From broad GTM AI to RFP excellence: How listening to customers is fueling our next phase of growth.
When we launched oper8r five months ago, our vision was ambitious: build an AI agent for entire GTM teams. We wanted to tackle sales enablement for AEs and SEs, generate customer follow-ups, create collateral, and deliver on-demand intelligence. And we saw real traction. Self-serve customers loved the sales enablement use cases, like quick battlecards and positioning insights that helped them close deals faster.
But as a small, bootstrapped team, breadth became our enemy. Our messaging was too vague, diluting outbound efforts. Development was spread thin across experimental modules. Meanwhile, enterprise contracts weren't coming from enablement; they were signed for one thing: automating RFPs and security questionnaires.
The Customer Signal That Changed Everything
Self-serve worked for tactical sales enablement, with individuals signing up and paying, but big wins came from RFP and questionnaire automation. In head-to-head POCs, we've beaten established players like Loopio, Responsive, and others. This is partly through shipping product very quickly and rapidly iterating based on customer feedback, but mostly due to our hands on obsession with customer outcomes and success.
We've only been around five months, yet enterprises are choosing us over incumbents. As a bootstrapped business, this is the survival signal that can't be ignored. We're riding this wave and listening to our customers.
Lessons from Startup Legends: The Power of Focus
Narrowing focus isn't new. It's a playbook move for enduring startups. Paul Graham puts it nicely:
"The most successful startups make something very specific for a small group of users, then expand."
Our bet is that being known for something simple and communicable-like "the AI that crushes RFPs"-beats being a vague "GTM agent." I still firmly believe in the power of AI to turbo charge sales enablement and GTM generally, and we may come back to try to blaze that trail in the future, but right now we're lasered focused on our new north star.
Our New North Star
We paused new experimental modules to laser-focus our development and messaging on:
Chat: Core conversations stay, with heavy investment for smarter interactions. Our daily driver, catch all solution.
Document creation and editing: Perfect first drafts for guides, collateral and document based RFPs.
Spreadsheet completion: Batch AI for RFPs/security questionnaires, that just works.
This trio is what will power our immediate roadmap and beyond.
Ready to End the RFP Scramble?
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