5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Place’s Journey to Building a Location Intelligence Platform
When Place launched in March 2020, the timing seemed terrible. Two weeks after Norway’s COVID lockdown began, three founders started building a location intelligence platform for retail businesses. Yet this seemingly unfortunate timing yielded unexpected advantages and important lessons for B2B founders.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Place founder Snorre Jordheim Myhre shared insights from their journey from zero to 50 paying customers. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their experience:
- Turn Customer Research Into Sales Opportunities
Instead of building first and selling later, Place conducted extensive customer research that organically converted into sales opportunities. “Within a month or so, we interviewed almost 50 different companies, everything from Starbucks in our way to the small restaurants just on the corner, mom pop shops and so on,” Snorre explained. By showing product sketches at the end of each research interview, they identified enthusiastic early adopters who later became paying customers.
- Create Your Category Even in a Crowded Market
While competing with well-funded players like Placer AI and MyTraffic, Place carved out their own category called “collaborative analytics.” As Snorre describes it, “We made it into a collaborative tool where you capture different insights and graphs you want and you build your report, and then you include your internal and external stakeholders in this.” This differentiation helped them stand out in the crowded location intelligence market.
- Embrace Network-Based Growth Before Traditional Marketing
Place grew to 50 paying customers primarily through network effects rather than traditional marketing channels. “It’s been pretty network based, so we get some press and attention. In Norway, we’ve got about 50 paying customers and it’s more word of mouth based use LinkedIn, and we don’t do much on search engine optimization,” Snorre shared. This approach allowed them to build credibility before investing heavily in marketing.
- Plan the Founder-Sales Transition Early
The transition from founder-led sales to a dedicated sales team proved challenging but crucial. “From a founder perspective, it’s a bit rough when you are the one in charge of talking with the customers all the time. You are the one driving being that bridge between the customer needs and taking over to the product side and holding everything together,” Snorre noted. Their successful transition helped triple annual recurring revenue from $150,000 to $450,000.
- Choose Your Initial Market Based on Scale Potential
For founders building similar businesses, Snorre advises starting in larger markets: “Start with a bigger market because the prop tech market is quite national and its hard to jump from one market to another. You would definitely get a competitive advantage by starting a larger market and then getting broadly market fit in a larger market where you can scale internally domestically.”
This advice comes from Place’s own experience navigating European market expansion. As Snorre explains, “Europe is so much more culturally diversified… For us having a data product, we need to source data in new countries as well, even though we have some cross border datasets.”
These lessons showcase how Place turned apparent challenges – launching during a pandemic, competing in a crowded market, and expanding across diverse markets – into strategic advantages. Their journey demonstrates that success often comes not from avoiding obstacles but from finding innovative ways to turn them into opportunities.
For B2B founders, Place’s experience offers a blueprint for building sustainable growth through deep customer understanding, strategic category creation, and careful planning of key transitions. Their approach shows that sometimes the best go-to-market strategy isn’t about moving fast, but about building the right foundation for scale.
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