In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show our host Alex Theuma is joined live from the SaaStock Studio at SaaStock Europe 2024 by Amos Haggiag, Co-Founder & CEO at Optibus, who shares his biggest learnings from building Optibus to a global unicorn.
“We sell a mission critical product. When a customer chooses Optibus, if Optibus doesn’t work, the public transportation stops working – busses don’t arrive on time or don’t arrive at all, passengers get the wrong information, like, it’s a disaster. So the risk is so high that in order to anyone to choose Optibus, it’s not enough to just bring like a really good product, you need to also convince [them] that you’re not introducing risk, that you know how to work in complexity, you know how to work in different regions, it’s very local. And because of that, at some point, we decided to change the organisation into more focus on the local region kind of management.”
Amos shares:
- Optibus’ funding journey to a $100M Series D funding round and a $1.3B valuation
- The moment they realised they had surpassed $1M ARR (and why he didn’t think they had product market fit at the time!)
- Scaling their sales team to accommodate for their global customer base
- From localised to centralised- the painful process of restructuring
- Challenges with delegating tough decisions as CEO
- The importance of having a long term focus
and more!
Watch or listen to the full episode below.
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