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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Find your wedge through empathy:
Omri and his co-founder succeeded initially because they had built similar solutions internally and deeply understood the pain points. They approached customers with genuine curiosity and empathy, spending 45-60 minutes just listening about what wasn't working in their finance departments. B2B founders should leverage their authentic experience and empathy to build initial trust.
Focus on critical pain points:
Rather than trying to change established workflows entirely, Routable looks for specific pain points as entry points - like payment failures that take 30-45 minutes to correct manually. B2B founders should identify acute pain points that provide natural openings for their solution, rather than trying to force wholesale process changes.
Build trust through demonstration:
In the mid-market and enterprise space, Routable found success by showing rather than telling. They implement a "try before you buy" approach with customers' own data, demonstrating their capabilities concretely rather than just making sales promises. B2B founders should prioritize proving their value through actual demonstrations over sales rhetoric.
Leverage customer feedback channels:
Routable built in-product feature request capabilities and maintains a dedicated product feedback channel where customer conversations are shared and discussed. B2B founders should create systematic ways to capture, share, and act on customer feedback across the organization.
Strategic pricing for growth:
One of Routable's most important GTM decisions was strategically increasing prices to reflect their value and improve unit economics, even though it meant moving away from smaller customers. B2B founders should price their products to enable sustainable growth and continued investment in product development.
Conversation
Highlights
Most founders pivot into B2B SaaS after identifying a clear market opportunity. But for Omri Mor, CEO and co-founder of Routable, the journey started with boredom and curiosity.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Omri shared how an internal tool built out of necessity evolved into a $100M-funded company transforming accounts payable automation for mid-market companies.
The Consumer Guy Goes Enterprise
“Transparently, my background is a consumer guy,” Omri says. “I never thought that I would be getting into B2B SaaS, let alone B2B Mid Market Enterprise SaaS, let alone Finance.”
After their previous companies were acquired around 2015-2016, Omri and his co-founder found themselves questioning why they had to build payment automation tools in-house. The answer revealed a crucial gap in the market: while there were plenty of solutions for finance teams and engineers separately, nothing effectively bridged the gap between them.
“You had a lot of solutions for proving payments, but they would fail at a thousand payments a month,” Omri explains. “And then you had a lot of payment processing solutions for deploy a hundred thousand to a million payments. But they wouldn’t talk to an ERP, they wouldn’t have the compliance that a CFO needs.”
The Path to Product-Market Fit
Rather than rushing to market, Routable took a methodical approach. They interviewed 300-400 finance executives before writing a single line of code. Just before entering Y Combinator in 2017, they incorporated the company and began building rapidly.
But the real validation came from getting that first customer live. “Getting that first customer live is that moment,” Omri recalls. “Because we have interviewed about 300 to 400 finance executives prior to and we knew what we wanted to build.”
The Empathy Advantage
Despite his consumer background, or perhaps because of it, Omri found finance leaders surprisingly receptive. The key? Genuine empathy for their situation.
“Finance leaders, they all have MBAs, and they are all brilliant,” Omri notes. “And when you look at their direct reports, they’re also MBAs that are brilliant, but they’re doing like extremely manual, tedious work. They’re essentially not doing their job because their job requires them to focus and plan and forecast.”
This understanding led to deeper conversations. Instead of pitching solutions, Routable spent 45-60 minutes just listening to what wasn’t working in their finance departments. This approach revealed that accounts payable wasn’t just about moving money—it was a complex supply chain of data, approvals, and reconciliation.
The Strategic Pivot
By Q1 2022, Routable was “humming,” onboarding hundreds of customers quarterly. But their most crucial GTM decision was yet to come: abandoning the SMB market.
“Stopping to sell to SMB mom and pop and making a hard pivot around that and investing increasing our pricing in such a way that our product commands it,” Omri identifies as their most important go-to-market decision. “There’s a difference between just charging more and making the platform feel like it’s worth a lot and you’re getting it at a discount.”
Building Trust in Finance
In an industry where you’re handling people’s bank accounts and ERPs, trust is paramount. Routable’s early marketing strategy reflected this reality: “Very early on marketing strategy was get customers through existing customers,” Omri shares. “When thinking about it, you’re touching people’s bank accounts and ERPs, it’s a lot of trust.”
Their approach evolved from guerrilla marketing through referrals to a more sophisticated strategy. “We spend a lot of time going to conferences because our market goes to conferences, they don’t shop online as much,” Omri explains. By 2024, they’ve expanded to content, account-based marketing, and hosting events.
The Market Opportunity
Perhaps most surprisingly, AP automation remains largely untapped. “We just got a report on this that there’s about 7 million potential customers that you can sell into and only 221,000 of them actually use an AP automation platform,” Omri reveals. “We’re talking about 3.4% of the market uses something.”
This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. As Omri puts it, “The industry feels to me like very much like where Shopify and Squarespace and BigCommerce was, but in 2014.”
Looking Ahead
With their latest procurement PO matching product reducing processing time from 8-15 minutes to 7-10 seconds, Routable continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in AP automation. But perhaps more importantly, they’ve proven that in B2B SaaS, sometimes the best qualification isn’t industry expertise—it’s the willingness to listen, learn, and solve real problems.
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