The Vev Playbook: Converting Early Enterprise Adopters When Your Product Creates a New Category

Landing enterprise deals is challenging enough when you’re selling a familiar product. But what happens when you’re creating an entirely new category? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vev founder Tine Karlsen shared their playbook for landing and expanding with their first major enterprise client, Shipstead.

Starting with Market Pain

Instead of leading with product features, Vev started by identifying a specific market pain point. “When companies were looking for ways to bring their print publication to Web, that tells me that large companies, they are so stuck with their original workflow that they started doing absurd things like converting PDFs to digital publications when that format is definitely not suitable for the web,” Tine explains.

This observation helped them identify media companies as their ideal early adopters. These companies had a clear need: they needed to produce custom content at scale without being bottlenecked by development resources.

Simplifying Complex Value

One of Vev’s biggest challenges was communicating their value proposition. “Our biggest challenge at the moment is that Vev is so new that we have to sort of compare Vev to very well known platforms for someone to understand what Vev is,” Tine shares.

The breakthrough came when they stopped trying to explain their platform in technical terms and instead focused on concrete outcomes. With Shipstead, they could demonstrate how they “reduced the time to market for these types of sites with over 90% from three weeks down to now being 30 minutes.”

Building for Multiple Stakeholders

Rather than trying to sell to a single decision-maker, Vev recognized the need to address multiple stakeholders. “We cater to teams, so we have to get through to both the designer, the developer, and other stakeholders on the team. And that makes the task incredibly complex,” Tine notes.

Their solution was to create clear value propositions for each stakeholder:

• For designers: Visual development without compromising on design control
• For developers: The ability to build new react components to extend the platform
• For marketers: Quick content updates without risking design integrity

The Power of Demonstration

Perhaps the most important lesson from Vev’s enterprise playbook is the power of showing rather than telling. “We typically see that whenever we get the luxury of demoing our platform, that’s when typical clients understand the value of the platform,” Tine explains.

This insight led them to focus less on marketing concepts and more on direct demonstration of value. “For me, it’s going back to the basics and simplifying, but the way to simplify is just saying things exactly how they are.”

Expanding Beyond Initial Use Cases

Once established with media companies, Vev began to see broader applications. “Now we see that more and more companies want to produce more content in house. So we also sell to marketing departments and agencies that produce on behalf of these enterprise clients,” Tine shares.

This expansion wasn’t accidental – it was built into their platform strategy from the start. By solving a specific problem extremely well for media companies, they created a solution that could scale to other enterprises facing similar challenges.

For founders building new categories, Vev’s experience offers valuable lessons about the importance of starting with specific pain points, creating clear value propositions for each stakeholder, and letting results speak louder than marketing concepts. Sometimes the best way to create a new category is to focus first on solving one problem extremely well.