Solution

Scott Snyder spent years in the manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry, developing electronic novelties and promotional products—items costing under a dollar to produce but facing massive distribution challenges. Running this business through the recession taught him a hard lesson: companies needed a completely new set of tools to survive and compete. The frustration of piecing together disconnected systems to manage sales, marketing, customer service, and commerce inspired him to build Solution.

Rather than rush to market, Scott invested heavily in validation. He conducted extensive qualitative research, talking directly to potential customers about their pain points and needs for a unified platform. The research overwhelmingly confirmed demand—large enterprises were trying to solve this by acquiring different companies, but there was no purpose-built platform from the ground up. Scott committed over $1 million of his own capital and assembled a 10-person team, mostly engineers and developers spread across the United States, Singapore, Germany, and Morocco. Development took 3 years, with Scott building a system that truly unifies transactional data (not just arbitrary data entry) to enable intelligent customer scoring using recency, frequency, and monetary metrics—something existing platforms like HubSpot and Marketo couldn't deliver for the manufacturing vertical.

Scott's go-to-market strategy relied on outbound call strategies, networking events, and trade shows. He targeted manufacturers and wholesale distributors under $100M in revenue, focusing initially on companies in the United States and Singapore at the startup phase. By the time of this interview, he had assembled an advisory group of 15 early adopters—10 companies in Singapore and 5 in Southern California—using the platform for free. He tracked daily active users and contact database entries to measure engagement and signal readiness to convert to paying customers.

The free early-adopter program proved effective for relationship-building and understanding customer workflows. Scott intentionally avoided a hard sell, instead helping companies implement the system and demonstrating clear value. However, adoption was gradual—while early adopters showed strong usage metrics, none had yet converted to paid when this interview took place. The strategy was to transition from free to paid during Q1, using annual contracts (though monthly options were available) at price points ranging from $35 to $113/month. Scott noted that the complexity of the platform required hand-holding and couldn't rely on self-serve or open-floodgates onboarding.

At the time of the interview, Solution was pre-revenue but burning $17-20k per month. Scott was preparing to convert the early-adopter cohort into paying customers, with the first training session just completed before the interview. His confidence in the product came partly from personal conviction—he and his team planned to use it themselves and believed others would feel the same. Despite the high capital investment before revenue, Scott remained focused on solving a real problem for manufacturing SMBs that larger competitors were ignoring.