Cobrainer’s 6-Year Consulting Phase: Why Sometimes You Need to Play the Long Game Before Finding Product-Market Fit
Most startup advice emphasizes moving fast and scaling quickly. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hanns Aderhold shared how Cobrainer took the opposite approach – spending six years as a consultancy before successfully pivoting to SaaS. Their story offers a compelling case for playing the long game.
The Initial Path
When Cobrainer began in 2013, they built a platform for university project teams. An unexpected opportunity changed their trajectory when a large enterprise approached them. “What we basically did, were learning on the job in the sense of getting our first customers, them telling us, hey, how we want this skills based platform, this skills based staffing platform to work,” Hanns explains.
The Consulting Years
Rather than immediately trying to build a scalable product, Cobrainer leaned into consulting. “We basically, just, for six years in a row, did consulting projects one after the other,” Hanns shares. This approach had two key advantages:
- Revenue Generation: Their first project brought in €100,000, followed by a €2 million contract. This funding allowed them to develop their technology without external investment pressure.
- Market Understanding: Each consulting project deepened their understanding of enterprise needs. As Hanns notes, “During this consulting time in the first six years, we always were using the skills data engine as a core. But the products that we were building were always one-offs.”
The Challenge of Custom Solutions
The consulting model wasn’t without frustrations. “Even though these shells were quite simple, they still had to be maintained, it was still effort. So it was not really kind of a scalable solution,” Hanns explains. Each new client required a custom implementation, creating maintenance overhead.
The Pivot Point
By 2019, they had enough knowledge and confidence to make a bold move. “We noticed that after six years of doing this consulting approach… we had this very unique skills engine that hasn’t changed for the last ten years,” Hanns recalls. They identified a common use case across their consulting projects: internal career transparency for employees.
Their first SaaS product launched in October 2019. The results were immediate: “Within 30 days of, like, that customer, which had 60,000 employees in total, 20,000 employees were on our platform.” This rapid adoption validated their patient approach to product-market fit.
The COVID Test
The timing of their pivot seemed terrible – they discontinued their consulting contracts just before COVID hit. But their deep market understanding paid off. “COVID actually turned out to be an accelerant for us because with COVID lots of people had a hiring freeze… and actually that made them turn to more their internal talent management, which was exactly our platform,” Hanns shares.
Lessons for Founders
Cobrainer’s journey offers several insights for founders:
- Revenue-First Development: Using consulting revenue to fund product development gave them independence and time to understand the market deeply.
- Core Technology Focus: While building custom solutions, they maintained and refined their core skills engine, creating lasting IP.
- Pattern Recognition: Six years of consulting helped them identify the most valuable and common use cases across enterprises.
Today, Cobrainer is growing at 252% year-over-year and approaching €10 million in revenue. Their six-year consulting phase, while unconventional, laid the foundation for this success by providing deep market understanding and stable revenue for development.
For founders feeling pressure to scale quickly, Cobrainer’s story suggests an alternative path: sometimes the best way to build a successful SaaS company is to start as a successful consultancy, using that time to deeply understand your market and refine your core technology.