From Platform Play to End-to-End Solution: How Lepaya Found Product-Market Fit in the $400B Employee Training Market

Three months into building Lepaya, René Janssen and his co-founder faced a stark reality about their initial go-to-market strategy. Their vision of creating a platform connecting training providers with enterprise clients wasn't working. "If this is the rate at which we're going to expand, then we rather stop right now," René recalls thinking.

This moment led to a radical pivot that would define Lepaya's future trajectory. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, René shared how they completely overhauled their approach: "We're just going to take everything upon us and we're going to client and saying we're just going to do leadership training, we're going to soft skills training, we're going to do personal development and we're just going to do it better."

This wasn't just a minor adjustment – it was a complete reimagining of their business model. Instead of trying to be a marketplace connecting existing players, they decided to own the entire value chain. The decision came from recognizing a fundamental flaw in their initial approach: "What we maybe naive in retrospect, had forgotten to consider is that meant that you had to do every sale twice, you had to sell to a client, and then you still have to sell to other external kind of training providers."

The pivot worked. By taking control of the end-to-end experience, Lepaya could focus on solving what René saw as the three main problems plaguing corporate training programs. First, companies often lack a clear vision about required capabilities. Second, they either give employees too much choice ("what do you want to learn?") or too little ("this is the course you're going into"). Third, they tend to be rigid in their delivery methods – either fully digital or fully classroom-based.

René's insight into these problems came from firsthand experience. While running Indonesia operations for Lazada, he witnessed how inadequate training led to high turnover and low productivity. When Alibaba acquired the company, they flagged people processes as a major concern during due diligence. This led to René taking on the HR leadership role, where he discovered 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," René explains. "But watching videos and doing some exercise and e-learning is too thin."

The market opportunity was clear. Of the $400 billion spent annually on corporate training, about 50% goes to soft skills, management skills, and leadership development – the areas Lepaya focuses on. This represents an $80 billion addressable market for their current product offering.

For founders looking to enter the enterprise HR space, René emphasizes the importance of deep customer discovery: "Call up yourself. Go on LinkedIn, call your friends, call whoever you might know kind of a lot around until you find five or ten or fifteen people that are your potential buyer. Tell them to be as critical as possible and pitch the product you want to have in six months or twelve months as if you had it today."

This approach ensures founders truly understand their buyers' needs before building. As René puts it, "You can ultimately sell anything. But the unit economics aren't always going to make the sense that you want them to make sense."

Looking ahead, René sees an opportunity for consolidation in what remains a highly fragmented market. "Every single market around the world has local players, and the biggest players per market have low single digit market shares," he notes. His vision is for Lepaya to become one of a handful of dominant global players in people development – a vision that seems increasingly achievable given their success in reimagining how corporate training can work.

The lesson from Lepaya's journey is clear: sometimes the path to product-market fit requires completely rethinking your initial assumptions and being willing to take on much bigger challenges than originally planned. It's not just about making existing processes marginally better – it's about fundamentally reimagining how things could work.