The Canopy Niche Strategy: Why Being Too Flexible Killed Their GTM Motion

The Canopy Niche Strategy: Why Being Too Flexible Killed Their GTM Motion

Your product can technically serve everyone. That sounds like a competitive advantage until you realize it’s fracturing your entire company. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Bivons, CEO of Canopy, shared how trying to be flexible enough for any lender—consumer BNPL companies, B2B revolving credit, everything in between—nearly destroyed their go-to-market motion. The breakthrough came from saying no to 50% of their pipeline.

The Flexibility Trap

In Canopy’s early days, the value proposition centered on extreme flexibility. They’d built a lending core that could handle any loan type, any repayment structure, any product configuration. “When we first started Canopy, we tried to do loans for all types of lenders. So whether you were a B2C buy now, pay later company or you were a B2B revolving charge card company like Brex or Ram,” Matt explains.

The logic seemed sound: maximum addressable market, minimal customer rejection, more shots on goal. If a prospect needed student loans, Canopy could do that. If they needed merchant cash advances, Canopy could do that too. The technical capability existed.

But technical capability and go-to-market effectiveness are different problems. “What we realized over time is that actually spread us really thin from a resource standpoint, it was not focused enough from a product standpoint and from a go to market standpoint,” Matt reveals.

The flexibility that looked like strength was actually diffusing their entire company’s focus.

How Flexibility Fractures Go-To-Market

The problem wasn’t just about product development resources, though that was part of it. The deeper issue was that different loan types demanded completely different go-to-market approaches.

B2C buy-now-pay-later companies have different buying committees than B2B commercial lenders. They evaluate vendors on different criteria. They care about different regulatory requirements. They have different competitive pressures and different roadmap priorities.

“All of these companies, depending on the TAM that you were in, wanted different aspects of from a regulatory and compliance standpoint,” Matt notes. This meant Canopy couldn’t develop deep expertise in any single regulatory environment—they had to stay surface-level across all of them.

The sales team couldn’t develop a refined pitch. Case studies that worked for one segment confused another. Marketing messaging that resonated with B2C buyers alienated B2B prospects. Content that educated one vertical was irrelevant to another.

You can’t be best-in-class at everything. When you try, you become mediocre at everything instead.

The Product Roadmap Peanut Butter Problem

Beyond go-to-market fracture, serving all loan types created what Matt calls “the peanut butter problem” in product development. “We were just spread way too thin, and we needed to go a lot deeper in the market that were being pulled into,” Matt explains.

Every segment wanted different features. B2C lenders needed one set of capabilities. B2B commercial lenders needed another. Each new prospect brought unique requirements that didn’t generalize to other segments.

“So we refined that product roadmap to be strictly B2B which then narrowed our ICP of who was using our product,” Matt says. The refinement wasn’t about building less—it was about building depth instead of breadth.

When you focus on B2B commercial lending exclusively, you can build the 25 specific loan types that matter to that market. You can develop deep integrations with the specific partner systems B2B lenders use. You can optimize for the specific workflows, compliance requirements, and use cases that segment cares about.

The Scary Decision: Cutting 50% of Pipeline

Understanding the problem intellectually is one thing. Actually cutting revenue opportunities is another. “The most important decision that we made, which was a scary one, was this year we cut out a significant portion of our consumer lending funnel. It represented over 50% of our sales pipeline,” Matt reveals.

Read that again: they eliminated more than half their sales pipeline. These weren’t theoretical opportunities—they were real companies that wanted to work with Canopy. “Eliminating that is obviously very scary, right, because you have a bird in hand of companies that want to work with us,” Matt acknowledges.

Most founders wouldn’t make this call. The instinct is to chase every dollar, especially in a competitive market. But Matt recognized something critical: “Particularly in the early days, you want to say yes to a bunch of things, right?”

The problem is that saying yes to everything means saying no to excellence in anything. You end up with a mediocre product for all segments instead of an exceptional product for one.

Reading Market Signals Over Personal Preference

What gave Matt the conviction to cut half his pipeline? Market pull. “We had massive market pool into the B2B side,” Matt explains. The external forces were telling him where to focus, even if it meant walking away from revenue.

This is where the distinction between stubborn and resilient matters. “I always say there’s a fine line for founders of being stubborn is one side and resilient is on the other. And so you get rejected a lot as a Founder, but you also have to know when the universe is telling you something,” Matt notes.

The universe was screaming at Canopy to focus on B2B. Fighting that signal to preserve pipeline numbers would have been stubborn, not resilient. “Eliminating the consumer lending was a very hard thing. But it has paid off tremendously with massive growth for Canopy in 2024,” Matt says.

What Focus Actually Unlocked

Narrowing to B2B commercial lending didn’t just simplify the product roadmap—it transformed the entire company’s effectiveness.

Sales messaging became sharper. Instead of generic value props about flexibility, Canopy could speak specifically to B2B lender pain points. Case studies featured companies in the same segment, making them more credible references.

Marketing could develop deep vertical expertise. Content addressed specific B2B lending challenges. The team could attend the right conferences, build relationships with the right partners, and develop thought leadership in a specific domain.

Product development accelerated. “We believe in the future of lending being personalized, embedded and multi product,” Matt explains. This vision—personalized loans, embedded infrastructure, multi-product capabilities—only becomes achievable when you focus deeply on one segment’s needs.

The value proposition crystallized: “We are one of the most fast, flexible systems where we believe in the future of lending being personalized, embedded and multi product, meaning that you should be able to work with us instantly, embed us directly into what you have today.”

That message works because it speaks to specific B2B pain points: slow incumbent systems, rigid product configurations, difficult integrations. Try to make that message work for both B2B and B2C simultaneously, and it loses its edge.

The Compound Startup Reality

Even within B2B commercial lending, Canopy serves multiple verticals: logistics companies like Flexport, healthcare, e-commerce, travel. “I would say that we’re more or less a compound startup in that way because we service so many different verticals and our go to market and value prop is unique to each vertical and product type,” Matt notes.

But here’s the key: these are all B2B commercial lending verticals. They share regulatory frameworks, buying committees, implementation patterns, and pain points. The differences between healthcare lending and logistics lending are orders of magnitude smaller than the differences between B2B commercial lending and B2C BNPL.

Focus doesn’t mean serving one company. It means going deep enough in one segment that the differences within that segment are manageable, not fragmenting.

The Adaptation Principle

The broader lesson transcends Canopy’s specific niche decision. “I think that is one of the biggest superpowers of successful companies and founders is being able to adapt and evolve and not being stuck to any one way,” Matt emphasizes.

But adaptation doesn’t mean adding more segments or broadening your ICP. Sometimes it means the opposite—recognizing that you need to cut, focus, and go deeper.

“Obviously fail a lot, fail fast, figure it out, run experiments and do what you feel is working and then double down on that,” Matt advises. For Canopy, doubling down meant first having the courage to cut everything else.

The Counterintuitive Truth

The instinct in enterprise software is to maximize addressable market. Build horizontal infrastructure that works for everyone. Never say no to a prospect. Keep your options open.

Canopy’s journey reveals the opposite truth: the flexibility to serve anyone can prevent you from serving anyone exceptionally well. Your product roadmap fractures. Your go-to-market motion dilutes. Your sales team can’t develop deep expertise. Your case studies don’t resonate because they’re too broad.

Sometimes the path to growth isn’t expanding who you serve—it’s narrowing until you can dominate a segment so completely that expansion becomes natural rather than forced.