When a company needs a bigger market
Accellion needed to grow beyond large file transfer, into a bigger market.
When a company says it needs a bigger market, the first instinct is usually to find more customers for the thing it already sells. New segments, new regions, a bigger sales push. Sometimes that’s right. But what looks like a market problem might really be a product problem… the thing you sell was built for the market you’re in, and it may not be what the bigger market is buying.
That was the question at Accellion. I was advising them on product and marketing, and I pitched secure collaboration, which meant building something new rather than selling the old thing harder. Then came the harder part: working across teams to design and build the platform. I named it Kiteworks.
The company made the pivot. Eventually it took Kiteworks as its own name.
It’s the question I start with now when a founder or CEO is about to make a big move: launching a product, scaling a startup, taking a company into the US. The move usually gets framed as a go-to-market question. Who do we sell to, and how do we reach them? Often that’s exactly the question. But underneath it there might be a product question, or a positioning question, or an assumption from the market you know that doesn’t hold in the one you’re entering. Working harder on the wrong one just gets you busier.
None of the things I’ve built started with a plan that survived. They started with a direction… and an honest look at whether what we had could get us there.
If you’re about to take your company somewhere new, what’s the question underneath the one you’re asking?