How losing focus can be a silent killer
We thought global expansion was growth and opportunity. Instead it was chaos.
Dear readers,
I am still on holiday and I’ve been reflecting on what was crucial for our company to survive. Sure, there are the obvious risks like failing to raise money or hiring the wrong people.
But the real danger was more subtle: losing focus over time without even noticing.
I am sharing the full story below.
Happy reading!
Best, Xaver
P.S. Last week I took a marble sculpting class in Florence. The result was nowhere near Michelangelo but I loved the process. Sometimes trying something completely different is the best way to reset your mind.
Missed my last story? Catchup here.
We had just hit $1M ARR.
A huge milestone for any B2B software company.
$83K in monthly revenue. Enough to cover rent, tools, and a few salaries. But nowhere near profitability. Which was fine. Profit wasn’t the goal. Growth was.
And even though we were growing around 10% month over month, we wanted more.
So we applied to accelerators around the world: Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, Madrid, London, San Francisco, Milan…
We got into nearly all of them.
On paper, it looked like success.
In reality, it was chaos.
My co-founder and I were still the only salespeople.
Suddenly, we weren’t just covering the DACH region. We had to show up everywhere.
I spent weeks in Tokyo pitching NEC, Sony, and other giants. Rooms full of executives who barely spoke English. Translators at my side. Jet lag in my head. And the constant feeling that I needed to be in three places at once.
Cultural difference were enormous.
I’ll never forget one meeting at Sony. A room full of executives nodding politely during the presentation, looking excited. I walked out convinced we had nailed it.
Days passed. Weeks passed. Nothing. Not a single reply to my follow-ups.
Either they found it interesting and copied it. Or they thought it was such a bad idea that it didn’t deserve a response. Given Asia’s lead in messaging tech at the time, probably the latter.
Either way, it was a waste of time.
We set up an office in Abu Dhabi for 3 months thinking, money won’t be an issue here. We pitched in front of hundreds of business leaders from the Middle East, held meetings with the biggest banks and insurances in the region, spent hours and weeks only evaluating their technical requirements without signing any contracts.
We also flew to San Francisco to pitch Y Combinator, knowing full well they’d want equity terms our investors would never accept.
It was all very exciting and personally something I will never forget but also draining and totally unsustainable for us and the company.
After months of spreading ourselves thin across the globe, we finally made the call: STOP.
We refocused on DACH again. Not the US. Not Asia. Not the Middle East.
Looking back, it was the best decision we ever made.
The global roadshow wasn’t just a distraction, it was burning cash and energy without moving the needle.
And accelerators weren’t the only distraction.
We also kept chasing the wrong product ideas.
Our core mission was clear: automate messaging requests. But the reality in Germany was that hardly anyone had real traffic from messaging apps yet. Most corporates were still stuck on hotlines and email. Some even fax.
So we decided to build an email automation feature.
On paper, it sounded smart. In practice, it was too far ahead of its time. The tech just wasn’t ready. Emails were long, complex, full of nuance. Today’s AI can handle that. Back then, it couldn’t even answer basic FAQs reliably.
We poured weeks of engineering into it. Burned resources. Built something nobody could actually use.
A complete waste of time.
And distractions like this can kill startups. It almost killed ours. Luckily, we pulled the plug early and refocused on our true mission.
Around that time, we raised another $2.5M. The first round with a structured VC on board.
We were lucky. They weren’t just investors. They were ex-founders who had scaled and sold their own company for $300M a couple of years ago. They knew the game.
And they quickly talked us out of chasing global expansion.
“Focus on continental Europe,” they said. “UK, France, DACH. Nail that first.”
In hindsight, it was the smartest advice we ever got and probably saved the company made it ready to get acquired one day.
I’m opening 2 coaching slots in September. If you’re a founder who wants to:
✅ Raise faster
✅ Grow without losing focus
✅ Hire the right people
Then this is your chance.
I only work with a handful of founders each month. You can send an email here.