The Esper Strategy: Making Cross-Industry Success Look Easy in B2B Tech

The Esper Strategy: Making Cross-Industry Success Look Easy in B2B Tech

When a restaurant chain and a healthcare company face the same fundamental challenge, you’ve found a golden opportunity for B2B expansion. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Esper CEO Yadhu Gopalan revealed how identifying this common thread enabled their growth across seemingly disparate industries.

Finding the Universal Problem

“Whether you’re sending software to a point of sale, to a washing machine, to a car, or to a healthcare monitoring, you’re trying to do the same thing,” Yadhu explains. This insight forms the cornerstone of Esper’s cross-industry success. Rather than creating vertical-specific solutions, they focused on the fundamental challenge all device-dependent businesses face.

The inspiration came partly from Tesla’s transformation of automotive software updates. As Yadhu notes, Tesla “made software deployments to a car, a thing they did, like 152 deployments in 2021.” This showed how modernizing device software deployment could transform any industry.

Building for Scale Across Industries

Success in multiple verticals requires a specific approach to product development. “We balance features that we want to do that move the needle on kind of the category creation along with what the customer wants and customer needs,” Yadhu shares. This balance ensures the platform remains versatile enough for different use cases while delivering specific value to each industry.

Their strategy has paid off particularly well in the restaurant sector. “We have five of the top ten restaurant chains using Esper,” Yadhu reveals. Each restaurant location might have “15 plus devices… from the kitchen display to point of sale to their busing on their kiosks.” This deep penetration in one vertical demonstrates how solving a universal problem can lead to industry-wide adoption.

The Champion Strategy

One key to cross-industry success has been identifying the right champion within each organization. “Many of our purchases are the chief product officer or the CTO or the engineering lead versus the IT person,” Yadhu explains. These technical leaders understand the infrastructure needed for scaling device fleets, regardless of industry.

This focus on product and engineering leadership rather than IT management reflects a crucial insight: while the specific devices might differ across industries, the challenges of software deployment and management remain consistent.

Supporting Cross-Industry Growth

Esper’s approach to customer support plays a crucial role in their cross-industry success. “Their success means our success,” Yadhu emphasizes. “We will always double down because we have that philosophy that I want every one of my customers to be very successful and do have their business be successful because as long as they can scale, we can scale.”

This commitment to customer success helps them understand the nuances of each industry while maintaining focus on the universal challenges they solve. Every successful implementation becomes a case study for expansion into similar verticals.

Evolution and Adaptation

Cross-industry success requires constant evolution. “What lands now will not be what lands in about six months to a year,” Yadhu notes. This applies not just to their product but to how they position and explain their solution to different industries.

Their vision extends beyond current success. “My goal is to be at billions in future years,” Yadhu shares, highlighting the vast opportunity across industries. Every device-dependent business, regardless of sector, needs modern software deployment capabilities.

For B2B founders looking to expand across industries, Esper’s approach offers valuable lessons: identify the universal problem beneath industry-specific manifestations, focus on technical decision-makers who understand the fundamental challenges, and build a product flexible enough to serve different use cases while solving the core problem effectively.