7 Go-To-Market Lessons From Building Cadana From Failed Pivots to $400M in Processed Volume

7 Go-To-Market Lessons From Building Cadana From Failed Pivots to $400M in Processed Volume

Three product rebuilds. Two complete pivots. Years of negative revenue growth. Most founders would have quit. Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO and Co-Founder of Cadana, kept building. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Albert shared the go-to-market lessons learned from transforming a struggling developer tool into a financial operations platform serving 400+ businesses across 26 African countries. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re battle-tested insights from someone who rebuilt the same company three times before finding the formula that worked.

Lesson 1: Market Maturity Trumps Product Excellence

The hardest lesson Albert learned came early: you can build a perfect product for a market that doesn’t exist yet. Cadana’s first iteration focused on helping African software companies distribute products globally. The vision was sound, the execution solid, but the market wasn’t ready.

“We spent about a year trying to sell that product, and we just couldn’t find enough people who wanted to buy it,” Albert explains. The problem wasn’t product quality or sales execution. “The market just wasn’t mature enough for it to be a venture scale business in that category.”

This lesson has profound GTM implications. Before investing in sales, marketing, or growth infrastructure, validate that enough potential customers have the problem right now—not that they might have it in three years. Market timing isn’t everything, but it’s close.

Lesson 2: Pain Point Intensity Matters More Than Pain Point Existence

Cadana’s second iteration focused on improving payment acceptance rates. They built technology that worked. Customers acknowledged the problem existed. But nobody would switch to solve it.

“People weren’t actually losing that much money from payments not being accepted. So it wasn’t actually a big enough pain point for them to want to switch,” Albert admits. This is the trap many B2B founders fall into—solving problems that exist but don’t hurt enough to justify change.

The breakthrough came when Albert started measuring pain by dollars lost, not just inefficiency created. “We started speaking to a lot more people and realized that actually the biggest problem that people had was not even accepting the payment. The biggest problem people had was everything that happens after you accept the payment.”

The GTM lesson: quantify customer pain in concrete terms. If customers can’t articulate how much money, time, or opportunity they’re losing, you’re probably solving a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Lesson 3: Build Horizontal Infrastructure When Vertical Knowledge Isn’t Your Advantage

After finding the right problem, Albert made a controversial choice: instead of dominating one vertical, Cadana went horizontal. “Because we built a very horizontal platform, we work with all kinds of businesses,” he explains. “We work with ride hailing companies, we work with e-commerce companies, we work with fintech companies, betting companies, software companies.”

This decision wasn’t about being everything to everyone—it was strategic positioning. Cadana didn’t have deep vertical expertise in any single industry, but they had deep technical expertise in financial operations infrastructure. Going horizontal let them leverage their actual advantage.

“Any company that has to do any high volume of payments or has to manage a lot of money flow” became the ICP. The commonality wasn’t industry—it was operational complexity and transaction volume.

For founders choosing between horizontal and vertical GTM: go vertical when you have unique industry insight or relationships; go horizontal when your advantage is technical infrastructure that solves a common problem across industries.

Lesson 4: Build for Tomorrow’s Scale at Yesterday’s Revenue

One of Albert’s most contrarian decisions was building enterprise-grade infrastructure long before they had enterprise revenue. “We focus very much on scalability and reliability,” he says. “So we built the platform to be able to handle very, very large scale.”

This wasn’t vanity engineering. It was GTM strategy disguised as product development. “Even when we were doing maybe only a few million dollars, we built it for scale so that when we’re doing billions of dollars, it still works the same way.”

This approach creates multiple advantages: you can close larger deals because your infrastructure can handle them, you avoid painful re-platforming projects that destroy customer trust, and you signal to enterprise buyers that you’re built for their needs. Today, Cadana processes over $400 million in transaction volume annually—on infrastructure designed to handle far more.

The lesson: if your GTM strategy includes moving upmarket, build the infrastructure to support that ambition before you have the revenue to justify it. The alternative is winning deals you can’t service or losing deals because you’re not credible at scale.

Lesson 5: Geographic Expansion Follows Product Maturity, Not Opportunity Size

Despite operating in Africa, Albert resisted the temptation to expand geographically until the product was bulletproof. “We currently work with over 400 businesses across 26 African countries,” he shares, demonstrating deep penetration in their initial market before expanding elsewhere.

Only after achieving this density did Cadana expand to North America, with European expansion planned next. This sequencing matters for GTM: going deep in one market teaches you what customers actually need, creates reference customers for new markets, and validates that your product truly solves the problem before you multiply your go-to-market complexity.

Many founders do the opposite—they expand geographically to chase growth when their product isn’t working in their home market. Albert’s approach suggests a different framework: achieve product-market fit and operational excellence in one market, then replicate the playbook elsewhere.

Lesson 6: Customer Development Never Stops, Even After Product-Market Fit

What saved Cadana from becoming another failed startup was Albert’s relentless focus on customer conversations. Even after two failed iterations, he kept talking to customers, kept asking questions, kept looking for the real problem.

“We started speaking to a lot more people” became the unlock for understanding that post-payment operations was the real pain point. This wasn’t a one-time customer development exercise—it was a continuous process that informed every strategic decision.

The GTM lesson: schedule regular customer conversations even when you think you understand the market. Your customers’ problems evolve, competitive alternatives emerge, and market conditions shift. The founders who win are the ones who maintain direct customer contact regardless of company size.

Lesson 7: Persistence Through Pivots Requires Clear Kill Criteria

Albert rebuilt Cadana three times, but each rebuild was driven by clear evidence, not blind optimism. “We just couldn’t find enough people who wanted to buy it” was the kill signal for iteration one. “People weren’t actually losing that much money” ended iteration two.

This framework—clear, measurable criteria for when to pivot—prevented Cadana from either giving up too early or persisting too long with the wrong approach. Each iteration taught something valuable: the first validated that African businesses needed better tools, the second proved they’d pay for infrastructure, and the third found the specific problem worth solving.

For founders navigating their own pivots: define success metrics upfront, set a timeline for achieving them, and commit to honest evaluation when the deadline hits. Persistence matters, but persistence without evidence is just stubbornness.

Albert’s journey with Cadana proves that finding product-market fit isn’t about having the right idea first—it’s about having the discipline to keep searching until you find the problem customers will actually pay to solve. These seven lessons aren’t just hindsight; they’re a replicable framework for any B2B founder building in complex, emerging markets where the path to success isn’t obvious from day one.