s the challenge our team wakes up to solve every day.
Why Pursue Such an Ambitious Quest?
Some people will say, “You don’t need the whole market. Even 1% would be a massive company.” Fair point. But that mindset turns the mission into a lifestyle business. We’re not here to capture a slice of the problem. We’re here to eliminate it.
The companies that reshape industries rarely start by aiming for a small percentage.
Microsoft didn’t just sell PCs to businesses. They made computing universal.
Facebook didn’t target college campuses forever. They connected the planet.
Amazon didn’t stop at books. They built the everything store.
Google didn’t organize research papers. They organized the world’s information.
Software makes this kind of ambition uniquely achievable. Once the solution works, it can scale to everyone.
That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to.
Making a Battle Plan
Once you know your dragon, you can finally start building a battle plan.
We began with the obvious levers: hiring, specialization, and focusing more on operating and scaling existing solutions rather than constantly building new ones from scratch.
The math looks roughly like this:
Start with the current scale gap of 3,500,000×.
Growing the team within each vertical might reasonably deliver a 4× improvement.
Adding dedicated vertical teams or partner ecosystems could multiply that by another 100×.
And over time, as more of our work shifts from brand-new builds to maintaining and onboarding customers onto existing solutions, we might gain another 3×.
Even after all of that, we’re still left needing roughly 2,917× improvement.
In other words, hiring and organizational structure alone won’t solve the problem.
To close the remaining gap without building a 100,000-person organization, we have to become dramatically more efficient. Even assuming a 10,000-person organization could maintain the productivity of a 50-person startup — which is already an optimistic assumption — we still need orders of magnitude improvement in how the work itself gets done.
So the real battle becomes efficiency.
The levers we’re pulling fall into a few categories, each with a set of grounded assumptions — measurable productivity gains we believe are achievable:
Streamlined processes and automation → +15%
Comprehensive knowledge base with reusable examples → +100%
Always-on access to domain experts → +25%
Repeat projects and multi-tenant services → +100%
Avoid writing code in roughly one-third of cases via AI services → +33%
AI agents with full context → +15%
Platform and tooling improvements → +15%
Compounded together, these improvements deliver roughly 10× productivity gains on top of the 2–3× advantage we believe we already have over traditional integration approaches.
In practice, that means quoting $50K implementations for projects customers expect to cost $1M, and delivering them in three weeks instead of twelve months.
Demand is already accelerating as IT leaders begin to realize what’s possible. And if we can unlock another 10× improvement, the scale of what becomes achievable changes dramatically.
The Dragon Remains
Even after all of that, we still need roughly another 142× efficiency improvement to truly tame it. A task in our domain that takes one developer a week today needs to take two minutes. A six-month, three-person project needs to take one person 2.5 hours.
Only then can we solve the problem for everyone without building an enormous, inefficient organization. That’s the challenge we need to solve. Nothing worth solving is ever easy, and that’s why we’re focused on this dragon.
