VenKuni

Founder

Shyfter.co

Head of Partnerships

Partnershift - Partnership Community

Member

Domintell

Board Member

skeeled

Executive Advisor

Selligent

Chairman and CEO

Co-founder and CEO

Co-founder and Managing Director

READEAL sa

Co-founder

I founded VenKuni, a hands-on consulting firm that helps European tech startups build optimal ecosystems and leverage partnerships to boost their performance.

I learned about the power of ecosystems and partnerships through my long experience as CEO of Selligent, a Belgian startup I co-founded at the end of my studies. 
Selligent, a provider of Marketing software, has become one of the world’s most significant marketing technology SaaS providers thanks to partnerships! 
With ~400 staff, 10 offices across 2 continents, an ARR of €80 million and an outstanding ecosystem and talent pool, the company was sold to the Private Equity firm HGGC in July 2015. My responsibilities ended in April 2019.

Not one after the other. Nooooo!
 
 
 
Here is what came out of chatGPT: "Ideally, you should first focus on achieving Product-Market Fit before fully developing and executing a Go-to-Market strategy", which reflects what is statistically relevant as information available on the internet, I guess.
 
I disagree.
 
My experience as Chief Executive Officer @ Selligent and more recently as Head of Partnerships under the VenKuni brand is that Product Market Fit is inseparable from GotoMarket, at the very least when the ecosystem is brought to play a significant role, which in fact should often be the case.
 
While we would all like the process to be simpler, the truth is that developing Product-Market Fit is a long iterative process in the majority of cases and it is not advisable to take on the challenges of defining PMF and GtM one after the other.
 
Let's take the example of the first part of Selligent's life, where the focus was on a B2B CRM suite. Product Market Fit, and the commercial success that resulted from it, would never have been what it was if we had not collaborated with large IT integrators that allowed Selligent to sell a highly configurable solution to CIOs of large companies; we ended up doing this knowing that we could rely on the integrators to build a solid reputation with large companies and achieve very significant software licensing revenues without having to set up gigantic delivery teams, a probably insurmountable challenge. Without these partnerships, we would never have found this PMF which consisted of becoming the preferred alternative solution for CIOs of large companies looking for an affordable solution capable of competing with tailor-made development in terms of adaptation to needs.
 
My experience accumulated through VenKuni projects only reinforces this observation.
The development work of the PMF and the GtM strategy must be done simultaneously to obtain an optimal outcome.

The corollary of this observation is that product teams must be deeply involved in the design of ecosystem strategies, and not only when it comes to tech-tech partnerships - which greatly influence the functional scope of the solution that a company delivers by taking into account the complementary solution proposed by the technological partner - but also when it comes to partnerships focused on commercial and service collaboration.
 
What an exciting journey!

André Lejeune

Taplio

André Lejeune's Linkedin Analytics

André Lejeune

André Lejeune's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}André Lejeune's Linkedin Analytics

André Lejeune

André Lejeune's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

André Lejeune's Linkedin Analytics

André Lejeune's Best Posts (last 30 days)