7 GTM Lessons From Footprint’s Path to $100M ARR
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eli Wachs, CEO of Footprint, shared the tactical playbook behind scaling a retail marketing platform from near-death to nine figures. These aren’t theory lessons—they’re survival tactics that actually worked.
- Kill Your Product Before It Kills Your Company
Footprint’s original product was merchandising analytics. The problem? It solved a problem nobody wanted solved. “We were building a product that could tell merchandisers which products were going to sell well and which products weren’t,” Eli explains. The wake-up call came from a brutally honest VP: “I have a team of 50 people whose job it is to forecast what’s going to sell. If I use your product and it works, I have to fire 30 of them. And if I use your product and it doesn’t work, I still have to fire 30 of them because I just spent a bunch of money on software that doesn’t work.”
Most founders would have tried iterating the product or finding better messaging. Eli’s team did something harder—they admitted the entire premise was wrong with six months of runway left. “We were like, oh shit, we need to change what we’re doing,” he recalls.
The principle: Political risk kills enterprise deals faster than technical risk. If your product forces buyers to restructure teams or admit their judgment was wrong, you’re not selling software—you’re selling career suicide.
- Find Buyers With Budget Authority and Urgency
After the pivot, Footprint didn’t just change their product—they completely changed their buyer persona. “Marketers were where the budget was. They had budget, they had urgency, and they actually wanted to try new things,” Eli says.
This wasn’t about finding a slightly different department in the same org chart. Marketing budgets operate under different economics than operations budgets. Marketers are measured on ROI, not cost savings. They have quarterly campaign budgets they need to deploy. Most importantly, they’re incentivized to try new channels and tactics.
The same product sold to operations gets stuck in nine-month procurement cycles. Sold to marketing, it closes in weeks because it’s categorized as campaign spend, not infrastructure.
- Exploit Channel Arbitrage While It Exists
Footprint’s zero-to-ten-million run wasn’t built on enterprise sales or product-led growth. It was built on Facebook ads arbitrage. “We basically said, we’re going to create a demand gen engine that is all about Facebook,” Eli explains. “Back in 2013-2014, Facebook ads were incredibly cheap and incredibly effective.”
The math was simple: “We could put a dollar in and get $3 out consistently. That was the engine that helped us grow from zero to about 10 million in ARR.”
This strategy has a shelf life, and Eli knew it. Channel arbitrage windows close as more competitors pile in and costs rise. But during that window, Footprint scaled faster than competitors relying on traditional enterprise sales motions. They captured market share while others were still building pipeline through conferences and cold email.
The lesson isn’t “use Facebook ads.” It’s recognizing when a channel is underpriced relative to customer value and exploiting it aggressively before the window closes.
- Build Distribution Moats, Not Product Moats
As Footprint scaled, Eli discovered their actual competitive advantage had nothing to do with their marketing automation features. It was about distribution through CPG relationships. “All of our customers buy products from CPG brands—Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Estee Lauder, Coca-Cola,” he explains. “Those brands want to sell more products through our retailers.”
The insight: “We realized we could go to these brands and say, hey, we have software deployed at 400 retailers. We can run a campaign on your behalf across all 400 of those retailers simultaneously.”
This created a flywheel competitors couldn’t replicate. Retailers adopted Footprint because CPG brands would co-fund their marketing spend. CPG brands wanted in because Footprint gave them direct access to retail customer data at scale. “It’s a differentiated distribution motion that is not replicable by any of our competitors,” Eli notes.
Your competitors can copy features in months. They can’t copy a three-sided network that took years to build.
- Know When You’ve Found Something Worth Scaling
Footprint raised a $35M Series B, but the timing matters more than the amount. “That was really the point at which we said, okay, we’ve figured out product market fit, we’ve figured out our initial go-to-market motion, now we need to scale everything,” Eli reflects.
Notice the sequence: product-market fit first, then GTM repeatability, then scale capital. Too many founders raise growth rounds when they’ve only proven that some customers will buy the product. Footprint waited until they had proven unit economics, a repeatable sales motion, and clear expansion paths.
The capital enabled three specific bets: expanding into retail media networks, building the CPG co-marketing business, and moving upmarket. “We had to hire a bunch of senior execs who had done it before,” Eli explains. “People who had scaled sales teams from 10 to 100, people who had built out marketing organizations.”
- Measure What Matters for Your Business Model
When discussing metrics, Eli focuses on two numbers: “We’re at a little over 100 million of ARR right now. We’ve been fortunate, we’ve been growing 30 to 40% year over year for the last several years.”
But the more revealing insight is about customer concentration. Despite serving 400 retailers, the top 25 drive significant revenue. “Some of our customers are spending multiple millions of dollars a year with us,” Eli says.
This revealed their actual business model: land-and-expand within retail chains, then layer on CPG co-marketing revenue. New logo acquisition matters less than account expansion and adding new revenue streams to existing customers. Understanding this shifted how they allocated sales and customer success resources.
- Maintain Strategic Optionality Through Platform Bets
Footprint’s current focus is rebuilding their entire product as an AI-native platform. “We basically are rebuilding the entire product as an AI native product,” Eli says. This isn’t about adding AI features—it’s about changing the fundamental user experience from tool-based to outcome-based.
“Instead of having someone go in and build a campaign, they tell our AI, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish, and the AI builds the campaign for them,” Eli explains.
This represents massive execution risk—rebuilding a $100M ARR platform from scratch could alienate customers or introduce bugs. But Eli sees it as necessary to maintain their lead. “The thing that I always come back to is optionality. You want to make sure you have optionality in your business.”
The principle: at scale, your biggest risk isn’t competition—it’s platform shifts that make your entire product architecture obsolete. Better to cannibalize yourself than let someone else do it.
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