7 Go-to-Market Lessons From Building a Mid-Market Fintech During a Global Crisis

Launching a company in April 2020 might sound like terrible timing. But for Julio Martinez, it proved to be the ultimate test of his go-to-market strategy. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how his company achieved 10X growth by taking an unconventional approach to the mid-market fintech space.

Here are the key lessons from his journey:

1. Double Down on Customer Research Before Building Most founders pay lip service to customer development. Julio conducted over 100 structured interviews with finance leaders before launching. But it wasn’t just about having conversations – it was about asking the right questions. “I personally like a lot the exercise with the coins,” he explains. “If you have to say hey, what do you want to solve?…you can only pick two. So you start imposing constraints so that they really prioritize for you what makes more sense.”
2. Choose Your Market Based on Pain Intensity, Not Size While many startups chase enterprise deals, Julio’s research revealed that mid-market companies had the most acute pain. “Down market we don’t believe there is enough intensity in the pain,” he notes. “With Excel and Google sheets, hey, you can get a lot done really.” The mid-market sweet spot emerged because “as companies mature, they will have more volumes of data, they will have more dimensions…more complexity in their models, more countries, more products, more stuff to manage.”
3. Adapt Your GTM to Your Buyer’s Psychology Finance leaders think differently than other buyers. “Selling to finance teams is very technical and is sophisticated, and you are facing somebody that doesn’t get easily excited as opposed to selling to sales or marketing or some other functions.” This meant focusing on “true value, an ROI, clear ROI, instead of, hey, excitement, or it’s the new shiny object in our space.”
4. Build Product-Market Fit Before Scaling Sales Rather than rushing to grow, Julio advocates for patience: “Make sure you have an extremely robust product market fit before you really want to start playing with go to market.” This approach helped them achieve “more than ten times year growth” initially, before settling into “more the three times year growth” as they scaled.
5. Implement Weekly Accountability Structures From their time at Y Combinator, one lesson stood out: “The urgency to deliver and stay accountable week in, week out was a very powerful concept.” This wasn’t just about founder accountability – they cascaded this structure throughout the organization: “My management team and everybody else in the company, basically, they have weekly goals that we discuss with our manager.”
6. Move Fast on Hiring Decisions When asked about his most important lesson, Julio’s answer was immediate: “Firing fast. And that’s a classic, right? So that’s become almost a cliche…despite all founders know this cliche…We screw up most of the time, and I wasn’t an exception.” He acknowledges the emotional toll: “That’s very heavy for the company and for what you want to accomplish, but also, it’s a heavy burden that you need to take.”
7. Start Narrow But Plan for Expansion While they began focused on financial planning and analysis, their vision expanded based on market feedback. They’re now becoming “the operational planning system for companies in the mid market,” working with “revenue operations teams, business operations teams, HR teams as well.” This expansion came naturally from understanding how mid-market companies operate.

For founders building in tough markets or challenging times, Julio’s journey offers a masterclass in methodical execution. It’s not about moving fast and breaking things – it’s about deeply understanding your market, building genuine product-market fit, and having the discipline to execute consistently even when the world seems to be falling apart.

The results speak for themselves: from launching during a global pandemic to achieving rapid growth in the notoriously demanding fintech space. By focusing on solving real problems for mid-market finance teams rather than chasing the latest trends, they’ve built a foundation for sustainable growth that other founders can learn from.