The problem
A B2B procurement marketplace launched into a market that already had four entrenched competitors. Every one of those platforms had been built around the bureaucracy of formal tendering rather than around what a buyer or vendor actually needed.
The friction showed up everywhere. Registering a company took roughly two weeks. The platforms charged vendors flat fees whether or not they ever won a deal. The entire product was organized around publishing a tender — generating the document and the auction — and then walking away from the part that mattered to the customer: getting the purchase completed on good terms.
The shift: aim one job higher
Working through Advanced Jobs-To-Be-Done, the team noticed that all four incumbents were solving the same low-level job — "publish a tender." That's a step, not an outcome. The job the buyer actually hires the platform for sits one level up: complete a procurement — find the right supplier, run a fair competition, and close the deal at a better price.
Once the team framed the product around that higher-level job instead of the paperwork beneath it, almost every prior product and pricing decision started to look wrong.
What changed
The insight rippled through three areas at once:
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Product. The team ripped out steps that existed only to satisfy process, not the buyer. Registration dropped from two weeks to about three minutes; setting up a tender went from ten minutes to two. Features nobody used were cut.
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Business model. Instead of charging vendors a flat annual license up front, the platform switched to taking a commission only when a vendor actually won a deal. That single change aligned the platform's revenue with the customer's success — it now made money only when procurements succeeded.
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Sales. Reps were retrained to uncover the customer's real situation before pitching, rather than reciting a feature comparison against the incumbents.
The results
Reorienting the whole company around the buyer's true job turned a late entrant into the market's standout:
- Turnover grew from zero to roughly $200 million in annual terms over five years.
- Vendor NPS reached 56% — a level that signals strong loyalty and active word-of-mouth.
- The platform came to be regarded as the most usable product in its category, despite arriving last.
The takeaway the team kept returning to: your competitors may all be solving the same small job. Solve the bigger one the customer actually came for, and the rest of the strategy writes itself.