I founded PolyAPI 20 months ago to empower companies to optimize their enterprise systems. Our goal is to facilitate seamless collaboration between these systems and their users, both horizontally through integration and vertically by developing new services and orchestrations. This approach enables companies to leverage new composite capabilities, setting them apart from their competitors.
As a PM with 15 years of enterprise experience (11 in IPaaS/APIs), many things came easy:
- ✅ Identifying a huge market -> literally every enterprise in the world = easy!
- ✅ Identifying an opportunity to differentiate -> focus on developers, leverage the latest and greatest infra tech/architecture = also easy!
- ✅ Fundraise -> call in old friends = piece of cake!
- ✅ Build a team of winners -> call in the best people I have worked with = done!
- ✅ Architect and Build a state-of-the-art platform -> with our team… = big easy button!
And that is where it started getting hard…
- ⁉️ Identifying the right stakeholders inside enterprises -> very hard when everyone presents themselves as “in charge,” “leader,” “director,” etc.
- ⁉️ Articulate what it is in 5 min and on your website -> each audience comes with a different background, set of systems, initiatives, and experience = nearly impossible!
- ⁉️ Become project-oriented to make the tech actionable -> “This is great, but we’re not sure how we would use it now” = 😭
- ⁉️ Learn to maneuver the decision-making and buying process -> champions, decision-makers, RFPs, contracting, pricing, procurement, approvals = 😵
… despite the challenge, all of these are things that can be learned with enough effort and experience.
No joke, having gone through the flow about 250 times now, it’s just starting to make sense.
If I could go back in time to the beginning of my career, I would have spent much more time in the field, working with Event Marketing to generate leads, Account Managers visiting customers and submitting proposals, Pre-Sales doing POCs, Post-sales doing onboarding, PS doing implementations, and support dealing with fire drills. The field teams that do the heavy lifting do not get the credit they deserve!
But that was not the most challenging part… The hardest part was building a culture of customer commitment to overcome “the big ask”…
The big ask looks like this:
“I want you to remove a mature platform, the most widely adopted one, with the most partners, with the most established field team, the strongest brand, with the highest rankings from the analysts, which you have in production, with a team that knows how to use and operate it; and I want you to bet your job and reputation on replacing it with our platform which is brand new, missing a UI, never been stress-tested in production, a team of 8 behind it, no analyst mention, no brand presence, no partners, no field team, no internal team experience, and shoddy documentation; I want you to implement the most important business workflows on it and put your company’s revenue on the line; and I want you to pay for both your current platform and our platform in the meantime, and I want you to pay for the full transition cost to the new one, and deal with your companies politics and internal process for purchasing a new product; while keeping in mind that 5 out of 6 companies at our stage will not survive and you could be left with an orphaned platform.”
It’s sobering, right? But it’s the reality of what you are asking people to do, so you may as well make it an explicit ask.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of the person that you are asking to make that decision. What do they want to see from you? The obvious things are:
- ✅ I have the problem you solve, in a big way.
- ✅ Your solution is production-ready.
- ✅ You have major investors.
- ✅ My team and I think your solution is far superior to the alternatives.
- ✅ The ROI from using your solution will be very good.
- ✅ You and your team are very competent and know this space better than anyone I have met.
- ✅ You have shown me that you execute in the time I have observed you.
Those are needed to just START the real conversation!
In the actual conversation, you need to give them cold, hard truths; there, you both need to be ideologically aligned. This is not some pitch or hypothetical; this needs to be the truth, and the decision maker must, deep down inside, also ALREADY believe it. The justification for the big ask looks something like this:
“Your current solution is a cancer in your organization, and it needs to be removed as soon as possible. The provider of the technology and their implementation partners are draining the life out of your company, both in terms of money and energy. They are in the business of extracting as much money from you as possible and genuinely don’t care about your success. They put their B team on your projects; the people they assign would rather be doing something else and view it just as a temporary job. The best people are kept from you, or they have moved on to something else long ago. They try to raise your prices and use the fact that their system is sticky and proprietary against you. It’s hard to find people competent in the system, so you rely on their specialist partners in the form of a racket. They promised the world to you during the sales cycle and have long ago moved on. You know this, which is why you already have the initiative to find a replacement, but you are worried that each vendor and SI you have looked at is more of the same.
I have a personal objection to this scheme. It’s morally corrupt and a widespread cancer in our society, draining and wasting human potential.
This is why I started Poly.
I understand with eyes wide open the big ask I am making from you. The reason I think you should make the switch is that we cost less, we get you away from platform and skillset lock-in, and we give you a ton of optionality on cloud providers (who, by the way, fight to get these sticky systems running on their clouds natively, a la cartel kingpins, so they win by proxy). Big tech is the real deal; they just pretend they are the good guys.
Being very aware of what I am asking you to do, I pay it back with a commitment that I now work for you. By proxy, my whole company now works for you. We don’t do this because we are nice. We do this because your success is what we need to show to progress to the next stage as a growth startup. Our objective is only a handful of such deals, which means we can give you the service needed to succeed. If you don’t succeed, we don’t succeed; it’s that simple.
We have burned the ships already. My co-founder and I, both of us are fathers, both of us are providers, have not been paid a dollar since we founded this company; there is no pivot, no switching roles, no getting a better job offer, no “it’s after hours,” or “I am vacation,” no quitting when it is hard, no going back, no plan B. We are committed to the long term, and our entire team shares this dedication. We have had zero turnover so far and are determined to ensure your success. We will help your company thrive and achieve a competitive edge in your industry by addressing this critical issue currently hindering you. Sometimes, we will fail you, but we will be direct, honest, take accountability, and fix the issue immediately. That is our commitment to you.”
Then you have to live this every day, no matter the time or day of the week. You have to remove every person from the team who does not share this, no matter how good they are at what they do. If you take this oath, you deliver all the table stakes, you have a chance, and one in one hundred people will take you up on this offer. They are visionaries who don’t need external influence to make their decisions. They are the people who have learned to judge character and know it when they see it. They hold the key to our success through the most challenging part of the startup journey. They make or break startups in the enterprise technology sector, and you must show them all the respect they deserve for what they do for you.