Inside Chord Commerce’s Pivot: How to Know When Your Infrastructure is Your Real Product

Every software company starts with a hypothesis about what their real value is. Sometimes, that hypothesis is wrong – but in an interesting way. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Bryan Mahoney shared how Chord Commerce discovered their true value wasn’t in the DTC brands they were building, but in the infrastructure powering them.

The Original Hypothesis

After leaving Glossier in 2019, Bryan and his co-founder Henry Davis started Arfa with a clear vision: build multiple DTC brands on a shared technology platform. Their hypothesis was that successful brands could be built more efficiently by sharing sophisticated tools and data infrastructure.

“The first product that we worked on at Arfa was in fact the technology stack that today is in market as cord commerce,” Bryan explains. “But we built it for our own brands.”

The Moment of Realization

After launching two brands – Hiki (an all-gender sweat brand) and State of Menopause – they had an epiphany. As Bryan describes: “Perhaps the real value in what we had created was in the technology stack and a better way to monetize it, instead of through the creation of our own brands, was to make it available to other founders who were looking for similar solutions.”

This realization didn’t come in isolation. Their investors provided crucial perspective: “We got some really good advice along the way from our investors that encouraged us to choose Elaine and really to focus.”

The Power of Operating Experience

What made this pivot particularly effective was their deep operational experience. Unlike traditional enterprise software companies that start with minimal products, Chord had built a comprehensive solution based on real operational needs.

“We really believe that we’re operators. We had created a system as operators for other operators,” Bryan notes. “We know where the hard parts are and we really felt like we’ve been able to productize, like I said, sort of decades of experience.”

Signs Your Infrastructure Might Be Your Product

Chord’s journey offers several indicators for founders to evaluate their own infrastructure:

1. Other Operators Ask About Your Tools Bryan recalls how at Glossier: “I used to get pinged all the time from other technology leaders or commerce leaders or CEO’s of brands that would just sort of ask for advice.”
2. You’re Solving Universal Problems Their experience showed that brands universally struggled with data infrastructure: “The hard parts of commerce used to be the storefront experience and the checkout experience… commerce is really a part of like all of our experiences.”
3. Your Solution is More Sophisticated Than Available Options As Bryan explains their value proposition: “We’re really delivering this enterprise grade turnkey data stack. For brands who are trying to do really sophisticated commerce.”

Executing the Pivot

The transition wasn’t just about repackaging existing technology. Chord made strategic decisions about their focus, recently choosing to narrow their offering: “Recently, we have decided to focus almost exclusively on that latter part, the commerce data platform, where we’re more agnostic to your storefront technology and your order management system or commerce back office technology.”

The Future View

This focus on data infrastructure aligns with Bryan’s vision for commerce: “If you’re not collecting great data, if you’re not leveraging your own channels to learn more about your customers, then you’re going to be left behind. I just don’t think you can build a great and durable brand without doing that.”

For founders building internal tools, Chord’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes your most valuable asset isn’t the product you’re building for the market, but the infrastructure you’ve built to solve your own problems. The key is recognizing when that infrastructure has broader market potential than your original product.