The Hidden Costs of Single-Customer Focus: Lessons from Inato’s Early Enterprise Strategy

Landing your first major enterprise customer feels like validation. But that early success can become a trap, leading you down a path of over-customization that makes scaling nearly impossible. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kourosh Davarpanah shared how Inato learned this lesson the hard way.

The Early Enterprise Trap

When asked about his biggest lesson learned, Kourosh didn’t hesitate: “I think the number one piece of advice would be partnering with enough clients so that you’re not overfitting to begin with.”

This insight came from painful experience. “What we ended up doing was we focused so much on a single one that we ended up building something that was super customized to them, which was a blessing and a curse because we ended up getting early traction, but we ended up doing 90% of our revenue with them.”

The Hidden Cost of Success

The problems weren’t immediately apparent. Early customization led to strong initial traction and revenue, creating the illusion of product-market fit. But as Inato tried to expand, they discovered the true cost of their single-customer focus.

“We actually then had to backtrack a ton to be able to understand what is completely specific to this pharma company and how can we actually build a product that fits a need in the market and not just for a single customer,” Kourish explains.

Breaking Free Through First Principles

The solution required more than just gradual changes. Inato eventually made the bold decision to pivot completely, abandoning their SaaS product to build a marketplace. “We pivoted after four years,” Kourosh recalls. “And when I say pivoted, it was a hard pivot. We went back to no clients, no revenue, no product, nothing.”

This reset allowed them to rebuild based on market needs rather than individual customer requirements. The results were dramatic: “We did more revenue on year two with the new model than we did on year four of the previous one.”

Building for Scale from Day One

With their marketplace approach, Inato took a different path to building trust and credibility:

1. Focus on Core Problems: “What was quite unique to us is we ended up focusing on the discovery piece, on the matching piece for a really long period of time,” Kourosh shares. Rather than adding features for specific customers, they focused on solving fundamental market problems.
2. Invest in Industry Expertise: Instead of customizing their product, they invested in expertise. “You need to have experts internally that the pharma are going to trust,” creating an “amazing customer success team with dozens of years of pharma experience.”
3. Build Trust Systematically: They spent three years focused solely on the core matching problem before expanding to “admin work, the legal work, the pricing, the payment, et cetera.”

The Results of Market-First Thinking

Today, Inato works with over half of the top pharmaceutical companies and approximately 3,500 sites across 50 countries, growing revenue by 600% in the past year. Their marketplace is transforming clinical trial access without being dependent on any single customer.

Key Lessons for Enterprise Founders

1. Partner with multiple clients early to avoid over-customization
2. Distinguish between customer-specific requirements and market needs
3. Build foundational features that solve industry-wide problems
4. Invest in expertise and trust-building that scales across customers
5. Be willing to reset everything if you’ve over-indexed on customization

Looking ahead, Kourosh envisions making clinical trial access as seamless as booking accommodation: “The big picture for us is making it as easy for any hospital in the world to offer trials to their patients as it is to book a place on Airbnb.”

For B2B founders, Inato’s journey shows that early enterprise success can be deceptive. The real challenge isn’t landing your first big customer—it’s building a product that can scale beyond them. Sometimes that means making the difficult decision to start over rather than remaining trapped in the customization spiral.