7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $76B Market Nobody Was Solving For

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $76B Market Nobody Was Solving For

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Park, CEO of Coldcart, shared how his team built a perishable ecommerce fulfillment platform by breaking nearly every conventional startup rule. Their approach offers a masterclass in strategic patience, category creation, and knowing when to ignore the playbook.

Lesson 1: High-Stakes Categories Demand Higher MVP Standards

The startup world worships speed. Ship fast, fail fast, iterate. Jason’s team did the opposite, and the reasoning reveals a crucial principle for founders in high-stakes markets.

“The most important go to market decision we made was almost to not go to market as much in the beginning,” Jason explains. The logic is simple but powerful: “When we talk about things like minimum viable product, in traditional startup parlance, the bar for minimum viable product is very high in this space.”

The stakes in perishable shipping are unforgiving. One late delivery doesn’t just cost a sale—it costs the customer relationship entirely. Jason quantified this: “The customer lifetime value impact of one late order is anywhere from three to seven future orders.” In categories where trust is binary, your MVP needs to be fundamentally trustworthy, not just functional.

This principle extends beyond logistics. If you’re building in healthcare, financial services, or any domain where failure has severe consequences, the traditional MVP approach can be fatal. The lesson isn’t to build slowly everywhere—it’s to recognize when your category demands a higher bar and adjust accordingly.

Lesson 2: Value Creation Beats Audience Reach in Go-to-Market

Jason’s marketing philosophy centers on a deceptively simple question that most companies get backward. “I think there’s a very important, nuanced distinction between how can I reach this audience and how can I add value?” he notes.

This distinction reshapes everything. Instead of asking “where is my audience?” and then pushing messages at them, Coldcart starts with: “Where can I create value along the customer journey?” This flips the typical funnel thinking on its head.

The practical application means thinking about marketing as product development: “Where am I going? What information am I seeking? And for us to kind of look at that, just like we would have product development and say, where can I add value along that way?”

This creates content and touchpoints that people actually want, rather than interruptions they tolerate. When every interaction adds value—even if it’s just informational—you build permission to continue the conversation. When you’re just “reaching” people, you’re spending attention capital without earning any back.

Lesson 3: Network Effects Can Exist in Physical Operations

Most founders think of network effects as purely digital phenomena—social networks, marketplaces, platforms. Jason’s insight was recognizing that physical logistics could generate the same dynamics through data aggregation.

The breakthrough example: “1000 companies shipping frozen product in New York City shipping via UPS…UPS is running 85% on time delivery. That’s fine. No alarm bells are going off, no one’s concerned. But those thousand companies are all refunding 15% of their sales because as soon as it delivers late, it’s dead.”

By aggregating signals across companies, Coldcart can see carrier issues in real-time and reroute shipments before problems occur. “Through cold cards platform, we would see that happening in real time, say across a couple of companies. And then for 998 other companies we would reroute those shipments to ship out of different warehouses.”

The result? “For 998 of those companies, their refunds go from 15% to 2%.” This type of optimization is impossible for individual companies to achieve because the only way they get the signal is through failure.

The lesson for founders: look for categories where aggregating operational data across customers creates compounding value. The more customers you serve, the better your service becomes—not just through economies of scale, but through genuine intelligence gains.

Lesson 4: Think Like Infrastructure, Not Like Software

Jason’s background consulting for tech companies during the AWS revolution shaped Coldcart’s entire strategic approach. He recognized that perishable shipping was experiencing the same pain points that enterprise IT faced before cloud computing.

“The transition from having giant physical server boxes and data centers that companies didn’t really understand…to a world in which we sign up for an Amazon Web Services AWS account and all that centralized in a way that’s more efficient than any of these individual companies can achieve on their own.”

This framing unlocked the core insight: even the largest companies with the largest supply chains struggle with perishable logistics. “Ironically the largest companies with the largest supply chains actually tend to be the worst at this. And they will self admit that.”

The reason? They’re optimizing in isolation. By centralizing intelligence across multiple companies, Coldcart can achieve what no single company can do alone. This infrastructure thinking led to building a platform rather than a service, creating durable moats through network effects rather than just operational excellence.

Lesson 5: Technical Decisions Are Strategic Decisions

Most founders separate technical architecture from go-to-market strategy. Jason’s team recognized these are inseparable when building in complex, high-stakes categories.

Operating in paid beta with only three to four customers at a time generated constant pressure. “Why not seven customers? Why not ten customers? Why not 15 customers…that’s the type of question you sort of wake up in the middle of the night and really agonize about.”

The discipline paid off: “Our product will not be the reason that we cannot grow like it happens with many companies just because you kind of move fast and you got to make some technical compromises and those come back to bite you in meaningful ways later.”

This is the inverse of technical debt. Instead of accumulating it through rapid growth, Coldcart incurred it upfront deliberately. Once they emerged from paid beta, they had enterprise-grade infrastructure without the painful rebuilding phase that typically follows initial success.

The strategic implication: if your category requires institutional trust and your ICP includes enterprise buyers, technical excellence isn’t a product concern—it’s a go-to-market advantage.

Lesson 6: Multiple Verticals with Shared Infrastructure Create Portfolio Stability

Coldcart serves three distinct markets—food, pharmaceuticals, and industrials—that behave very differently but share the same core problem. This diversification is strategic, not accidental.

“Pharma and industrial are actually meaningfully larger than food,” Jason notes, but each market has unique characteristics. Pharmaceuticals offer inelastic demand and regulatory complexity. Industrial applications are mission-critical. Food has demographic tailwinds and consumer visibility.

The insight: “As you go from food to pharma to industrial, you get into increasingly mission critical applications and use cases.” This creates a “very kind of balanced portfolio” where economic cycles, regulatory changes, or market dynamics in one vertical don’t determine company fate.

For founders building horizontal infrastructure, this suggests deliberately targeting verticals with different risk profiles and growth drivers, even if it complicates initial go-to-market efforts.

Lesson 7: Align Business Model with Positive Externalities

Jason articulates something rare: a business model where optimization naturally creates environmental and social benefits. “If we just do our jobs, we will create financial benefits and we will create social, environmental impacts and benefits.”

By optimizing packaging for actual conditions rather than worst-case scenarios, Coldcart reduces packaging waste by up to 20%. By reducing spoilage, they cut food waste. By lowering costs, they enable companies to serve markets previously economically unviable.

“Some businesses kind of, you benefit from doing evil things. And so you have to do unnatural things to kind of give back to the world. In our case, if we just do our jobs, we will create financial benefits and we will create social, environmental impacts and benefits.”

This alignment isn’t altruism—it’s strategic advantage. When your core business model generates positive externalities, you unlock partnerships, brand value, and team motivation that companies pursuing purely extractive models can never access.