5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Exiger’s Journey to $100M ARR

Sometimes the best GTM strategies emerge from crisis. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels revealed how his team turned a critical government contract during COVID-19 into sustainable hypergrowth. Here are the key lessons from their journey:

1. Use High-Stakes Moments to Showcase Your Full Capability

When COVID hit, Exiger had been using their technology primarily for compliance-focused vendor screening. The pandemic created an opportunity to demonstrate their platform’s full potential. As Brandon explains: “In the COVID-19 response effort, we got to unleash the full capability that we had built that assessed operational risk, that assessed financial health, that assessed your technical capability to actually deliver the supplies that the customer was procuring.”

This complete deployment proved transformative, leading to broader adoption: “We ended up getting a contract through GSA to support a Federated Information Sharing, utilization or use case for our software across the federal government for all of supply chain risk management.”

2. Let Customer Problems Guide Product Evolution

Rather than building in isolation, Exiger evolved their product based on real customer challenges. Brandon shares: “The second thing that it did for our business is it helped us to understand…we need to pierce the veil not only on who we’re buying from, but who they’re buying from and who they’re buying from so that we can see the problems that potentially sit at the bottom of the supply base.”

3. Turn Cost Centers into Strategic Advantages

During the 2022 downturn, instead of typical cost-cutting, Exiger found ways to transform expenses into leverage. Brandon details: “We shrunk our pool of hosting companies, shrunk our pool of data providers, and actually spent more with each of them…We took our data vendors from 83 to 20, but bought more from the 20.”

This approach created exceptional unit economics: “Every net new dollar that Exiger adds in terms of software revenue equals 90 plus percent gross margin.” They applied similar optimization across the business, including reducing translation costs from $3 million to $150,000 annually through smart caching.

4. Reinvest Efficiency Gains into Growth

Instead of banking the savings, Exiger doubled down on growth. Brandon explains: “We still got to EBITDA positive. But what we did is we took all of the benefits of these efficiency initiatives and stuck it into sales and marketing.” This included doubling their sales and marketing investment from $10M to $20M.

The strategy paid off: “We’re 2 million ahead of our bookings targets for April, $2 million in bookings in excess of what our bookings target was.”

5. Build for Enterprise-Grade Requirements from Day One

For founders targeting government contracts, Brandon emphasizes preparation: “You really have to have something that’s ready for deployment in order to go into the federal government just because there are a number of gates that they have from a security perspective or from a technical acceptance perspective.”

This extends to funding choices: “When you’re taking funding, when you’re looking at potential funding sources, you have to assess your foreign ownership, control and influence. Meaning focusing on Silicon Valley funds, focusing on US funds.”

The results speak for themselves. As Brandon notes, they went “from 10 million of arr in 2019 in the third party and supply chain space to a place where in the next twelve months we’ll be at 100 million in arr.”

Looking ahead, Brandon sees an even bigger opportunity: “Our aspiration is to do good and to do well…we want to be the platform that returns that conversation to a question of just performance and price because that’s where they’re naturally skilled.”

The key takeaway? Success often comes from turning moments of crisis into opportunities for demonstrating value, then systematically reinvesting in growth while maintaining operational discipline. It’s not about having the biggest funding round – it’s about executing strategically when opportunities arise.