From €100K to €2M: How Cobrainer’s First Two Enterprise Deals Shaped Their Go-to-Market Strategy

The journey from first customer to enterprise success rarely follows a straight line. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hanns Aderhold shared how Cobrainer’s initial enterprise deals turned a university project into a serious HR tech player, offering valuable lessons for founders navigating early enterprise sales.

The Unexpected First Deal

In 2013, Cobrainer was just a university project aimed at matching student skills with project teams. Then something unexpected happened. A large German enterprise approached them with an unusual request.

“Right at the beginning of our journey, a large enterprise company here from Germany approached us and said, ‘hey, we actually want to work exactly the way you’re advocating for, with your platform,'” Hanns recalls. “‘We want to work exactly that way inside our organization… can you build your platform, your university platform, can you build that for us as an enterprise?'”

The offer was €100,000 – a fortune for university students. “We’re like just young students, and €100,000 was quite a lot of money for us,” Hanns shares. But more valuable than the money was what this first deal taught them about enterprise needs.

The Game-Changing Second Contract

The real turning point came with their second enterprise customer. “We’re super lucky because the next customer didn’t pay €100,000. They actually offered to pay €2 million,” Hanns explains. This 20x jump in contract value revealed something crucial about the market.

Rather than rushing to build a scalable product, Cobrainer used these early deals to deeply understand enterprise needs. “We basically, just, for six years in a row, did consulting projects one after the other,” Hanns notes. This consulting phase, while less scalable, provided invaluable insights into how enterprises actually used and valued their skills platform.

Key Lessons from Early Enterprise Sales

Several crucial lessons emerged from these first deals:

1. Enterprise Needs Often Differ from Initial Assumptions The same platform built for university project teams needed significant adaptation for enterprise use. Understanding these differences shaped their entire product strategy.
2. Word-of-Mouth Drives Early Enterprise Sales “We just relied on word of mouth and this first customer kind of referring us to another customer,” Hanns shares. Their first success created opportunities for larger deals.
3. Early Deals Should Fund Learning Instead of immediately trying to scale, Cobrainer used these early contracts to fund deep market understanding. “We had this very unique skills engine that hasn’t changed for the last ten years,” Hanns notes, highlighting how early learnings created lasting value.

The Long-Term Impact

These early deals fundamentally shaped Cobrainer’s approach to product and market. When they finally pivoted to SaaS in 2019, they had deep knowledge of enterprise needs. Their first SaaS customer saw 20,000 employees adopt the platform within 30 days – a success built on years of enterprise learning.

For founders pursuing enterprise sales, Cobrainer’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the path to scalable success requires taking the longer, more educational route through consulting. Their story shows that early enterprise deals aren’t just about revenue – they’re opportunities to build deep market understanding that can drive success for years to come.

Today, as Cobrainer approaches €10 million in revenue with 252% year-over-year growth, those first two deals remain pivotal moments in their story – not just for the revenue they brought, but for the market understanding they enabled.