Cadana’s Horizontal GTM Strategy: Why They Serve Betting Companies and Fintechs on the Same Platform

Cadana’s Horizontal GTM Strategy: Why They Serve Betting Companies and Fintechs on the Same Platform

Every B2B SaaS playbook says the same thing: pick a vertical, dominate it, then expand. Build for healthcare or fintech or e-commerce, become the category leader, and only then consider adjacent markets. Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO and Co-Founder of Cadana, ignored this advice entirely. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Albert explained why Cadana built a horizontal platform serving ride-hailing companies, betting operators, fintechs, and e-commerce businesses simultaneously. This wasn’t scattered execution—it was strategic positioning based on a clear framework for when horizontal beats vertical.

The Conventional Wisdom: Why Everyone Says Go Vertical

The vertical-first strategy exists for good reasons. When you focus on one industry, you can speak their language, understand their specific workflows, build industry-specific features, and create powerful reference customers within that vertical. Your marketing becomes easier because you’re targeting one conference, one set of publications, one tight community.

This approach works exceptionally well when you have deep vertical expertise or unique industry relationships. If you spent ten years in healthcare before starting your company, going vertical in healthcare makes perfect sense. Your advantage is industry knowledge, and vertical focus maximizes that advantage.

But what if your advantage isn’t vertical knowledge? What if your edge is solving a technical problem that exists across multiple industries?

Cadana’s Core Insight: Infrastructure Problems Are Horizontal

Cadana’s decision to go horizontal started with understanding where their actual advantage lived. They weren’t healthcare experts or fintech specialists. Their expertise was in building infrastructure for financial operations—specifically, everything that happens after a payment is accepted.

“Because we built a very horizontal platform, we work with all kinds of businesses,” Albert explains. “We work with ride hailing companies, we work with e-commerce companies, we work with fintech companies, betting companies, software companies, any company that has to do any high volume of payments or has to manage a lot of money flow.”

The commonality across these industries isn’t vertical—it’s operational. Every business processing high volumes of payments faces the same fundamental challenges: reconciliation complexity, multi-currency management, accounting integration, compliance reporting, dispute handling. A betting company and a fintech have radically different business models, but their post-payment operational problems are nearly identical.

This insight became Cadana’s framework for choosing horizontal: if the problem you’re solving is infrastructure rather than workflow, and if that infrastructure problem manifests similarly across industries, horizontal positioning leverages your actual advantage rather than fighting against it.

The Decision Framework: When Horizontal Makes Strategic Sense

Albert’s experience reveals a clear decision framework. Go horizontal when these conditions are true:

First, your advantage is technical infrastructure, not industry expertise. Cadana’s edge wasn’t understanding betting operations or e-commerce logistics—it was building scalable financial operations infrastructure. Trying to become vertical experts would have required learning each industry deeply without adding meaningful value to the core product.

Second, the problem manifests similarly across industries. While a ride-hailing company and a software company have different business models, their reconciliation challenges, accounting needs, and compliance requirements follow similar patterns. The infrastructure to solve these problems doesn’t need to be industry-specific.

Third, no single vertical is large enough to reach your scale ambitions quickly. If each vertical represents a $10M opportunity and you need to build a $100M+ business, going horizontal lets you capture multiple markets simultaneously rather than sequentially dominating small verticals.

Fourth, cross-industry learning accelerates product development. “We focus very much on scalability and reliability,” Albert emphasizes. Serving multiple industries simultaneously forced Cadana to build more robust, flexible infrastructure than they would have needed for a single vertical.

The Hidden Advantages of Horizontal Infrastructure

Going horizontal created unexpected strategic advantages for Cadana beyond just market size. First, it diversified their revenue risk. When one industry faces headwinds—say, regulatory challenges in betting or economic downturns affecting e-commerce—other verticals continue growing. This stability matters more as the company scales.

Second, it accelerated learning. Every new vertical taught Cadana something about financial operations that improved the product for all customers. Edge cases from betting companies informed features that e-commerce businesses didn’t know they needed. This cross-pollination of insights happens faster with horizontal platforms.

Third, it created competitive moats that vertical players can’t easily replicate. A fintech-focused financial operations tool can’t easily add betting company features without diluting their vertical positioning. Cadana, already serving both, can continuously improve infrastructure that serves all.

Fourth, it enabled faster geographic expansion. When Cadana entered new countries, they weren’t limited to finding fintech customers or e-commerce customers—they could sell to any high-volume payment business. “We currently work with over 400 businesses across 26 African countries,” Albert shares. This density across industries made geographic expansion more efficient.

The Trade-offs: What Horizontal Costs

Albert doesn’t pretend horizontal is universally better—it comes with real costs. Marketing becomes harder because you can’t just show up at the fintech conference or sponsor the e-commerce newsletter. You’re not the “fintech financial operations platform” or the “e-commerce reconciliation tool”—you’re something broader and potentially less immediately clear.

Sales cycles can be longer because you lack industry-specific reference customers for each prospect. When a betting company asks “Who else in betting uses Cadana?”, you might have to sell on technical merit rather than social proof from their specific industry.

Product development requires more discipline. You can’t build every industry-specific feature every vertical wants, or you’ll end up with an unfocused product that serves nobody well. Cadana had to identify which features were truly common infrastructure versus which were vertical-specific nice-to-haves.

The key is building a platform that’s genuinely horizontal, not just multiple vertical products duct-taped together. “We built the platform to be able to handle very, very large scale,” Albert explains. This meant investing in flexible infrastructure from the beginning, even when they only had a few million in transaction volume. “Even when we were doing maybe only a few million dollars, we built it for scale so that when we’re doing billions of dollars, it still works the same way.”

The ICP Question: Defining Target Customers Horizontally

One question founders always ask about horizontal strategies: how do you define your ICP without vertical focus? Albert’s answer is elegant: define your ICP by operational characteristics, not industry classifications.

Cadana’s ICP isn’t “fintech companies” or “e-commerce businesses.” It’s “any company that has to do any high volume of payments or has to manage a lot of money flow.” This definition is simultaneously broad and precise. It includes multiple industries but excludes businesses without the operational characteristics that make Cadana valuable.

This approach to ICP definition works for any horizontal infrastructure play: identify the operational characteristics that create the problem you solve, then target any company with those characteristics regardless of industry. Transaction volume, data complexity, compliance requirements, integration needs—these operational factors often matter more than industry vertical for infrastructure products.

When to Choose Horizontal Over Vertical

The decision framework distills to a simple test: Where does your unique advantage live—in industry knowledge or technical infrastructure? If you have deep industry relationships and expertise, go vertical and leverage that advantage. If your edge is building technical infrastructure that solves common problems across industries, going horizontal lets you maximize that advantage.

Cadana’s journey from struggling vertical attempts to successful horizontal platform proves this framework works. Today, they process over $400 million in transaction volume annually across multiple industries, each vertical strengthening the platform for all others.

For B2B founders facing the horizontal versus vertical decision, Albert’s experience offers a clear path: understand where your actual advantage lives, identify whether the problem you’re solving is infrastructure or workflow, and have the courage to go horizontal when that’s where your edge truly is—even if every playbook says otherwise.