Inside Lapaya’s Pivot: How Abandoning Their Platform Play Led to Product-Market Fit
Three months into building a marketplace for corporate training, René Janssen and his co-founder faced a stark realization that would completely reshape their company’s future. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, René shared how a critical decision to abandon their initial platform strategy led to finding product-market fit in the $400B employee training market.
The Original Platform Vision
Like many founders, René initially saw an opportunity to build a platform connecting existing players in a fragmented market. “We first started out like I think many tech founders were saying, let’s just do a tech platform. There’s a lot of content out there already. There’s a lot of trainers out there already, there’s lots of facilitators out there already,” René explains.
The theory was compelling: build a platform that could help training providers deliver more coherent learning paths and measure impact. But theory and reality quickly diverged.
The Hidden Complexity
The fatal flaw in their platform approach emerged quickly: “What we maybe naive in retrospect, had forgotten to consider is that meant that you had to do every sale twice, you had to sell to a client, and then you still have to sell to other external kind of training providers.”
This double-sided market challenge was killing their growth. As René recalls, “After three months, my co-founder and I were looking at each other and said, well, if this is the rate at which we’re going to expand, then we rather stop right now.”
The Pivot Decision
Instead of trying to optimize their existing approach, Lapaya made a radical decision. René explains: “We’re just going to take everything upon us and we’re going to client and saying we’re just going to do leadership training, we’re going to soft skills training, we’re going to do personal development and we’re just going to do it better.”
This wasn’t just a minor pivot – it was a complete transformation of their business model. They would own the entire value chain, even though they weren’t necessarily experts in all aspects of training content. René acknowledges: “Weren’t necessarily people kind of experience on the content of that, so that we just needed to insource as soon as possible.”
The New Approach
The pivot allowed Lapaya to address fundamental problems in corporate training that a platform alone couldn’t solve. They built a hybrid model that René describes as: “Let’s use tech wherever we can. But since many of those skills that makes you effective at work, the skills that help you convince a client, the skills that help you collaborate with a coworker, are, in essence, human skills. We managed to blend in humans in there as well.”
This end-to-end control enabled them to target a specific segment of the market – the roughly 50% of training budgets spent on soft skills, management skills, and leadership development. This focus gave them an addressable market of about $80 billion.
The Results
The pivot paid off. Today, Lapaya uses a land-and-expand strategy that René describes as starting with “a first kind of believer at a client” and then growing “year after year, we can grow the number of employees we touch and grow our share of wallet within the company.”
Key Lessons for Founders
The Lapaya pivot offers several crucial lessons for founders considering similar strategic shifts:
- Recognize platform challenges early: Double-sided markets require exponential effort to get moving.
- Be willing to take on bigger challenges: Sometimes solving the problem requires more than just connecting existing players.
- Focus on unit economics: As René puts it, “You can ultimately sell anything. But the unit economics aren’t always going to make the sense that you want them to make sense.”
For founders facing similar pivot decisions, René emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding customer needs: “Pick an industry, pick a market at the fine enterprise even more narrowly understands what keeps them awake at night, and you can fix that, then you can scale it.”