Conversation
Highlights

How Continuum Turned Customer Acquisition Into a Network Effect: Building Reverse EDI in B2B Supply Chain

When your HVAC system fails, a contractor arrives at your house and begins a process most people never see. First, they navigate to the manufacturer’s website to verify warranty status. Then they download PDF diagrams to identify which of 20 possible replacement parts they need. Next comes what Alex Witcpalek calls “a game of guess who”—calling distributor branches one by one, asking if each has the part in stock. After finding inventory, they manually file a warranty claim with the distributor, who files it with the manufacturer. The entire process takes 30-45 days.

Continuum completes it in 30-45 seconds.

Alex spent 13 years selling CRM and analytics solutions to manufacturers and distributors before founding Continuum. He joined a British-based company at $1 million ARR and helped scale it to $15 million before its acquisition by SugarCRM. The experience revealed something unexpected: “I just realized how far behind the times they were. Which also meant I think there’s a great opportunity here,” he shares in a recent episode of Category Visionaries.

But the opportunity wasn’t where most founders would look.

Why Multi-Party Returns Required Building Three Systems Simultaneously

Consumer returns platforms like Loop Returns and Narvar solve straightforward problems. Alex is direct about the complexity gap: “I could probably build a consumer returns app in Lovable and give me a day or two.”

B2B reverse logistics involves what Alex calls “multi-party returns”—transactions requiring coordination between end users, distributors, and manufacturers. Each party runs different ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Epicor’s Profit 21, Epicor Eclipse, Infor) with bespoke business logic. “If it’s this day, and it’s this day and I did this, then I’m gonna act like this,” Alex explains. “They all are very particular about their process flows. We’ve done it this way for a very long time.”

To replicate these transactions, Continuum built “the equivalent of an order management system, a warehouse management system and a procurement system, all to solve one transaction of a reverse logistics process.” A single return can involve 16 constituents across sales, customer service, fleet management, supply chain, warehouse, purchasing, and finance departments.

The technical challenge alone would deter most competitors. But Alex saw a second layer of defensibility: “Supply chain companies have an extremely high pain threshold.” They’ve accepted broken processes for decades. This creates both a customer education challenge and a massive competitive moat once you prove the solution works.

Targeting Problems Where You Can Win 100% Market Share

Alex studied competitive dynamics across supply chain software and identified a pattern. Companies building CRMs, sales order automation, and accounts payable solutions all face the same constraint: fractional market share. Even category leaders in verticals like HVAC or electrical distribution top out at 25-30% penetration.

“There’s 1.5 million distribution manufacturing companies in North America. Guess how many we want? All of them. Every single one of them on our platform,” Alex says.

This required choosing a greenfield problem no competitor was solving. The trade-off was clear: “We need to be able to go educate the market on a problem that they think is fine, that they’re living with.” But the upside was avoiding competitive displacement entirely. Every prospect conversation focuses on change management, not competitive differentiation.

The strategic implication extends beyond Continuum. Founders should map their TAM against competitive saturation—markets where you can own the entire category create fundamentally different unit economics than fighting for fragments of crowded spaces.

How to Sequence Network Businesses: Independent Value Before Network Activation

Eighteen months into building Continuum, Alex faced investor skepticism about network effects. The challenge was structural: “When you don’t have a network, you don’t sell the network. It’s just in your plans and how you’re building.”

His Facebook analogy crystallizes the problem: if Mark Zuckerberg pitches a social network where you can see family photos and post on timelines, it sounds valuable—until you ask who’s on the network. “Well, it’s just me. It’s like, there’s no value to that network.”

Alex’s solution was what he calls “independent network value.” Continuum sold three distinct benefits to early customers:

• P&L impact: Recovering missed vendor credits and reducing financial leakage
• Labor reduction: Eliminating 30-45 days of manual processing across multiple departments
• Customer experience: Enabling 30-45 second resolution instead of multi-week delays

Each benefit delivered standalone ROI independent of network density. Meanwhile, Continuum built network infrastructure invisibly—creating the technical architecture to connect trading partners while customers focused on immediate operational wins.

Only after achieving critical mass in specific verticals (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, medical devices) did they activate the network value proposition. At that point, distributors had incentive to recruit manufacturers onto the platform, and manufacturers wanted their distributor networks connected.

“You start to literally incentivize your customers to recruit more people on. And at some point, you can cut the incentive off because the incentive is just to get greater value by connecting,” Alex explains.

This sequencing prevents the cold-start problem that kills most marketplace businesses. Founders building network effects must design standalone value that makes the first 100 customers successful before network density matters.

Why Facebook Retargeting Beats LinkedIn for 50+ Year Old Buyers

Continuum’s number one lead source isn’t content marketing, paid search, or LinkedIn—it’s existing customers recruiting trading partners onto the network. But reaching the first cohort required unconventional channel choices.

Facebook retargeting became their highest-performing paid channel. “We’re talking 50 plus year olds in the supply chain. They’re trying to comment on their grandkids’ pictures,” Alex notes. The platform works precisely because it’s where VP of Supply Chain and COO buyers actually spend personal time, creating multiple retargeting touchpoints outside work contexts.

BDR outbound—the channel many SaaS founders abandoned—delivers high win rates. “Shockingly, people wouldn’t believe it. BDR Outbound still works. We’re picking up the phone and dialing. Our win rates are very high on outbound.” In an industry built on relationships and handshakes, direct conversation creates trust that digital channels can’t replicate.

Events drive pipeline in an industry where “a lot of business is done on a handshake.” The in-person channel builds credibility that email sequences and LinkedIn InMails cannot.

The tactical lesson extends beyond channel selection: founders should ethnographically research where their specific ICP spends attention rather than defaulting to SaaS playbooks designed for different personas. A 50-year-old supply chain executive behaves nothing like a 32-year-old product manager at a tech startup.

Why Business Model Architecture Is the Only Remaining Moat

Alex has a provocative thesis: “I genuinely believe there’s no such thing as a tech moat anymore.”

To prove it, he personally built Continuum’s entire LMS platform using AI-powered vibe coding—a system that ingests every sales call recording to distribute tribal knowledge across the team. He also built their own e-signature platform called Continue Sign rather than licensing DocuSign. “I quite literally built our whole LMS platform. Like, why would you ever go buy an LMS system? I built an agent LMS system that is connected to all of our systems integrated to confluence.”

If a non-technical CEO can replicate DocuSign and build sophisticated internal tools in days, technical differentiation provides zero defensibility.

Continuum’s moat comes entirely from network architecture. To displace them from an HVAC distributor requires simultaneously disconnecting integrations with manufacturers like Carrier, Daikin, Bosch, and LG—plus all the other distributors in those manufacturers’ networks. “To bounce us out means you have to bounce the network,” Alex explains.

He draws inspiration from EDI, a 1960s technology still dominant today despite being technically obsolete. “Technology built in the 1960s still being used today. Untenable people can’t bounce them because of their network.”

The implication for founders: business model must create switching costs, network density, or proprietary data advantages. Technology alone—no matter how sophisticated—provides no protection in the AI era.

Using Enterprise Complexity as Buyer Qualification

Continuum runs enterprise sales cycles for $40,000 ACVs. Buying involves VPs of Supply Chain, COOs, CFOs, and stakeholders across sales, customer service, warehouse, purchasing, and finance. Most SaaS companies view this as friction to eliminate.

Alex weaponizes it as qualification. Companies willing to coordinate multi-threaded enterprise buying processes have real pain, real budget, and executive alignment. The complexity filters out tire-kickers and price-sensitive buyers who would churn.

He layers three value propositions knowing different stakeholders weight them differently: “Every business that we work with has a different premium on those three different value pillars. So it just depends on kind of the organization and where they’re feeling the pain.”

Operations leaders prioritize labor reduction. CFOs focus on P&L impact from recovered credits. Customer-facing teams care about experience improvements. By multi-threading across all three, Continuum builds organizational buy-in that reduces implementation risk and churn.

The company grew 8x in the last 12 months and is tracking toward 7x growth in the next 12. Alex attributes this to never resting: “It’s never as good as you think it is. It’s also never as bad as you think it is. You got to stay in that middle.”

Building Internal Knowledge Distribution Systems

As Continuum scales, Alex faces the challenge every founder with deep domain expertise encounters: how do you distribute tribal knowledge across a growing team when the industry requires 13 years of experience to understand?

His solution is an AI-powered LMS that ingests every sales call recording. “Every call recording I’ve ever been on goes into that LMS just trying to distribute this knowledge that a lot of our core people in our company have,” he explains.

This creates a feedback loop: new hires can query the system to understand how Alex handles specific objections, navigates ERP integration discussions, or explains network value to skeptical prospects. The system makes implicit knowledge explicit, compressing the learning curve from years to weeks.

The broader principle: founders with defensible domain expertise should invest in knowledge distribution systems that let them scale beyond their personal capacity. AI tools make this possible in ways that weren’t feasible even two years ago.

From Reverse Logistics to Supply Chain Operating System

Continuum’s mission statement reveals their long-term play: “A seamlessly connected supply chain. Imagine the unthinkable.”

Alex is explicit that this says nothing about returns, warranties, or repairs. “We’re connecting the supply chain the reverse way. Well, you can imagine once we do it up the reverse way, what can we do after that?”

The strategy is land-and-expand at the infrastructure level. Once Continuum connects manufacturers, distributors, and end users for reverse transactions, they own the data pipes and relationships to expand into forward transactions—orders, shipments, inventory visibility, pricing.

“Ultimately what we’re building is the operating system for the supply chain,” Alex says. The vision positions them not as a point solution but as the central data layer connecting all parties and all transaction types.

For founders building in complex B2B ecosystems, Alex’s final insight matters: “I genuinely don’t think you can solve root cause of supply chain problems without having spent a long time in this industry.” The tactical knowledge required to navigate disparate ERPs, bespoke business logic, and multi-party coordination can’t be shortcut through pattern matching from other industries.

His caveat: “The thing that keeps me up at night is that true in two years from now?” AI may eventually compress the domain expertise advantage. Until then, deep industry knowledge combined with deliberate business model architecture creates the only moat that matters.