The COVID Launch Playbook: Building Through Global Crisis

April 2020: The global economy was in freefall, VCs were battening down the hatches, and most founders were focused on survival. It was exactly then that Julio Martinez decided to launch a new company. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared the counter-intuitive strategies that turned crisis constraints into advantages.

When the World Was Melting

“If you remember back then, now we know it’s with the benefit of hindsight, we know everything finished relatively okay. But back in the day, the world was melting,” Julio recalls. “I remember VC’s running headless trying to help for portfolio companies. I remember nobody was fundraising fighting.”

The challenges weren’t just about raising money. Convincing talented people to leave stable jobs during peak uncertainty seemed nearly impossible. As Julio notes, “You are supposed to get your early employees in motion and probably they have a job that probably pays them very well, so why would they join a couple of guys with a PowerPoint and whatever?”

The Decision to Launch

Despite these headwinds, Julio and his co-founder made the decision to move forward. “I remember literally the first week of lockdown where the governments were placing everybody home. I’m having that conversation with my wife. Yeah, great idea. We’re going ahead anyway.”

This wasn’t blind optimism. Their conviction came from deep customer research – over 100 interviews with finance leaders that revealed a critical problem: “We see finance teams and revenue operations teams spending a lot of time, actually 60, 70, 80% in some cases of their time, in manual tasks.”

Three Crisis Launch Principles

Their launch strategy centered around three core principles:

1. Absolute Conviction “Definitely it required a lot of commitment, a lot of conviction, a lot of discipline,” Julio explains. “A lot of willingness to get exposed to this challenge and a lot of clarity as to what to build and certainty that things were going to play out well, regardless of the environment.”
2. Problem-First Focus Instead of getting distracted by the chaos, they stayed focused on their core insight: “We knew the pain is very real. We knew we had an unfair advantage to solve it. So it was full determination to go and do it.”
3. Embracing Constraints The crisis created natural constraints that forced discipline. As Julio notes, “You’re supposed to be fundraising your proceed or sit down and nobody’s really funding.” This forced them to be incredibly efficient with resources.

Turning Crisis into Advantage

The constraints of launching during COVID actually created several unexpected advantages:

1. Less Competition While others were pulling back, they were pushing forward, giving them more space to establish their position.
2. Focus on Fundamentals The crisis forced them to focus on real pain points rather than nice-to-have solutions. “We are building here the problem we had in the past and we are building the product we wish we had in the past,” Julio explains.
3. Strong Team Culture Starting in crisis created a resilient culture. “I think that made us stronger,” Julio reflects. “And here we are now.”

The Results

Their contrarian approach paid off. The company achieved “more than ten times year growth” in its early stages, later settling into “more the three times year growth” as they scaled. More importantly, the crisis launch helped them build strong foundations for sustainable growth.

Lessons for Crisis Launches

For founders considering launching during uncertain times, Julio’s experience offers several key insights:

1. Deep customer research can provide conviction when the macro environment suggests caution
2. Crisis constraints can force discipline and efficiency
3. Moving forward while others pull back can create strategic advantages

The key is having genuine conviction about the problem you’re solving. As Julio puts it, you need “clarity as to what to build and certainty that things were going to play out well, regardless of the environment.”

Today, as they expand beyond their initial focus to become “the operational planning system for companies in the mid market,” the resilience built during their crisis launch continues to shape their approach to growth and innovation.