7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Tive to $80M and 1.5M Trackers Shipped

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Tive to $80M and 1.5M Trackers Shipped

Most founders wait too long to talk to customers. Krenar Komoni, CEO and Founder of Tive, was three months from running out of money when he did the opposite—he started cold calling and cold emailing 150 to 200 potential customers every single week. That decision, made after laying off half his team, transformed his company from a struggling GPS tracker startup into a supply chain visibility platform that’s raised $80 million and shipped over 1.5 million trackers.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Krenar shared the tactical go-to-market lessons that took Tive from near-failure to category definition. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re battle-tested strategies forged through trial, error, and the pressure of a dwindling bank account.

Lesson 1: Cold Outreach at Scale Unlocks Product-Market Fit

When Tive was down to three months of runway in 2018, Krenar made a counterintuitive move. Instead of conserving resources, he and a small team of college graduates launched an aggressive outreach campaign. “Do not be afraid to cold call customers, especially potential customers,” Krenar emphasizes. “Email, cold call, email, cold call, change messaging, change the subject line, change how we write things and just try and try.”

The volume mattered, but so did the iteration. By testing different messaging and subject lines across hundreds of conversations weekly, the team rapidly learned what resonated. The results were dramatic: proof-of-value engagements jumped from one per month to two or three per week. More importantly, this concentrated customer exposure revealed the fatal flaw in their business model—customers couldn’t handle the reverse logistics of returning expensive trackers.

The principle here isn’t just “do cold outreach.” It’s that high-volume customer conversations create a feedback loop that accelerates learning. When you’re talking to 150-200 prospects weekly, patterns emerge fast. “We got a lot of responses. We were usually doing like one proof of value a month. We started doing two, three per week and, but throughout that process, we learned a lot about this issue,” Krenar recalls.

Lesson 2: Let Customers Tell You Your ICP—Don’t Assume

Krenar thought he knew his ideal customer profile: VPs of supply chain and chief supply chain officers. He was wrong. “We kept getting directed towards logistics managers, transportation managers, people that are actually doing the work of moving the goods from a to b. And that’s how we figured out as far as the persona goes,” he shares.

The vertical assumptions were equally off-base. Krenar believed pharmaceutical companies would be his early adopters. Instead, Tive found immediate traction in produce—strawberries, blueberries, poultry, asparagus. “They want to make sure that those arrive in good condition at the retail store. And temperature is very important for those, but they also want to do it very cost effective. And that’s where we really started to see some strides in the beginning,” he explains.

Pharma required passing extensive regulatory requirements that a cash-strapped startup couldn’t afford to tackle. Nine years later, Tive is finally ready to dominate that vertical. The lesson: follow the path of least resistance to revenue, then build capabilities to tackle harder markets from a position of strength.

Lesson 3: Business Model Determines Product Adoption

Tive’s initial product was technically superior—over a year of battery life, robust GPS tracking, and customers like Nokia. But the business model killed adoption. “The challenge was they couldn’t use it a lot because they had to figure out how to, they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be one of my first customers was Nokia, but then they would have to return these trackers back,” Krenar explains.

The insight that changed everything: customers needed disposable trackers. “We got to figure out how to make more cost effective trackers that could be used once and if the customer doesn’t return them, it’s okay,” Krenar says. This wasn’t just a product decision—it was a complete reimagining of the value proposition.

To make single-use economics work, Krenar and his VP of technology flew to China and visited eight manufacturing sites. They needed trackers they could sell for $40-60 while making money on the first sale. “I couldn’t afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like over the first sale,” he notes. By January 2020, they released the world’s first single-use 5G-ready tracker, and product-market fit clicked.

Lesson 4: Build Trust Through Radical Transparency

Krenar’s marketing philosophy centers on two emotions: “I want our customers to love our brand. And number two, I want the customers to trust our brand.” But he recognizes that love without trust is empty—customers might enjoy your brand but won’t buy if they don’t trust the product.

Trust, Krenar learned, comes from radical transparency—especially during failures. “If there’s been a challenge in the market or we run into an issue, I’ve trained the team and I’ve done it myself, to immediately call the customer, email the customer, apologize to the customer, tell them about the issue before they figure out the issue,” he shares.

This proactive approach to problems builds more trust than perfect execution. Customers expect issues; they don’t expect companies to own them immediately and communicate openly. Transparency is Tive’s number one company value, and it extends from internal operations to customer relationships.

Lesson 5: Investor Relationships Are Built Through Predictable Execution

Raising $80 million required talking to 600-800 different investors over the years. Krenar’s approach mirrors his customer strategy: build trust through consistent execution over time. “You tell them what you’re going to do next, and I’ll check in with you in three months. And then three months later, you were at point A three months ago. Now you’re at point B, and they can start drawing a line,” he explains.

Nobody writes a check on day one. But they will six, nine, or even 24 months later if you consistently hit the milestones you commit to. “Ideally you want to be a little bit above point C. So then they start building this line from A to B to C and can say, wow, I can actually trust Krenar as a Founder, as an entrepreneur. If he’s telling me he’s going to do ABC, he’s going to do D all the way to IPO, I’m going to back him up,” Krenar notes.

This long-term relationship building also yields better terms and more engaged investors who understand your business deeply.

Lesson 6: Get Physically Close to the Problem

When asked for his number one piece of advice for supply chain tech founders, Krenar doesn’t hesitate: “You have to be close to customers, especially in supply chain logistics. It’s such an operational world, such a daily basis. Things change. Go and figure out. Visit warehouses, visit logistics centers, visit DC’s distribution centers, figure out a way how to get in with customers as much as possible early on so you can learn where the pain points are.”

This isn’t about conducting user interviews in a conference room. It’s about seeing the physical reality of how products move through the supply chain. Krenar’s initial insight about disposable trackers came from watching a truck driver named Tony move lobster and scallops with temperature sensors that only provided data at the end of the shipment. That physical observation sparked the entire business pivot.

Lesson 7: Early-Stage Marketing Requires Hustlers, Not Strategists

Building Tive’s marketing team taught Krenar that early-stage needs differ dramatically from growth-stage needs. “In the beginning, when you build out a marketing team, you want to find, I would say, hustlers in the beginning. Definitely. People who are willing to roll up their sleeve and do everything on their own, whether it’s press release, whether it’s guerrilla marketing, whether it’s understanding how Google Ads, how LinkedIn ads work, whether it’s SEO search,” he explains.

The shift happens around $10-20 million in ARR when data-driven marketing becomes critical. But until then, you need people willing to try everything and move fast. The early marketing function is about rapid experimentation and learning, not optimization.

Today, Tive has 205 employees and aims to reach $200 million in revenue within three to five years as they prepare for an IPO. The journey from a side project for his father-in-law’s trucking company to a category-defining platform came down to one principle: get close to customers, learn from them relentlessly, and execute on what they teach you. Everything else follows.