Steadybit’s Counterintuitive Customer Strategy: Why They Said No to Early Enterprise Deals

Steadybit’s Counterintuitive Customer Strategy: Why They Said No to Early Enterprise Deals

The conventional wisdom for B2B startups is clear: land big enterprise customers early to validate your product and secure revenue. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steadybit founder Benjamin Wilms revealed why his team took the opposite approach, turning down major enterprise opportunities to build a more sustainable foundation.

The Tempting Enterprise Trap

Just months after launching with six months of runway, Steadybit faced a pivotal moment. “There was a big company knocking on our door. They are very convinced about the product. They would like to buy a license,” Benjamin recalls. For most startups, this would be cause for celebration – the kind of early validation that investors love to see.

But Benjamin saw past the immediate revenue opportunity to recognize a deeper challenge: “It was like, okay, now I’m dealing an enterprise procurement process and we are just six people at this point in time.” This clear-eyed assessment of their capabilities would shape their entire go-to-market approach.

Redefining Customer Value

The key insight that drove Steadybit’s strategy came from understanding what early-stage companies truly need from their customers. As Benjamin explains, “Revenue is not like your biggest value you can get from customers. There’s even more feedback, like working with them very closely on your product to validate new features you have in mind.”

This perspective fundamentally changed how they evaluated potential customers. Instead of focusing on deal size, they prioritized customers who could help them refine their product and validate their approach to chaos engineering.

The Focus Advantage

At the heart of their strategy was a ruthless focus on immediate priorities. “The biggest obstacle is focused. Spend your time very efficient. Spend your time with the problems you need to solve right now,” Benjamin emphasizes. This meant saying no to opportunities that would distract from their core product development, even when those opportunities came with significant revenue attached.

For a team of six people, managing an enterprise procurement process would have consumed resources needed for product development and refinement. By avoiding this drain on their resources, they could maintain their focus on building a product that would eventually serve multiple enterprise customers effectively.

Building for Long-Term Success

Rather than chase enterprise deals, Steadybit invested in making their product more accessible. “We don’t would like to be an expert only tool. We would like to be a tool where people without any knowledge about chaos engineering or complex systems are able to start easily save and to get value out of it as fast as possible,” Benjamin explains.

This approach had two key advantages: it made the product more attractive to future enterprise customers while allowing the team to gather feedback from a broader range of users. By focusing on usability and integration, they built a foundation that would eventually support enterprise-scale deployments.

The Validation Paradox

Today, Steadybit serves major enterprises like Salesforce, validating their counterintuitive early strategy. By saying no to early enterprise deals, they were able to say yes to building a product that could truly serve enterprise needs at scale.

The lesson for B2B founders isn’t that enterprise deals are bad – it’s that timing matters more than immediate revenue. Sometimes, the best way to build an enterprise-ready product is to resist the temptation of early enterprise deals that could derail your development process.

For technical founders facing similar decisions, Steadybit’s journey offers a valuable framework: evaluate opportunities based on their impact on focus and feedback, not just revenue. In the early stages, the right customers are often those who help you build the right product, not those who pay the highest prices.