Over the last 10 years, we have been helping software companies in various stages bring their products to market. What we’ve learned is that having clarity internally about why you exist, who you serve and how your solution helps your customers makes the biggest difference in success or failure over time.

For many founders, this sounds simple. As the owners of the vision, they intuit their way through problems because they see the end-goal before others. They are able to make trade-offs that others on their team can not and prioritize ruthlessly early on to only what matters. They are able to bring a product to market and get early traction. But then...it stalls. Why?

The first sales hire didn’t work out…”will sales ever work for my company?”. The engineers aren’t shipping without the founder’s detailed involvement…”will we ever scale beyond myself?”. The founders are spending all nighters on support…”who will care as much as I do about our customers?”. The founder is putting out operational fires vs. building towards their vision of what the company could become. Unless they have a venture scale business, the options of getting to the next level aren’t great...most businesses aren’t venture scale.

For other founders, the road is different again. They’ve created a product that meets the needs of a market and are clear on their impact to customers, but don’t want to do that for the rest of their lives. They’ve created a product that needs sales, marketing and support; but their hope was to just put something out into the world for people to enjoy. For these founders, the next project is what gets them going, not the mundane enterprise feature set that they need to build out in front of them. Unless they’re willing to commit themselves 100% to this one project, the options aren’t great either.

At Polychrome, our mission is to help these founders, products, side-projects and small businesses achieve their potential in the market that they couldn’t have otherwise. We do this by investing into these companies and providing our own operational expertise. This allows founders to focus on the areas of the business that align best with their strengths. Our model won’t be for every founder, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to help as many as possible.

To that end, this blog will serve as a resource for founders and early-stage teams at B2B Software companies to help them get their business to the next level. We will strive to create content that serves people in these situations. Hopefully, our readers will grow beyond the advice within these pages because their ventures reached new problems that we aren’t suited to weigh-in on. Not everything we will say is going to be correct, but by creating the dialogue and providing resources, we hope we can help people find the answers or connections for themselves and their situation.

Welcome to the Polychrome Blog.

Sincerely,

Alex, Greg and Matt