From Lazada to Lapaya: How Operating Experience Shaped This Founder’s GTM Strategy

Experiencing a problem firsthand often leads to the most compelling startup ideas. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, René Janssen shared how his journey from scaling Lazada’s Indonesia operations to leading their HR transformation provided crucial insights that would later shape Lapaya’s approach to revolutionizing employee training.

The Problem on the Ground

While running one of Lazada’s largest markets, René encountered a fundamental challenge: “The amount of people we needed to fix our problems and the amount of technical terms, warm bodies were throwing at problems made us extremely unproductive. And that also led to people being unhappy and running out of the door… pretty much as fast as we could hire them.”

This wasn’t just a minor operational hiccup. When Alibaba acquired Lazada, they identified people processes as a major red flag during due diligence. Instead of dismissing the criticism, René took an unusual step for a business leader – he moved into HR leadership.

The Transition to HR

“It was not a common thing, I suppose, to do for an entrepreneur, for a business leader,” René recalls, “but I thought, yeah, we have 5000 people in the company. I do think they deserve better and we can do better as a company.” This decision would provide crucial insights into the challenges of employee development at scale.

Identifying the Market Gap

Leading HR exposed René to the limitations of existing training solutions. “If you really struggle with skills like leadership, with communication, with how to give a great presentation, you don’t need to lock yourself for five days with a traditional player into a conference center or hotel to kind of learn that. But watching videos and doing some exercise and e-learning is too thin.”

This experience revealed a clear market opportunity. The training industry was stuck between two extremes: expensive, time-consuming in-person training or superficial digital solutions. Neither addressed the real needs of rapidly scaling companies.

Translating Experience into Product Strategy

René’s operational background influenced Lapaya’s hybrid approach: “We say, hey, let’s use tech wherever we can. But since many of those skills that makes you effective at work, the skills that help you convince a client, the skills that help you collaborate with a coworker, are, in essence, human skills. We managed to blend in humans in there as well.”

This wasn’t just about making training more convenient – it was about addressing a broader economic challenge. René points to declining productivity growth: “40, 50, 60 years ago, there used to be four, five, 6% more every year… Today those growth rates have dropped significantly… to zero to 1% a year.”

Building Credibility with Enterprise Buyers

Having been on the buyer side, René understood how to build trust with enterprise decision-makers. His marketing approach reflects this: “Let’s make sure that we reach as many decision makers as possible and try to get the story out of how we do things better. So we’re very factual, very content driven, push out a lot of research and numbers and trying to show, hey, we understand the business problems you have.”

Key Lessons for Founders

1. Deep operational experience in your target market provides invaluable insights
2. Sometimes the best product insights come from switching roles within a company
3. Understanding buyer psychology requires experiencing their challenges firsthand
4. Complex problems often require hybrid solutions, not pure technology plays

Looking ahead, René sees an opportunity to consolidate a fragmented market: “Every single market around the world has local players, and the biggest players per market have low single digit market shares.” His operational experience has positioned Lapaya to potentially become one of the dominant global players in people development.

The lesson for founders? Sometimes the best preparation for building a successful company isn’t founding previous startups – it’s experiencing the problem you’re solving from multiple angles within a large organization.