An Aptage Case Study
This is a case study of work Aptage has done applying our core techniques to market analysis and strategic investment focus. This capability is available as a consulting product from Aptage.
StarCorp
– 3 yr old private company, well-funded by top VCs, disrupting/enabling/accelerating one of the most significant trends in the electronics industry (site confidentiality if you are asked for any further details, and do not respond to guesses).
– Biggest challenge for company is addressing a very large and growing market (> $10B TAM) – how to select key market verticals and drive adoption by large industry leading early-majority companies.
– Company was “trying to boil the ocean” with customers across a broad spectrum of market verticals and with a large array of customized solutions
– Commensurately, they were behind plan and over budget.
– CEO retained Aptage to solve the complex challenge of resolving market unknowns/responses, new technology introduction/scale and limited capital/resources into a coherent business strategy to reclaim performance-to-plan and achieve early-majority customer adoption and growth inflection. StarCorp investors and BoD were very supportive of quantitative approach to enterprise management and galvanized around CEO, executive team and project.
– In a nutshell, Aptage provided a quantitative, intelligent, learning and user-friendly turn-key tool to “cross the chasm” – classic Geoffrey Moore – a process most/all emerging companies have to go through, a process that is most responsible for the demise of promising start-up and early-growth companies.
– It is noteworthy that the Aptage tool transcends start-up/early-growth companies and can be equally applied to any ecosystem where uncertainty has to be managed to yield planned outcome with minimum expenditure of time and resources – efficiency.
StarCorp results:
o Company “backed-off” large pool of market verticals and focused/selected on vertical/customer to “cross the chasm” rapidly to precipitate early-majority adoption;
o Company dominated selected customer and then chosen vertical;
o Company leveraged this “win to rapidly migrate laterally into other select verticals;
o Within three quarters of retaining Aptage, company is 300% ahead of plan YTD and has achieved the inflection point of its growth phase;
o Company is on-track to “catch-up” with growth and value creation plan;
o Investors and BoD are believers, and have started process of retaining Aptage to support executive teams in their portfolio companies.
CEO testimonial: “This summary of events is accurate, Aptage has been a game changer for my company, I would recommend this tool to any investment, executive, sales, product, and market management team/ individual. In my estimation, Aptage is the future must-have management tool for optimal execution of a business plan or project in the face of complexity and uncertainty.”