7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $19M Enterprise AI Platform

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $19M Enterprise AI Platform

Most founders racing to build AI companies are optimizing for the wrong things. They chase hockey-stick growth, pivot constantly, and burn through cash trying to compete with OpenAI. Hans Elstner, CEO of Rooom, took a different path—and it’s one that actually works.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hans shared how his team built a document processing AI platform that raised $19 million while growing at what he calls a “sustainable” pace. For technical founders navigating the messy middle between product-market fit and enterprise scale, these lessons cut through the noise.

Lesson 1: Find the Bottleneck, Build the Platform

Rooom didn’t start as a platform company. They began doing custom automation work for clients. But Hans recognized a pattern that changed everything. “We built a lot of automation projects, classical automation projects with using some of the tools out there,” Hans explains. “And we realized that extracting data from documents was a big bottleneck. So we said, okay, this is actually the thing that we could bring the most value.”

This insight—identifying a repeated bottleneck across multiple projects—became their wedge. Instead of doing custom work forever, they productized the solution. The lesson? Your best platform idea often hides inside your consulting work. Pay attention to what you’re solving repeatedly.

Lesson 2: Choose Your Buyer Persona Deliberately

While competitors built no-code tools for business users, Rooom went technical. “Our main target audience is actually more technical,” Hans says. “So we have a low code tool which is much more similar to like if you go on AWS or if you go on Anthropic and like, you know, you fiddle around with the API.”

This wasn’t an accident. Hans understood that technical buyers want flexibility, not constraints. They want infrastructure, not applications. By targeting developers and technical teams, Rooom could offer something competitors couldn’t: true customization without custom development.

The tradeoff? A smaller addressable market. But Hans didn’t care. “We wanted to build a sustainable business, not like burn through cash,” he explains. Technical buyers meant higher contract values, longer retention, and better word-of-mouth. Quality over quantity.

Lesson 3: Build Enterprise Credibility Before You Need It

Moving upmarket isn’t just about adding features. Hans learned that enterprise sales require enterprise infrastructure—certifications, audits, compliance frameworks. “When you start going into larger enterprise, you don’t only need to be certified, you need to be audited by them,” Hans notes. “You need to go and prove them that you can actually operate at scale.”

The catch? Enterprises won’t give you business until you can prove you can handle it. Hans solved this chicken-and-egg problem through strategic early partnerships. “We managed to get partners that kind of believed in us early on where we could show that we can operate at scale.”

Those early believers became reference points. Each enterprise customer made the next one easier. The lesson for founders: start building enterprise credibility while you’re still selling to mid-market. The transition takes longer than you think.

Lesson 4: Optimize for Culture, Not Just Valuation

Here’s where Hans diverges from conventional wisdom. When raising their Series A, Rooom deliberately didn’t take the highest offers. “I just don’t like drama,” Hans says bluntly. “I just like to build sustainably.”

This philosophy shaped everything. They chose investors who understood their pace and wouldn’t push for unsustainable growth. The result? A $19 million round that felt like a partnership. “We’re currently growing at a rate of like 150% year over year, which is not like the 10x, 100x that you sometimes hear in Silicon Valley. But it’s enough.”

For founders tired of the growth-at-all-costs narrative, this is permission to build differently. Hans proves you can raise significant capital while preserving sanity and culture. The key is finding investors who share your values upfront.

Lesson 5: Position in the Stack Strategically

When LLMs exploded, many founders panicked. Would foundation models eat their lunch? Hans saw it differently. “We use foundation models under the hood,” Hans explains. “So in that sense, we use it like a developer would use like a programming language or a library.”

This positioning—as an orchestration layer above foundation models—protected Rooom from direct competition with AI giants. They don’t try to build better models. Instead, they solve the messy problems of making those models useful: data preparation, prompt engineering, output validation.

The broader lesson? In platform shifts, you don’t need to own the foundation. You need to own a valuable layer above it. Think about which problems the foundation layer creates rather than which problems it solves.

Lesson 6: Partner Your Way to Distribution

Rather than building a massive sales team, Rooom doubled down on partnerships. “We’re building integrations with a lot of the automation vendors out there,” Hans says. This transformed potential competitors into distribution channels.

The math is compelling. Building a hundred-person sales team costs millions annually. Partnership channels leverage existing relationships and sales motions. Yes, you give up margin. But you gain speed and efficiency.

For technical founders uncomfortable with traditional enterprise sales, partnerships offer an alternative path. Focus on building integrations and enabling partners to sell your product. Let them handle the relationship; you handle the technology.

Lesson 7: Technical Depth Is Strategic Advantage

Throughout our conversation, Hans’s technical depth was evident. He can discuss API design, model architecture, and infrastructure scaling with equal fluency. This isn’t just impressive—it’s strategic.

Technical founders often feel pressure to “graduate” to purely strategic roles. Hans proves the opposite. His technical understanding shapes every decision: which markets to enter, which features to build, which partnerships to pursue.

“I was not interested in like burning myself out,” Hans admits. That technical depth lets him make informed decisions quickly, without relying on multiple layers of management. It keeps the organization lean and nimble.

The lesson? Don’t abandon your technical advantage as you scale. It’s your edge in a world where most executives can’t tell good architecture from bad.

The Sustainable Growth Playbook

Hans’s journey offers an alternative to the typical Silicon Valley playbook. You don’t need 10x growth to build something valuable. You don’t need to raise at the highest valuation. You don’t need to compete with foundation model companies.

Instead: Find a genuine bottleneck and productize it. Choose your buyer deliberately. Build enterprise credibility early. Optimize for culture alongside capital. Position strategically in the stack. Partner for distribution. Leverage your technical depth.

It’s not the fastest path. But it might be the one that actually gets you where you want to go—with your sanity intact.