When you ask Privyr Co-founder and CEO Aaron Lim how he defines a sustainable business, he quotes serial entrepreneur-turned-VC David Skok, “it’s repeatable, predictable, scalable, and profitable.” But Aaron also knows that finding the right business model to deliver all those elements is rarely straightforward. At times, your business needs to evolve, and this was certainly the case for Privyr, a Singapore-based company on its journey to find its next stage of growth.

Founded in 2018, Privyr offers a suite of tools designed for sales and marketing professionals, helping them engage and convert leads directly from their phones. Aaron has always emphasized one thing: Privyr is built for the salesperson, not the sales manager. From day one, the team focused on a bottom-up, B2C strategy, targeting individual salespeople. They built a self-serve product that attracted paying subscribers through a product-led marketing approach. That’s how they found their product-market fit.

“Even though we’re built for salespeople, we initially hesitated to do sales,” Aaron explains. “We shied away from the enterprise space because we didn’t want to engage with people who wouldn’t actually use our product–something that often happens when selling to enterprises.” In fact, Privyr even distanced themselves from the typical enterprise jargon like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as their customers often didn’t understand it or had negative experiences with complex CRM systems used by enterprises.

This approach helped ensure they were solving real problems for their users with a genuinely useful product, rather than just being skilled at sales. And it worked. They grew their base to hundreds of thousands of users in over 125 countries, with a few thousand of those as paying customers. But Privyr soon faced a challenge: how to scale and grow their revenue faster through bigger deals. This essentially meant a change in mindset and confronting the enterprise market they initially avoided. By the end of 2023, they hired their first salesperson, looking at how to sell upmarket, to larger customers.

Defining Privyr’s enterprise value proposition

While they focused on targeting small businesses, they had a few conversations with enterprises like real estate management firm Frasers Property in Singapore but could only acquire smaller teams through the bottoms-up motion. During that time, they connected with advisory and fractional services company Salamander Advisory Services through Wavemaker Partners. 

Aaron and his team were struck by how attentively the Salamander team listened to their challenges. Even as Aaron was still weighing whether to pursue large enterprise clients, it became clear that Salamander had the expertise to help them explore that space. 

Privyr’s key deliverable for Salamander in their three-month engagement was straightforward: enterprise introductions that could lead to actual deals. And no PowerPoint decks or sales frameworks please. But before they could dive into potential client conversations, Salamander posed a crucial question: What’s Privyr’s pitch to enterprise clients?

That’s when it hit–Privyr wasn’t prepared to dive into enterprise sales just yet. They didn’t have the right positioning or narrative for this market, and their sales strategy was undefined. 

You could say that the engagement with Salamander also required a mindset shift. They pivoted to distilling Privyr’s enterprise value proposition. After a series of detailed brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions, they finally landed on a clear picture of Privyr’s positioning within a larger company’s context. Instead of branding themselves as just one product (a mobile-first sales tool), they reframed Privyr as offering three distinct products–CRM, CMS (Content Management System), and Sales Workflow Automation. 

However, this was not enough to completely enter the enterprise space. Privyr still needed to address product-oriented issues, like security concerns from using platforms like WhatsApp and integrations with widely used software like Salesforce and Hubspot. 

Privyr had to redefine their objectives. Instead of rushing to sell to enterprises, they doubled down on selling to teams and small businesses, moving slowly upstream.

Challenging assumptions, keeping an open mind

While Privyr didn’t end up focusing on the enterprise space or pursue any introductions from Salamander, gaining clarity on their enterprise narrative marked the foundations of their potential future expansion into this area. More importantly, it helped them move upstream to larger customers with greater clarity and confidence, closing their biggest-ever deals in the following months. And we’re talking five times bigger than their previous biggest deal. 

Privyr likely would have arrived at the same outcome but working with Salamander allowed them to get there faster and in a more focused way. 

When asked how, Aaron gave an example: “The Salamander folks have lived in the enterprise world. So they were playing the role of our potential customers and challenging us with questions like: “Do you really not want to mention the term CRM? Why are you trying to avoid this so much? Any enterprise buyer is very aware of CRMs and will quickly categorise you as one regardless of what words you use. So it’s better to have a narrative to differentiate yourself upfront.”

“I can’t say every founder acts the same way, but Aaron was very willing to be open-minded,” said Bill Padfield from Salamander. “Some founders would want to narrow the story down to, ‘you people don’t understand us.’ But Aaron was different. He was eager to be challenged, he was open, he wanted to understand what doors were open and what were closed.”

Boyd Varty, in his book The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, shares a valuable insight about lion tracking that resonates with entrepreneurship: it all begins with “first tracks”—those initial clues that guide you through the unknown. One quote in the book captures this beautifully, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know how to get there.” For the lion tracker, the goal isn’t always to find the lion; it’s about following the tracks with presence and awareness, embracing the journey itself. 

Privyr is still early in exploring bigger teams and the larger enterprise space. And the results will take time to unfold. But that might just be the whole point. Building a sustainable business isn’t about fixating over a specific destination, but rather staying attuned to the journey, trusting your instincts, and adapting along the way.

Just like in lion tracking, you can’t always predict where the path will lead. The key is to follow the first track, then the next, and then the next–each step bringing you closer to where you need to be.

Edited by Jum Balea
Lead image by Jakub Żerdzicki/Unsplash