BUILDERS

Pennylane spent its first two years operating an accounting firm to experience the workflows it intended to fix. It then sold the profitable business, removed the channel conflict, and went all-in on software. After three years of deliberate customer development, growth accelerated to more than one million SMEs on the platform. In this episode of BUILDERS, Tobias Janiesch, Managing Director - Germany at Pennylane, breaks down the accountant-led distribution model, the trust-building behind its growth, and why entering Germany required both a product rebuild and a startup-style local team.Topics Discussed:Why Pennylane operated—and then sold—its own accounting firmHow accountants became the channel behind roughly 95% of leadsThe customer sequence behind Pennylane's growth inflection pointUsing founder-led roadshows and peer referrals in a trust-driven marketWhy Germany offered a four-year window but required a 40% product rebuildGiving a local team startup autonomy inside a scaled companyBuilding embedded AI on a unified financial data layerGTM Lessons for B2B Founders:Make the channel successful before asking it to distribute: Pennylane saves accountants 30–40% of their time and gives them a workspace their clients use. The accountants then invite the SMEs; approximately 95% of leads originate through them. The channel works because the product improves the partner's own economics.Earn the right to move upmarket: Pennylane first made 20 digital-first firms successful, expanded to the next 50, and used each cohort to uncover edge cases. Only then did it pursue larger firms. The first flagship customer helped turn three years of steady growth into rapid acceleration.Enter conservative markets through the progressive edge: Pennylane started with accountants already running digital firms. Their recommendations in WhatsApp, Facebook, and professional communities transferred trust to more cautious peers. Identify the insiders whose credibility can bridge the adoption gap.Localize the product and the operating model: Germany could reuse roughly 60% of the French product; 40% required rebuilding around local rules. Pennylane added German accounting expertise early and let the local entity operate like a startup, using lightweight tools before institutionalizing systems such as Salesforce.Turn trust into operating metrics: The founders avoided promising features they could not ship and reviewed commitments against delivery each year. In Germany, the team measures real activation through monthly VAT submissions and expects no early churn. Track recurring workflow adoption—not logins or account creation.//Sponsors:Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I HireSenior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.Subscribe here:https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Handl Health is building an AI platform that aggregates and analyzes publicly available healthcare pricing data, helping brokers and benefits consultants design, evaluate, and personalize health plans for self-insured employers. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ria Shah, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Handl Health, to learn how the company turned newly mandated price transparency data into a plan design platform that brokers and benefits consultants rely on.Topics Discussed:How price transparency legislation created a now-or-never moment to build on terabytes of newly published contracted ratesWhy neither co-founder was technical, and how Ria learned Python and PySpark to ingest 300 billion row machine readable filesHow an NIH grant and a free consumer cost estimator revealed the wrong initial customerWhy Handl Health moved past direct-to-employer sales to the broker and benefits consultant channelWhere brokers see value first: prospecting new business with carrier comparisons and personalizing renewals with claim-level cost projectionsThe three-year education arc from explaining what an MRF is to a market where everyone needs a price transparency partnerHow Handl Health escaped the checkbox compliance perception by layering actuarial modeling and steerage on top of public dataWhy white glove service remains core even as the company productizes a services-heavy workflowGTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:Follow the burden until you find the buyer who owns it: Handl Health started consumer-facing with a free cost estimator, then realized that reaching the masses meant going through self-insured employers, who hold majority market share in how most Americans access healthcare. But employers are overburdened and understaffed, so the company went to the brokers and benefits consultants those employers already trust.Sell to the channel that is already on the hook: Brokers must give sound recommendations to employer clients about which network to rent and which point solutions to buy, while working with disparate data and no ROI visibility on vendors. When they started using the platform, Ria said their reaction was "wait, we can do this in minutes." Adoption is fastest where accountability and pain already sit together.Market education runs in stages, then flips: Ria described years one to three as skepticism that the regulations would even hold and that the data was useful. The company went from explaining what an MRF was, to convincing the market that MRFs contain useful data, to a market where everyone needs a price transparency partner and the only question is which one. Early adopter champions carried the company through the skeptical years.Regulation creates data, not a category: Early on, products like Handl Health's were perceived as checkbox compliance costs. The escape was the layer above the public data: actuarial modeling, cost projections, and steerage assumptions that help employers bring down costs and help members shop for higher value, lower cost care.Align the commercial model with channel growth: Ria said the commercial model came down to aligning incentives. As long as the platform helps brokers grow their book of business and differentiate in the market, they keep coming back and find new ways to partner.Productize the workflow, keep the concierge: Handl Health is productizing a highly services business. AI tooling automates much of the analytics, but when brokers run reports or stratify networks, the team wraps their arms around those partners to interpret results together. Ria does not expect that to go away, because the white glove layer is what makes the channel stick.// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio.We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Brandlight is building an AI visibility platform that helps enterprise brands, most of them Fortune 500 companies, monitor and influence how they show up in AI engines across AI search, AI ads, and agentic commerce.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Imri Marcus, CEO & Co-Founder of Brandlight, to learn how the company won Fortune 500 customers from day zero and turned AI visibility into a CMO priority instead of an SEO project.Topics Discussed:Why calling AI visibility "SEO 2.0" is the industry's most prevalent misconceptionWho owns AI visibility inside enterprise marketing departments, and why Brandlight always starts from the CMOHow Brandlight answers skeptics who claim AI engine results cannot be influencedThe advisory board of Fortune 50 CMOs and agency CEOs that opened enterprise doors from day zeroWhy enterprise AI visibility programs require orchestrating close to a hundred stakeholdersHow the education burden in first CMO conversations disappeared between late 2024 and todayWhat happens to SEO, brand, legacy search, and Google as search shifts into AI enginesReddit's real role in an AI visibility strategyGTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:Refuse the frame that shrinks your category: Imri said the most prevalent misconception is that AI visibility is SEO 2.0. Brandlight positioned it as a completely new marketing channel where traffic just happened to be the first KPI that got hit. The framing decides who owns the problem and how big the budget conversation can be.Start the sale where the orchestration lives: The SEO team is involved in every account Brandlight works with, but Imri called a single-department home the wrong place for a big enterprise. Brandlight always tried to start from the CMO and preach a holistic orchestrated approach, because PR, content, partnerships, and even legal teams need to get involved.Build the door-opening system before the market exists: Brandlight went after the Fortune 500 from day zero and built an advisory board of over a dozen advisors, people who are or were Fortune 50 CMOs and CEOs of some of the biggest agencies. The advisors made the initial connections, and the first iterations of the platform were seen by Fortune 50 CMOs.Treat early education as pipeline, not lost deals: At the end of 2024, the first 15 minutes of every CMO conversation was education. Not all of those CMOs purchased in 2024 or 2025, but it made sense to all of them, and Imri said the vast majority became customers later on.Answer skepticism with proof at the largest possible scale: Against the claim that AI answers cannot be influenced, Brandlight presented on the ANA's big stage with its customer Kimberly-Clark: over 12 months, the program took 12 out of 12 brands to lead their categories.Anchor urgency in behavior data, not predictions: Imri said that when Brandlight started, less than 1% of search happened in AI engines, and now it is over 50%. Brandlight analyzes billions of data points daily and can show traditionally successful marketing organizations losing share of voice while smaller companies overtake them.Position the new channel as additive, not substitutive: Imri argued SEO foundations still matter and brand still matters. AI visibility is an addition, not a substitution, which lowers the perceived risk of adopting it.// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio.We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Odynn is an AI-powered, fully modular platform that helps fintechs, banks, card issuers, and travel companies launch embedded travel, loyalty, and rewards programs. The company's flagship product, Awayz, gives financial institutions a white-label travel portal where cardholders can search, plan, and book hotels and flights with side-by-side points, miles, and cash pricing.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with John Taylor Garner, Founder & CEO of Odynn, to learn how the company is taking on a market where Booking, Expedia, and Hopper collectively hold 95% market share by offering financial institutions a personalized, modular alternative to their monolithic competitors.Topics Discussed:How John's background as a points and miles enthusiast led him to identify the gap in embedded travelWhy John shut down his first startup, Card Curator, and how that experience led to founding OdynnHow Built Rewards became Odynn's first customer and what they saw that other banks had not yet recognizedHow the market shifted from requiring heavy customer education to prospects who arrive already understanding the problemWhy US customers immediately understand the cardholder retention problem while European markets require more educationWhere the term "embedded travel" came from and how Odynn uses it to define the categoryThe critical marketing decisions John made to reach six different types of buyersHow Odynn structures its approach across personal banking, business banking, BaaS, credit card affiliates, card issuers, and corporate travel managementWhat selling to tier-one banks actually looks like in terms of sales cycle lengthWhat John learned transitioning from direct-to-consumer to enterprise financial institution salesTactics that have helped shorten long enterprise sales cyclesAdvice for founders selling technology to banksGTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:Solve a problem before customers know they have it: Odynn launched in January 2022 with the hypothesis that airlines and hotels moving toward dynamic pricing would cause points to become less valuable, which would hurt cardholder retention. As John put it, "fixing a problem that nobody really knew that they had was a hard thing to do." The company had to wait for market timing to catch up with its thesis before the sales motion became straightforward.Let customers tell you what product to build: Odynn originally focused on the loyalty layer of the problem. Customers like Built Rewards pushed them toward building a full travel portal. "It wasn't just the loyalty space that was broken," John said. "It is the entire experience of redeeming points or just booking travel with cash, either way, on the embedded side was really bad." The product pivot came from listening to customers, not from an internal strategic decision.Land a lighthouse customer who already sees what is coming: Built Rewards was Odynn's first customer and remains one today. John credited Built with being "one of the few customers that were savvy enough to know that this was going to be a big problem and ultimately in their favor, because they got ahead of it." Built had team members from airline and bank loyalty backgrounds who could read the trajectory of dynamic pricing before most banks could.

Cents builds software, payments, and hardware for the laundry industry, serving laundromat operators and other commercial laundry businesses. The company is the only venture-backed company operating at scale in a market that most technology companies had overlooked, and has reached approximately one in six U.S. laundromats.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Alexander Jekowsky, CEO & Co-Founder of Cents, to learn how the company grew to serve roughly one in six U.S. laundromats by building technology for operators that most software companies had written off.Topics Discussed:How Alex discovered the laundromat industry while looking to buy a small business after selling his previous company, a payment system for college campusesWhy laundromats generate durable cash flows -- 30% margins, 20-plus year equipment lifespans, and leases that can outlive their operatorsHow Cents became the only venture-backed company in the laundry software space and what Alex means by "first executor advantage"Why 70% of Cents's early sales were inbound -- and what that revealed about how badly the market was underservedHow trade shows became Cents's "Super Bowl" and why they staffed booths 25 to 50% heavier than plannedThe tension between brand building and product credibility in SMB tech, and the question operators ask when they see a high-profile marketing spendWhy the laundromat business is "a highly services-based business" despite appearing commoditized on the surfaceHow AI and robotics fit into laundry -- and why improving efficiency without improving service quality is "net worse"Why Cents describes its role as digitizing, not transforming, the laundromat industryGTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:Build in markets where buyers are already searching. Alex said 70% of Cents's early sales were inbound. The market was ready -- operators were actively looking for product. Know who you're actually selling to. Laundromat operators are not the unsophisticated buyers that investors and technology companies assume. Alex said they are often "more cash generative than any of the portfolio companies of a seed or series A investor." The insult embedded in that assumption had left a massive gap -- and Cents walked into it with 70% inbound demand.First executor advantage is more durable than first mover advantage. Cents was not first to try selling software to laundromats. But Alex described the company's edge as "first executor advantage" -- being the only company willing to raise the capital and build the balance sheet to actually execute at a level operators were searching for.Use events as trust infrastructure, not just brand exposure. Trade shows were Cents's "Super Bowl." The company staffed booths 25 to 50% heavier than planned because Alex believed the people behind the brand were what converted attention into trust. Earn the right to innovate before leading with transformation. Alex described Cents's job as "to not transform or change" the laundromat business -- it's to "digitize, create optionality, and earn the opportunity to drive innovation over time." Understand why the business looks commoditized but isn't. Two laundromats can use the same equipment, detergent, and labor pool and still deliver entirely different customer experiences. The laundromat business is actually "a highly services-based business." Adoption required understanding that operators cared deeply about how customers felt in the store, not just about technology features.// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service