5 Go-to-Market Lessons from &Open’s Journey to Building a Global Gifting Platform

Every successful startup begins with a problem worth solving. For &Open CEO Jonathan Legge, that insight came from an unexpected place – being an Airbnb host. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jonathan shared crucial lessons about building and scaling a B2B platform that now handles over a million gifts annually. Here are the key go-to-market insights from their journey:

1. Let Customer Pain Points Guide Your Product Evolution

Sometimes your best product insights come from being a customer yourself. &Open’s pivot to enterprise gifting started when they experienced Airbnb’s broken gifting process firsthand. As Jonathan describes: “Nobody knew they were sending a gift. In particular, the guest, who was the intended recipient, had no idea they were going to get a gift. And then they also had no idea that they’d even tried to gift. And Airbnb had no idea that the gift had failed.”

This direct experience with the problem gave them the confidence to approach Airbnb, despite being told they were “way too small” and “operating out of your garden shed.” They understood the pain point deeply enough to know they could solve it.

2. Turn Geographic Constraints into Competitive Advantages

Starting a global logistics business from Ireland might seem like a disadvantage, but &Open turned it into a strength. “Through a lot of hard lessons and being forced to do so from a tiny island on the edge of the Atlantic,” Jonathan explains, they mastered cross-border logistics early. This foundation became crucial as they scaled internationally, giving them capabilities that US-focused competitors struggled to match.

3. Focus on One Customer Until You’ve Mastered the Problem

Rather than rush to scale, &Open spent two years serving only Airbnb. As Jonathan notes: “For two years they were our only client because we were just learning so fast and really didn’t have the capacity to take on anything else.” This intense focus allowed them to deeply understand the challenges of global gifting and build robust solutions before expanding.

4. Stay Self-Funded Until You’ve Found Your Core Value

Despite operating in a venture-heavy space, &Open remained self-funded for three years. Jonathan explains: “I wanted us to stay self funded because I wanted us to really understand what we’re doing and to have the foundations in a really strong place before we took in outside capital.” This patience allowed them to build strong foundations without the pressure of external growth expectations.

5. Reframe the Category Around Emotional Impact

Rather than positioning themselves as just another gifting platform, &Open reframed corporate gifting around relationships and emotional connection. “Relationships are not a quantitative thing, they’re a qualitative thing,” Jonathan explains. “And gifting isn’t a silver bullet, but it definitely can help augment a relationship, particularly in kind of the hyperdigital, fractured world we live in today.”

This perspective shaped their product decisions, like giving recipients curated choices rather than unlimited options: “Don’t give them a voucher to Amazon prime where they can choose anything from batteries to a box set of West Wing. But give them something that’s curated enough that it shows the thought you’ve put into it and as a business, that it represents your brand.”

For founders building enterprise platforms, &Open’s journey offers a powerful reminder that sometimes the best go-to-market strategy isn’t about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about deeply understanding a problem, building robust solutions, and scaling thoughtfully. As Jonathan puts it when discussing their vision: “The question we’ve been talking about a lot of recent is like, how do you scale thoughtfulness?”

Their approach shows that in B2B, especially when handling critical customer touchpoints, taking time to build strong foundations can create more sustainable advantages than rushing to scale.