Canopy’s $0 to First Customer: How to Sell Enterprise Software Before You Build It

Canopy’s $0 to First Customer: How to Sell Enterprise Software Before You Build It

Most founders wait until their product is polished before talking to customers. Matt Bivons did the opposite. After getting rejected by Y Combinator at 3am and every VC on Sand Hill Road, he got on planes to pitch lending infrastructure that barely existed. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Bivons, CEO of Canopy, shared the specific playbook for pre-product enterprise sales—and why validation always comes before building.

The Market Validation That Changed Everything

After the brutal rejections, Matt had a choice: double down on his student credit card vision or investigate what the market actually wanted. He chose investigation over insistence.

“I tried to reach out to some very large companies, Chime being one of them, Greenlight being another,” Matt explains. His approach was direct but strategic. Instead of pitching what he’d already built, he asked a simple question: were these debit card companies planning to get into lending?

“Back in 2019 and even still to this day, but definitely in 2019, there were so many debit card companies out there and I asked them if they were ever going to get into lending and credit and if they could use our APIs to help build a co branded credit card. And every single one said yes,” Matt recalls.

This wasn’t customer discovery in the abstract. It was pre-selling infrastructure before writing a single line of code. Every conversation validated not just that the problem existed, but that companies would actually pay to solve it.

The Pattern Recognition Advantage

Matt’s ability to sell before building wasn’t luck—it came from deep domain expertise. Before founding Canopy, he’d spent years at Earnest and Greensky, both fintech companies struggling with the same infrastructure problems.

“I saw a very similar pain point at Earnest and Green sky when it came to servicing,” Matt notes. The pattern was consistent: “At Earnest and at Greensky, they built it off of very rigid tables and databases and it caused a ton of different problems. It caused problems in terms of new product creation. So if a customer wanted a different loan Type the ledger couldn’t support it.”

This domain knowledge became his sales weapon. He wasn’t pitching a theoretical solution—he was describing pain points that every conversation partner immediately recognized. When you’ve lived the problem your prospects are experiencing, pre-product sales becomes about articulating their pain better than they can themselves.

The Surgical Pivot That Enabled Sales

The market validation revealed something critical: companies didn’t want the student credit card. They wanted the infrastructure underneath it. This insight forced a brutal simplification.

“I realized at that moment that was the market pool, that was the signal that was saying I need to pivot. And so I completely gutted everything related to the student credit card, stripped away everything and went down just to the basics,” Matt explains.

The question he asked became the foundation of his sales pitch: “What is the hardest thing about what we are building, that no one else has that everybody else wants.” The answer: “It was the servicing infrastructure, the ledgering, the lending core.”

This clarity—knowing exactly what value you’re selling—makes pre-product sales possible. You’re not selling features or demos. You’re selling the solution to the hardest problem in the market that nobody else can solve.

The Early GTM Motion: Pure Hustle

With validation in hand and a clear value proposition, Matt’s go-to-market strategy was elegantly simple: show up everywhere.

“The early go to market was just me hustling and flying around the country trying to get in front of companies that did lending or were getting into lending,” Matt recalls. This wasn’t scalable, repeatable, or efficient. It was necessary.

Matt breaks down the growth channels available to early B2B companies: paid marketing, organic SEO, word of mouth and referral, and direct outbound sales. For Canopy, only one worked: “That’s really how our go to market started at Canopy,” Matt says, referring to direct founder-to-founder outreach.

The approach was manual: “Direct marketing obviously can fall under direct mail, it can fall under email, or it could fall into actually, just as me as an individual, cold Calling or emailing founders of other companies.” No automated sequences, no SDR team, no marketing automation. Just a founder with deep expertise having conversations with other founders about their hardest problems.

The Trust-Building Framework

Selling pre-product enterprise software requires a different psychological contract than selling finished products. You’re asking prospects to bet on your ability to execute, not evaluate your existing execution.

Matt’s framework centers on listening over selling: “That comes in the form of not being, you know, overselling, but really listening and understanding the company, their business model, their future.”

This approach works because enterprise infrastructure decisions are inherently forward-looking. Companies aren’t buying for today’s problems—they’re buying for next year’s scale, next quarter’s product launches, future regulatory requirements. A founder who deeply understands their business model can speak to those future needs better than any demo.

Why One Email Can Change Everything

Even in those early days of pure hustle, Matt believed in something that sustained him through the rejections: “I firmly believe that, you know, one yes, one email, one phone call, one customer can fundamentally change the trajectory of a company.”

This isn’t just motivational thinking—it’s the mathematics of enterprise sales. Unlike consumer products where you need thousands of users to generate meaningful revenue, enterprise B2B can scale on dozens of key customers. That first customer becomes your case study, your proof point, your reference account.

“From that’s how we got our first investment,” Matt notes about the pivot to B2B infrastructure. The investment didn’t come from a polished pitch deck or hockey stick projections. It came from demonstrating that large companies—Chime, Greenlight, and others—had validated the market demand through actual conversations.

The Adaptation Mindset

What makes Matt’s early-stage playbook replicable isn’t the specific tactics—flying around the country, cold emailing founders. It’s the underlying principle of rapid adaptation based on market feedback.

“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. The early days aren’t about executing a perfect plan. They’re about finding which conversations convert, which value propositions resonate, which prospects actually have budget and urgency.

Matt describes this as one of the critical founder capabilities: “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.”

The Principle Behind the Playbook

Strip away the specific tactics and you find the core principle: validation always precedes building. Not validation through surveys or landing pages, but validation through conversations with people who have budget authority and acute pain.

Matt’s background as a designer taught him something essential: “As a designer, I very much believe that great design helps facilitate better life experiences. And so as a designer, as an engineer, as a marketer, as a Founder, you need to have a lot of empathy for the people using your product.”

That empathy—understanding your customer’s pain at a visceral level—is what makes pre-product sales possible. You’re not selling vapor. You’re selling the credible promise that you understand their problem better than anyone else and can solve it.

Five years later, Canopy has evolved from founder-led hustle to sophisticated enterprise sales. But the foundation was built in those early days of getting on planes, having conversations, and selling infrastructure that didn’t exist yet. Because sometimes the best way to validate your product is to sell it first and build it second.