5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Cobrainer’s Journey to €10M ARR

Sometimes the most valuable GTM insights come from companies that had to completely reinvent their approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hanns Aderhold shared how Cobrainer evolved from a university project to a thriving skills platform, offering crucial lessons for founders navigating their own go-to-market challenges.

1. Use Early Customers as Strategic Learning Labs

Rather than rushing to scale, Cobrainer spent six years as a consultancy, using each client engagement to deeply understand the market. “We noticed that after six years of doing this consulting approach… we had this very unique skills engine that hasn’t changed for the last ten years,” Hanns explains. This foundation of customer understanding became crucial when they later pivoted to SaaS.

2. Turn Market Headwinds into Advantages

When COVID hit right after Cobrainer discontinued their consulting contracts, it seemed catastrophic. However, Hanns shares, “COVID actually turned out to be an accelerant for us because with COVID lots of people had a hiring freeze… and actually that made them turn to more their internal talent management, which was exactly our platform.” The lesson? Sometimes apparent market challenges can actually accelerate adoption if your solution addresses the resulting pain points.

3. Build a Partner-First GTM Strategy

Instead of building a large internal sales team, Cobrainer leveraged partnerships with major HR platforms and consultancies. “Working with these big HR players and actually working with their sales organization, pushing us, pushing our solution really helped us a lot,” Hanns notes. These partnerships provided qualified leads and helped them navigate enterprise sales cycles more efficiently.

4. Avoid Premature Scaling

One of Cobrainer’s key lessons came from scaling too quickly after receiving funding. “We really hired a lot of headcount. So went up to like 70, I believe even more than 70 people, just, we had eight people in marketing alone,” Hanns recalls. They later had to restructure, learning that building organizational structures should follow market demand, not precede it.

5. Find Your Niche in a Changing Market

For HR tech companies today, Hanns emphasizes: “Be very niche in HR. So people are really opening up their portfolio of solutions. The trend is going away from centralization into one big platform, and the trend is really going towards distinct solutions for like even just parts of use cases.” This insight helped Cobrainer focus on skills data management rather than trying to build an all-in-one solution.

The results speak for themselves. Cobrainer is “growing ARR on an average of 252% year over year” and approaching €10 million in revenue. But perhaps more importantly, they’ve built a sustainable growth engine by understanding their market deeply and making strategic pivots at the right moments.

For founders building their own go-to-market strategy, these lessons highlight the importance of patience, strategic partnerships, and careful scaling. As Hanns puts it when discussing partnerships: “Those where you kind of have like talks and rough idea sketches in the beginning, they never tend to really materialize.” Instead, focus on concrete, urgent needs and build from there.

The company continues to evolve, now exploring expansion into the SMB market while maintaining their enterprise focus. This dual-track approach demonstrates another key lesson: successful go-to-market strategies aren’t static – they evolve as your company and market mature.

Cobrainer’s journey shows that building a successful go-to-market strategy isn’t about following a predetermined playbook. It’s about understanding your market deeply, being willing to pivot when necessary, and building strong partnerships that can accelerate your growth. Most importantly, it’s about having the patience to build a strong foundation before scaling.