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The $35M Pivot: How Footprint Cracked CPG Distribution After Burning Through Their Runway

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eli Wachs, CEO of Footprint, shared how his retail marketing platform nearly died before finding product-market fit. The journey from failed enterprise software to a $100M ARR business wasn’t about brilliant strategy—it was about survival and one critical insight about retail buyers.

Footprint today powers personalized marketing for major retailers like Express, Lulus, and Party City. But the path there required Eli to abandon everything he thought he knew about B2B sales.

The False Start Nobody Talks About

Footprint’s original product wasn’t built for marketers at all. “We started out as a merchandising analytics product,” Eli explains. “We were building a product that could tell merchandisers which products were going to sell well and which products weren’t.” The team had raised money, built technology, and started selling—except nobody was buying.

The wake-up call came from customer conversations. One VP told Eli point-blank: “I have a team of 50 people whose job it is to forecast what’s going to sell. If I use your product and it works, I have to fire 30 of them. And if I use your product and it doesn’t work, I still have to fire 30 of them because I just spent a bunch of money on software that doesn’t work.”

That’s when Eli realized they’d built something technically impressive but commercially dead. “We were like, oh shit, we need to change what we’re doing,” he recalls. The team had maybe six months of runway left.

Finding the Wedge Through Channel Arbitrage

The pivot to marketing automation happened through a fortunate accident. While scrambling to salvage the business, Eli noticed something: “Marketers were where the budget was. They had budget, they had urgency, and they actually wanted to try new things.”

But here’s where most pivot stories gloss over the details. Footprint didn’t just change their target buyer—they fundamentally restructured their go-to-market around a single channel insight. “We basically said, we’re going to create a demand gen engine that is all about Facebook,” Eli explains. “Back in 2013-2014, Facebook ads were incredibly cheap and incredibly effective.”

The arbitrage was simple but powerful. Footprint would create content about retail marketing challenges, distribute it through Facebook’s then-underpriced ad platform, and capture leads from marketing managers actively looking for solutions. “We could put a dollar in and get $3 out consistently,” Eli says. “That was the engine that helped us grow from zero to about 10 million in ARR.”

This wasn’t sophisticated ABM or enterprise sales—it was pure channel exploitation before the market caught up.

The CPG Distribution Breakthrough

As Footprint grew, Eli discovered their actual competitive moat had nothing to do with their product features. It was about distribution through CPG relationships. “All of our customers buy products from CPG brands—Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Estee Lauder, Coca-Cola,” he explains. “Those brands want to sell more products through our retailers.”

The insight: Footprint could become the connective tissue between brands and retailers. “We realized we could go to these brands and say, hey, we have software deployed at 400 retailers. We can run a campaign on your behalf across all 400 of those retailers simultaneously.”

This created a three-sided network effect that competitors couldn’t replicate. Retailers wanted Footprint because CPG brands would help fund their marketing. CPG brands wanted in because Footprint gave them direct access to retail customer data. And Footprint captured value from both sides. “It’s a differentiated distribution motion that is not replicable by any of our competitors,” Eli notes.

The Metrics That Actually Mattered

When asked about their growth trajectory, Eli shares numbers that reveal their true scaling pattern: “We’re at a little over 100 million of ARR right now. We’ve been fortunate, we’ve been growing 30 to 40% year over year for the last several years.”

But the more interesting metric is customer concentration. Despite serving 400 retailers, Footprint’s top 25 customers drive meaningful revenue concentration. This revealed their real business model: land-and-expand within retail chains, then layer on CPG co-marketing revenue. “Some of our customers are spending multiple millions of dollars a year with us,” Eli says.

The unit economics work because retail marketing has direct ROI measurement. Unlike brand marketing, where attribution gets fuzzy, Footprint customers can track every dollar spent to revenue generated. This made renewals and expansions straightforward—if the platform drove revenue, retailers bought more.

What Changed After $35M

Footprint’s Series B marked a strategic inflection point. “That was really the point at which we said, okay, we’ve figured out product market fit, we’ve figured out our initial go-to-market motion, now we need to scale everything,” Eli reflects.

The capital enabled three specific bets: expanding the product into retail media networks, building out the CPG co-marketing business, and moving upmarket into enterprise retail. Each required different capabilities. “We had to hire a bunch of senior execs who had done it before,” Eli explains. “People who had scaled sales teams from 10 to 100, people who had built out marketing organizations.”

The lesson here isn’t about raising money—it’s about knowing when you’ve actually found something worth scaling versus just hoping the next round will figure it out.

The AI Replatforming Bet

Footprint’s current product development centers on a complete rebuild using AI. “We basically are rebuilding the entire product as an AI native product,” Eli says. But this isn’t about adding chatbots or copilots—it’s about changing the fundamental user experience.

The thesis: retail marketers don’t want better tools, they want outcomes. “Instead of having someone go in and build a campaign, they tell our AI, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish, and the AI builds the campaign for them,” Eli explains. The platform handles segmentation, content generation, channel selection, and optimization automatically.

This represents a major risk. Rebuilding a $100M ARR platform from scratch could alienate existing customers or introduce execution risk. But Eli sees it as necessary to maintain their lead. “The thing that I always come back to is optionality,” he says. “You want to make sure you have optionality in your business.”