7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building PolyAPI to $22M

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building PolyAPI to $22M

Most founders will tell you to find product-market fit before scaling go-to-market. Darko Vukovic did something harder: he built go-to-market for a product category that didn’t exist yet. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Darko Vukovic, CEO and Founder of PolyAPI, shared the tactical lessons from taking an API management platform from consulting side project to venture-backed infrastructure company. These aren’t theoretical frameworks—they’re battle-tested strategies from someone who had to figure out how to sell infrastructure before anyone knew they needed it.

Lesson 1: Turn Billable Hours Into Pattern Recognition

The most valuable products don’t come from brainstorming sessions—they come from repeatedly solving the same problem. PolyAPI started because Darko and his co-founder kept hitting the same wall during consulting engagements. “We were doing a consulting project and we had to integrate with a bunch of systems that our customer was using,” Darko recalls. “And it was really difficult, really expensive, really time consuming.”

The lesson isn’t to do consulting and build a product on the side. It’s to recognize when you’re solving the same problem multiple times. “We ended up building this internal tool to make that work smoother, work better, work faster,” Darko explains. When other clients started asking about that internal tool, they had their signal. The key is knowing when to stop taking the easy consulting revenue and commit to the harder path of building scalable software.

Lesson 2: Quantify the Hidden Tax

Integration problems are notoriously hard to sell because they’re invisible until they’re catastrophic. Darko’s breakthrough was reframing integration as a hidden engineering tax that executives could immediately understand. “Companies spend 30 to 40% of their engineering time doing integrations,” he explains. “That means if you have 100 engineers, you have 30 to 40 engineers that are just doing integration work.”

This wasn’t a vague efficiency claim—it was a stark resource allocation problem. When a CTO realizes they’re spending millions on engineers who are essentially doing plumbing instead of building features, the value proposition becomes obvious. The lesson for founders: find the hidden cost in your customer’s business and make it impossible to ignore. Not “we make things better”—but “you’re currently spending X on Y and don’t realize it.”

Lesson 3: Cold Outreach Works If Your Targeting Is Surgical

In an era of inbound marketing and product-led growth, Darko’s approach feels almost anachronistic: “We did a lot of cold outreach, a lot of cold emails, a lot of cold calls.” But the strategy worked because the targeting was ruthlessly specific. They focused on VP and C-level executives at companies with 200-2000 employees who were already spending heavily on integration tools.

The insight was simple: “If you are spending this much money on integration tools, you probably have a very deep integration problem.” They weren’t prospecting to companies that might need their solution someday. They targeted organizations already bleeding budget on inadequate solutions. When you know exactly who has the pain and can prove they’re already trying to solve it, cold outreach becomes pattern matching rather than spray-and-pray.

Lesson 4: Architecture Is a Go-to-Market Advantage

Most founders think about technical architecture as a product decision. Darko understood it as a go-to-market decision. The choice to deploy on-premise rather than as a cloud service wasn’t about technical elegance—it was about unlocking enterprise buyers who would never consider cloud-based alternatives.

“We actually sit in your infrastructure,” Darko explains. “So PolyAPI, you can run it on-prem, you can run it in your own AWS account, you can run it in your own Google Cloud account, Azure account, whatever you want.” This architectural choice opened doors with banks, healthcare companies, and government contractors—organizations with strict data residency requirements that represent massive contract values.

The lesson: your technical decisions directly impact who can buy from you. Sometimes the “worse” technical choice (on-premise deployment is objectively harder to support than SaaS) is the better business choice because it removes a non-negotiable barrier for high-value customers.

Lesson 5: Ride Market Shifts Without Rebuilding

When AI exploded, many companies scrambled to rebuild their products. PolyAPI did something smarter: they realized their existing product was already perfectly positioned. “AI kind of came out of left field and took over the world,” Darko admits. But instead of adding AI features, they reframed their entire messaging.

“We very quickly realized, oh, this thing that we’ve been building for four and a half years is actually very useful for AI,” Darko explains. The product insight was simple: AI agents need to take actions, and actions require API integrations. “If your company uses Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, whatever, your AI needs to talk to all these systems to be able to do work on your behalf.”

The tactical move was comprehensive. “We realized that the best way to think about PolyAPI is to serve as the connection layer between your AI and the rest of your business.” They changed their homepage, their pitch decks, their sales conversations—everything got reframed around AI enablement without changing a single line of product code. The lesson: major market shifts often validate existing products rather than obsolete them. The founders who win are those who can reframe their value proposition faster than they can rebuild their product.

Lesson 6: Define Your Category or Get Defined By It

PolyAPI operates in a space crowded with integration platforms, iPaaS solutions, and API management tools. Darko’s response wasn’t to out-feature competitors—it was to reject their category entirely. “We are not an iPaaS. We are an API management platform,” he insists.

This wasn’t semantic hairsplitting. iPaaS platforms require data to flow through their infrastructure. PolyAPI’s architecture is fundamentally different, and that difference matters enormously to their target buyers. By refusing the convenient category label and insisting on precision, Darko ensures prospects understand what makes PolyAPI different before they ever see a demo.

The broader lesson: in crowded markets, category definition is competitive advantage. Don’t accept the categories analysts create. Define your own based on the differences that matter to your buyers.

Lesson 7: Invest in Category Creation, Not Just Demand Capture

Perhaps the most contrarian aspect of PolyAPI’s strategy is Darko’s commitment to thought leadership and category education over short-term pipeline generation. “You need to be seen as a thought leader in your space,” Darko argues. “You need to be putting out useful content that is going to resonate with your ICP.”

This requires patience that most venture-backed companies lack. Category creation doesn’t generate immediate pipeline. “When you are creating a new category and people don’t really know about your category, you have to do a lot of education,” Darko explains. But that education builds trust and mindshare that transactional marketing never could.

For infrastructure companies especially, the lesson is clear: you can’t just capture demand that already exists. You have to create the demand by teaching the market why the problem matters and why existing solutions fall short. That’s a longer game, but it’s the only game worth playing when you’re building something genuinely new.

The Through Line

What connects all these lessons is Darko’s willingness to play a different game than his competitors. While others optimize for scale and velocity, PolyAPI optimizes for precision and category ownership. It’s a strategy that requires conviction—and one that’s building a company positioned to become fundamental infrastructure for how enterprises operate in an AI-native world.