6 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Lapaya’s Journey in Enterprise Training

Sometimes the best early-stage decisions come from recognizing what isn’t working. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Lapaya founder René Janssen shared how a brutal reality check three months into their journey led to a complete transformation of their go-to-market strategy. Here are the key lessons from their path to building a leading enterprise training platform.

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Completely Overhaul Your GTM Strategy When Lapaya’s initial platform approach wasn’t gaining traction, they made a radical pivot. As René explains: “After three months, my co-founder and I were looking at each other and said, well, if this is the rate at which we’re going to expand, then we rather stop right now.” Instead of connecting training providers with clients, they decided to own the entire value chain: “We’re just going to take everything upon us and we’re going to client and saying we’re just going to do leadership training, we’re going to soft skills training, we’re going to do personal development and we’re just going to do it better.”
2. Solve for Unit Economics First While ambitious visions are important, René emphasizes the need to focus on fundamentals: “You can ultimately sell anything. But the unit economics aren’t always going to make the sense that you want them to make sense.” This meant ensuring their solution could scale profitably before pursuing aggressive growth.
3. Deep Customer Discovery is Non-Negotiable René’s advice for founders entering the enterprise HR space is unequivocal: “Call up yourself. Go on LinkedIn, call your friends, call whoever you might know kind of a lot around until you find five or ten or fifteen people that are your potential buyer. Tell them to be as critical as possible and pitch the product you want to have in six months or twelve months as if you had it today.”
4. Focus on Real Problems, Not Incremental Improvements The enterprise training market didn’t need another marginal improvement. René identified three fundamental problems: lack of clear vision about required capabilities, poor balance in employee choice, and rigid delivery methods. “If you really struggle with skills like leadership, with communication, with how to give a great presentation, you don’t need to lock yourself for five days with a traditional player into a conference center or hotel to kind of learn that,” he explains. “But watching videos and doing some exercise and e-learning is too thin.”
5. Build for Market Evolution Rather than just addressing current needs, Lapaya built for where the market was heading. René notes: “The amount of people we needed to fix our problems and the amount of technical terms, warm bodies were throwing at problems made us extremely unproductive. And that also led to people being unhappy and running out of the door.” This insight shaped their approach to building a solution that could scale with changing workforce needs.
6. Target Markets Within Markets While the overall training market is massive at $400 billion, Lapaya focused specifically on the soft skills and leadership development segment – about 50% of the total market. This targeted approach allowed them to build deeper expertise and more focused solutions. As René puts it: “Pick an industry, pick a market at the fine enterprise even more narrowly understands what keeps them awake at night, and you can fix that, then you can scale it.”

Looking ahead, René sees consolidation coming to this fragmented market: “Every single market around the world has local players, and the biggest players per market have low single digit market shares.” This presents an opportunity for companies that can execute well on these go-to-market fundamentals to become dominant global players.

The key takeaway? Success in enterprise markets often requires completely rethinking conventional approaches, deeply understanding customer needs, and being willing to take on bigger challenges than initially planned. It’s not about incremental improvements – it’s about fundamental transformation of how things work.