From 75% layoffs to $10M ARR: the B2B turnaround playbook
Welcome to B2B Growth Secrets, where every week, we listen to dozens of B2B Growth podcasts and extract the top actionable ideas. (For more context on these ideas, give the podcasts a listen)
In this issue:
Editor’s corner: The myth of “it’s better to build picks and shovels”
The multi-channel strategy that grew Orgnostic from $100K to $2.5M ARR
The company that fired 75% of staff after Series A, then doubled revenue in 2 years
The myth of “it’s better to build picks and shovels”
The conventional wisdom says building tools for startups (the “miners”) is safer than building the products themselves. The data tells a different story: when everyone's selling shovels, you end up in a race to the bottom, while the miners capture all the value. We only remember the winners and forget the graveyard of infrastructure companies that died trying.
We've all heard the gold rush story. While miners went broke chasing nuggets, Levi Strauss got rich selling them jeans. It's become Silicon Valley's favorite metaphor for de-risked entrepreneurship: build infrastructure, not applications. Sell to startups rather than consumers. Be the picks and shovels, not the prospector.
There's just one problem: survivor bias (and the strategy increasingly doesn't work).
The Levi Strauss “lie” (and their forgotten competitors)
Let's start by debunking the origin story. According to Levi Strauss & Co.'s own company historian, Levi Strauss wasn't a tailor who sewed pants from sailcloth during the gold rush. He was a wholesale dry goods merchant who arrived in San Francisco in 1853—after the main rush, and didn't enter the jeans business until 1873, when a tailor named Jacob Davis approached him for patent funding.
But here's what the myth really misses: Levi Strauss had plenty of competition. Companies like Greenebaum Brothers were also making riveted jeans for miners, locked in what historians called a "reinforcement arms race" to create the toughest workwear. We only remember Levi's because they won. The others? Forgotten to history, despite selling the exact same picks and shovels to the exact same customers.
The actual history reveals survivor bias at its finest: for every Levi Strauss, dozens of dry goods merchants and clothing manufacturers competed for the same gold rush dollars… and disappeared without a trace.
When everyone sells shovels, margins collapse
The fundamental problem with infrastructure businesses is simple: they seem less risky to build, so more capital and talent flock in that arena. The result is predictable commoditization and brutal price wars.
Consider the explosion of vector databases. When the AI wave hit, dozens of vector database companies emerged, all competing for essentially the same market. The competition became so intense that companies stopped calling themselves "vector databases" and rebranded just to escape the commoditized category. Meanwhile, established players like MongoDB and Postgres simply added vector search as a feature.
The pattern repeats across infrastructure categories. Project management software has over 280 competing tools. Marketing automation platforms see significant pricing pressure, with many companies lowering prices to stay competitive.
This isn't just pricing pressure. According to 2025 data analyzing over 400 AI startups, infrastructure companies command significantly lower revenue multiples than frontier application companies. Companies below 60% gross margins start getting valued like consulting firms rather than software companies.
Infrastructure (picks and shovels): where the bodies are buried
Modern cloud infrastructure provides the clearest parallel to gold rush suppliers, and a graveyard is full of failures.
Take cryptocurrency infrastructure. Between 2018 and 2022, hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges failed, with major platforms collapsing despite being valued in the billions.
Or consider Nirvanix, a cloud storage provider that gave customers just two weeks' notice before shutting down and filing for bankruptcy in 2013. The company couldn't compete with AWS's relentless price cuts; a pattern that has only intensified since.
The mobile era told the same story. Hundreds of mobile ad networks competed until consolidation destroyed most of them. Whereas Instagram sold for $1 billion with 13 employees, and WhatsApp sold for $19 billion with just 55 employees. Both were built on completely commoditized infrastructure.
Infrastructure commoditized and failed. Applications captured the value.
Payment processing: Stripe's 126 competitors
The payment processing space perfectly illustrates infrastructure overcrowding. Stripe is considered a massive success story, but faces 126 competitors in payment processing.
WePay was acquired by JPMorgan, Braintree was acquired by PayPal, and Authorize.net was acquired by Visa. These weren't failures exactly, but they were absorbed because they couldn't compete independently at scale.
Meanwhile, communications infrastructure companies experienced dramatic margin compression, with some SMS margins declining significantly as messaging commoditized.
Even the winners struggle
What about the famous success stories? The cloud space has become increasingly commoditized, with even market leaders dealing with continuous price wars.
As investor Micah Rosenbloom puts it: "Don't sell picks and shovels, dig with them". Infrastructure plays face just as much risk as frontier applications, just with lower potential returns.
The frontier rewards creativity and risk
Yes, frontier companies have high failure rates. But here's what the picks-and-shovels advocates miss: infrastructure companies have similarly high failure rates, just with capped upside.
The power law dynamics favor frontier plays. Among top-performing VC funds, just a small percentage of invested capital generates the majority of returns. Infrastructure businesses, with their compressed margins and competitive dynamics, rarely produce those outlier outcomes.
When barriers to entry are low and big tech can replicate features overnight, that "safe" infrastructure bet becomes a commodity play with razor-thin margins.
The real winners aren't selling shovels to everyone. They're the ones digging in unexplored territory, taking the creative risks that commoditized infrastructure makes possible, and capturing the value that only differentiated products can command. That's where the outsized returns actually come from, even if the history books only remember one Levi Strauss and forget the dozens of other jean makers who tried the exact same "safe" bet.
The multi-channel strategy that grew Orgnostic from $100K to $2.5M ARR
Leaders of Growth podcast, Episode: Scaling from $100K ARR to $2.500.000 ARR (Oct 12, 2025)
The Multi-Channel Strategy That Actually Worked
When Faris Sehovic joined Orgnostic (an HR tech platform, acquired by Culture Amp) in late 2022, his CEO gave him one goal: reach $1M ARR in one year. The company was at $100K.
His response? "Throughout my whole life, I always love to think about plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D."
That mindset drove a quarterly strategy that scaled the company to $2.5M ARR in 18 months, eventually leading to acquisition by CultureAmp.
Quarter by Quarter: The Tactical Breakdown
Q1: Referrals Faris started with referrals through an influential US podcaster in the HR space and the CEO's network. Result? 45-60 conversations but only one deal closed… after 265 days.
The key insight: "After two months you already have to have plan B in place."
Q2: Events Faris calls his event strategy "medical surgery – you can't make mistakes."
The process:
Target 4 events per year (2 in Q2, 2 in Q4)
Start outreach one month before through LinkedIn event pages
KPI: 15 pre-scheduled meetings minimum before arriving
Spend one month after for follow-ups
His LinkedIn opener? Never lead with sales. I noticed you'll attend [Event] in London. Curious to hear what is your goal from that event?"
This question alone increased conversion by 25%.
Q3: Outbound (When You Finally Know Your Message) After two quarters of market research through referrals and events, the team launched outbound campaigns. They targeted companies with 10,000+ employees, maximum 2 people analysts, based in the US or Western Europe.
One email campaign closed a $150K annual deal in 30 days (more than their entire yearly revenue at the time). Conversion rate: 11%.
Q4: Inbound (The Compound Effect) While executing the quarterly strategies, the team built a Slack community that grew to 1,000+ people analysts. By Q4, quality inbound leads started flowing. They won an RFP with a 100,000-employee French supermarket (their largest deal ever).
The Event Strategy That Needs No Booth
At the biggest HR tech event in Europe (Unleash Paris), Orgnostic had no budget for a booth. Faris called the We're a young startup from Serbia. Can we get free tickets? If we succeed this year, next year we'll buy a booth."
They got three free tickets, "hijacked" a networking table, and generated enough pipeline that they returned the next year with a paid booth.
The Bottom Line
Faris's advice: "No matter which stage of the company you are in, sales should be the top priority from day one. And you don't need a lot of money. Ask for free event tickets, reach out on LinkedIn, think out of the box."
The real lesson? Have multiple strategies running simultaneously. Referrals didn't drive immediate revenue but educated the team. Events and outbound closed deals. Community building created compounding inbound. All four working together scaled ARR 25x.
The company that fired 75% of staff after Series A, then doubled revenue in 2 years
B2B Rocks, Workshop: The New Playbook for B2B Growth: Strategies Driving Success in 2025 (Sept 29, 2025)
Ferdinand Goetzen, founding partner at The Growth Syndicate (“we help companies grow from $1M to $100M”) hosted a workshop to go over the blunt reality for B2B companies, and case studies of what works. (Excellent presentation btw, really worth checking out!)
Overview: Why Everything You Know About B2B Growth Just Broke
If you're running Google Ads in 2025, you already know the pain. CPC costs are up 50% in just a few years. Email open rates have dropped 80-90% over the last two decades. LinkedIn organic reach has collapsed 75% from just four years ago. So with the same effort, you’re only getting 25% of the reach you’d get just a couple of years ago. And AI is going to level (or break) the paying field.
That’s because it’s become VERY easy to build new tools so the number of your competitors grows exponentially, and everyone is targeting the same channels so they’ve become over-saturated.
The old playbook is dead. From 2005 to 2015, B2B marketing was easy. SEO was simple keyword stuffing. Google Ads had no competition. LinkedIn gave you massive organic reach for free. Content marketing worked because nobody else was doing it.
Now? You're competing with thousands of companies in every channel. AI has flooded the internet with mediocre content. And the "low-hanging fruit" tactics that built the last decade of B2B success simply don't work anymore.
“B2B companies don’t fail because they don’t do the right things. They fail because they don’t know how to do them right.”
Case Study on ICP Focus: The Decision to Shrink From $5M to $200K ARR
inSided (now Gainsight Customer Communities), a customer success platform, hit $5 million in revenue selling to energy companies, banks, financial associations, and software companies. They raised a Series A. Everything looked great.
Then they hit a wall.
Their cost efficiency collapsed. They were spread too thin across too many ICPs: different use cases, different messaging, different product needs. Sales was constantly requesting new integrations for prospects that weren't even their best customers.
Two months after raising their Series A, they laid off 75% of their team.
Then they made the decision that saved the company: They said no to $4.8 million in annual revenue.
They picked one ICP: Customer success managers at mid-size B2B SaaS companies. That segment represented just $200K of their $5M revenue base. But these customers "just got it." Easiest to close. Highest engagement. Most referrals. Best product-market fit.
The founder personally interviewed 100 customer success managers. He learned how they think, where they hang out, what they read, what keeps them up at night. He rebuilt everything around this single audience.
The result: Two years later, they hit $10 million ARR and exited for close to $100 million. With only one funding round. The founders kept most of their equity.
The Four Growth Levers (And Why Thought Leadership Multiplies Them All)
Every B2B company grows through four channels:
Thought Leadership (content, webinars, events, LinkedIn, podcasts)
Search (SEO, Google Ads, Bing Ads)
Marketing-Assisted Outbound (create value touchpoints BEFORE cold outreach)
Product-Led Growth (free trials, freemium, in-app referrals)
But here's what most teams miss: Thought leadership is a force multiplier for everything else.
When you're searching for analytics tools and see Hockey Stack in the results, you click it because you've seen their content everywhere. When someone does cold outreach but you've already attended their webinar, you respond. When you try a product, you're more forgiving of issues because you love the founder's perspective on LinkedIn.
Adam Robinson built retention.com to $20 million. Then he launched RB2B and hit $2.6 million in six months. Why? Because his 100,000 LinkedIn followers gave him instant credibility and distribution.
Marketing-Assisted Outbound: The Playbook That Actually Works
Stop doing cold outreach alone. Start creating a "network of value" first.
Here's the framework:
Week 1: Create a list of 200-400 dream companies (not "kind of ideal", actually ideal)
Weeks 2-7: Run LinkedIn ads to those exact accounts. Not conversion ads. Problem-aware ads. Make them think about the problem you solve.
Week 8: Start automated outreach (using tools like Expandi). But don't pitch. Ask for feedback. Invite them to share their challenges.
Ongoing: Invite non-responders to your webinars. Send them your best content. Stay top of mind.
Simultaneously: Have your sales team go manual on the highest-priority accounts with calls and personalized outreach.
The goal isn't perfect attribution. The goal is creating enough touchpoints that when someone finally raises their hand, they already know who you are, trust your perspective, and believe you understand their problem.
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