An wen verkaufen wir eigentlich?

A few months ago, I wrote about Donnacha Daly pausing his university career to work on Gopf full-time. He's back now, and what he left behind is a question that changed how we think about where to go next.

To whom do we actually sell?

Without him pushing us on it, we would have stayed in a niche that would never have given us enough traction.

He made us zoom out and ask who is actually willing to pay, and whose problem we solve.

So we reshaped our whole positioning. On the new website, you can now see three focus groups we would never have named on our own:

• C-level executives

• Strategic consultants

• Private equity

We're still evaluating it all, but none of it existed six months ago.

He sees these things before we do because he meets industry decision-makers almost every day through conferences, speaking engagements, and his university lectures.

So he is always hearing the burning questions people ask, especially about AI and where the job market is heading.

The rest of us were often heads down in the operational rabbit hole, planning how to build this and that.

And then Donnacha would say: "But guys, we have the data. What if we simply sell data and the analytics layer to them?"

We'd ask: "Well, but how does that actually look?" And that discussion pulled us back into the bigger picture every time.

What we have now is a lot of Pandora's boxes opened, with many directions we could take and no shortcut to the answer.

The work ahead is the unglamorous part: talking to these different people, understanding their roles and their problems, and gathering the evidence to see where it makes sense to go.

He won't be in the office much anymore, but the connector role stays.