Or, the accelerated path to business innovation
As you may recall, we’ve already shared the story of how bundling our services into scalable and repeatable packages birthed an app (ContentGen™) which then demanded a new company (ConteSaaS-AI) in this blog: Innovation in the era of massive digital transformation. The entire process of creation, iteration, launch, and business evolution has been mind-blowing enough, but THEN, we found our way into a Microsoft-sponsored GTM Accelerator in collaboration with Women in Cloud, and our minds caught on fire. Here’s a sneak peek at our massively accelerated process.
Identify your path to market
We built our SaaS App on Microsoft Azure for many reasons, including security, scalability, and industry-leading compute capacity. As an added bonus for us, the list of Microsoft partner benefits is impressive … but it can also be overwhelming for a start-up ISV trying to navigate all the options. We kept describing our path to market as “paralyzed by opportunity,” until we connected with the Accelerators and ISV Success offerings. Now we have a guide to help us navigate our journey, shining light on key opportunities, next steps, and best practices. It’s like the path is unfolding before our eyes and each opportunity is more exciting than the last.
The first GTM Momentum Accelerator opened our eyes to new perspectives and possibilities, and really helped us define the opportunities for the company, ConteSaaS-AI, vs. the product, ContentGen. We were connected with the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program and showered with Azure Certifications and Credits and ISV Success opportunities that provided all the resources we needed to optimize our app in the cloud and make it transactable through Microsoft AppSource. And then we were invited into ANOTHER accelerator – a Cosell Leadership Lab, which helped us align our thinking around our end-to-end marketing and sales funnel and how to best operationalize our internal tools and resources. And THEN, we were invited to apply for a Co-launch Marketing Accelerator that has enabled us to refine our co-marketing strategy to align with the way the Microsoft Partner ecosystem thinks about how to (and is incentivized to) drive revenue and key metrics – which will set us up for success with partner sellers.
Find experienced guides
Ironically, having worked in and around the Microsoft partner ecosystem for the past 24 years, our team is intimately familiar with the benefits Microsoft offers its partners. But the new partner offerings mapped out the journey for us in a step-by-step fashion like we’ve never seen before. It made engaging with Microsoft easy and consumable, served up exactly the right benefits in the right order at the right time so we could stay focused on the next action without getting overwhelmed by the possibilities.
At The Odigo Group, our projects often only touch one piece of a much larger puzzle, so we have deep experience in some areas and no experience in others. But these accelerators lay out the path for ConteSaaS-AI and ContentGen in a way that reveals exactly what we need when we need it. And gives us the insight to build and improve our solution with our dev team in parallel. In fact, no sooner did we build Open AI into our solution then Microsoft Copilot launched! So, then we were connected with product engineers who helped us understand how our app will lend itself to Copilot solutions in the (very near) future.
Give yourself grace
When I tell you the market is changing fast, I’m sure there’s a more exciting and eloquent way to say it, but I’m not kidding when I tell you that my brain is operating at max capacity.
Even though ConteSaaS-AI and ContentGen will stand alone from the Marketing Consulting services we offer at The Odigo Group, the entire process has reshaped our experience in the market and shed light on the new solutions and services (and as-a-services) Odigo needs to offer. It’s true what Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said when he claimed every company would need to be a be a technology company. We started as a Marketing Consultancy and have recently packaged up decades of tools, templates, and key learnings into a human-centric, AI-enabled SaaS app for marketing content creation that we are super excited to take to market. While our Marketing Services are still very much bespoke consulting, we can package them in new ways to build on top of the ContentGen app that is now transactable in AppSource. So, Odigo will effectively become a Managed Service Provider, building marketing consulting services on top of the app built on Azure.
I have to be honest … learning how to be the CEO of a software company was never on my bucket list. So, having the new Microsoft-sponsored partner benefits to guide me along the way has been such a gift. It’s a relief to chat with industry experts, learn from the questions and successes of others on the same journey, and get feedback from real people in real time.
Imagine if your dream had another dream
Now, we’re on the cusp of launching our solution and I already have five more business ideas that I now know how to spin up and launch successfully. It’s so much more than a GTM launch strategy ... it’s like discovering the gift of innovation.
Which means that our experience at The Odigo Group has just upleveled from consulting with software companies (especially start-ups) to actually having experienced developing software and taking it to market. So, we can connect clients with the right resources through the Microsoft Partner Associations, like Women in Cloud, and advise when it’s time to invest in a bigger dev team. (Our counterparts at ConteSaaS-AI have a wealth of dev resources to suit any development needs.) And then, we can help package solution messaging to resonate with the client’s audience and drive digital campaigns to accelerate revenue, just like we’ve always done. So, as you can see, there are sparks flying in all directions (and smoke billowing out of my ears).
I know. If you’ve been following our social media this summer, you thought we were enjoying a nice leisurely summer on the island. But really, our minds are racing like a wildfire we can’t contain! Thanks for following along. We look forward to sharing the next steps as the journey continues to unfold. And rest assured … once we launch, we’ll have all the skills and resources to guide you along the journey too!