5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Moderne’s Enterprise Software Journey

Trust Your Strategy Over Market Trends In 2020, when product-led growth was the only acceptable go-to-market strategy in Silicon Valley, Moderne took a different path. “Back in 2020, that was not popular. Firms wanted to hear, bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. All day long and if you said enterprise sale, it really had a chilling effect,” Jonathan Schneider recalls. Instead of following the crowd, Moderne developed a hybrid approach combining open source community building with enterprise sales.

Build a Long-term Brand Identity Early Before securing pre-seed funding, Moderne invested $60,000 in brand development – with Jonathan paying the first half from personal savings. This unconventional early investment stemmed from a clear vision: “If you’re thinking from the beginning, you want this to be a lasting brand… establishing that identity early is really important because it takes a while for you to fit.”

Focus on Business Outcomes, Not Feature Benefits Moderne evolved their messaging to directly address business value rather than technical capabilities. As Jonathan explains, “When you think about mass refactoring, you could think, oh, this is a developer productivity story… but developer productivity is a bit indirect to the business outcome we’re trying to achieve. So now we talk about something like tech stack liquidity, the ability to get off of old systems, to consolidate vendors.”

Navigate Category Creation Strategically Rather than choosing between creating a new category or redefining an existing one, Moderne did both. “I like having both because new category is where you have that opportunity to find a new price point. That’s what everybody really wants to be able to do. But if you’re a strictly new category, you’re going to struggle to fit into an enterprise budget line item that’s expecting you to fit into something they know.”

Filter Conflicting Market Feedback During fundraising, Jonathan experienced dramatically opposing feedback: “I had 230 minutes rejection calls… the first one I’m listening, and I don’t remember even what the criticism was, but it was, you look like a square and you should look like a circle… And in the next call, it was like, you look like a circle, you should look like a square.” The lesson? Stay true to your vision despite conflicting market signals.

Build Trust Before Asking for Enterprise Commitment Enterprise sales cycles require significant trust, especially when handling sensitive assets. “This is an enterprise product. When we’re dealing with source code, we’re asking basically a customer to give us either in whole or in part their intellectual property,” Jonathan notes. This reality shaped their approach to customer acquisition, taking over a year to land their first customer but establishing a strong foundation for future growth.

The broader lesson from Moderne’s journey is the importance of maintaining strategic conviction while being pragmatic about execution. As Jonathan puts it, “You really have to know who you are and be true to that, regardless of the cycle.” This balance between conviction and adaptation has enabled Moderne to build a distinctive position in the enterprise software market, with a clear vision for the future: “If we can mass fix the open source ecosystem upon which we rely, and we can mass fix the applications that depend on them, I think we can solve the technical engineering problems that confront our society more quickly.”

These lessons underscore a crucial truth about B2B go-to-market strategy: success often comes not from following prevailing wisdom, but from finding the unique approach that aligns with your product, market, and long-term vision.