Max Denevich

Oh, that's a good one.

I think what made it real for me was looking at the numbers.

The company had gone through like millions of dollars in investment, and the result was a couple dozen clients outside the home market spread across a handful of countries.

So that's not a struggling company.

That's a model that simply doesn't work.

And the first decision was don't panic into the wrong move.

No emergency, fundraise, terrible terms, no slashing the product team, no pivoting to something

completely different.

The core idea had potential.

We'd seen it resonate with clients.

The product focus and positioning needed to shift.

And it did over time, but the immediate problem was how we were selling and distributing what we had.

So the shift was instead of hiring more salespeople to knock on more doors and investing a lot of money in marketing upfront, we went...

to other direction entirely.

We stopped treating partners like a side channel and made them a primary engine.

So all this like post providers, integration platforms, technology operators, marketing agency, the people already embedded inside the restaurant chains.

But more than that, we didn't just integrate with them technically.

We

turn them into real advocates of our solution.

So they were not just passing leads, they were recommending us because our product made their offerings stronger.