From a marketplace to SaaS and payments.
Notch was a restaurant-supply marketplace that collapsed when COVID hit. A new CEO hired me to find a new model, not to scale one that already worked, and the North America pivot was the mandate.
Publicly-named Notch customers.
The marketplace model was dead. The company had to find a new one or fold, and the obvious order-management angle did not scale. The real, unsolved problem was a paper-based supply chain no one had digitized.
The seam was where the pain actually lived, inventory and accounts receivable across restaurants, suppliers, and distributors, and the company pivoted to SaaS around it.
We rebuilt the product from the ground up off direct customer and distributor feedback, order and invoice management, AR and AP automation, the payment rails a paper-based supply chain never had, then built three motions on top: product-led, enterprise, and lifecycle.
It took the hard structural calls people avoid, closing one office, opening another, then a disciplined retreat from the US to protect the brand, and keeping the team rowing together through the change.
How the build unfolded.
What I owned, and what it produced.
The whole commercial number, and the receipts it threw off. Pick a lens.
Rebuilt a dying marketplace into a real SaaS business, and the multiple followed.
See how it played out elsewhere.
Same method, on your workflow.
The playbooks and skills in Operator School are these builds, genericized so you can run the loop yourself. Get the next one in your inbox.