Rachel Lin had a horizontal product problem that looked like a growth problem. Basis had 340 customers across 22 industries. Support costs were high, NPS was mediocre, and the sales cycle kept getting longer as the ICP got harder to explain.
The board conversation
Lin describes the board meeting where she proposed the vertical pivot as the most prepared she has ever been for any conversation in her career.
"I came in with two years of cohort data broken down by industry. The logistics cohorts had 96% retention. The median cohort across all other industries was 71%. The decision made itself once people were looking at the same data."
What the transition required
- Sunsetting integrations and features that served non-logistics customers.
- Rebuilding the sales deck, ICP definition, and outbound targeting from scratch.
- Having hard conversations with 60+ existing customers who no longer fit the roadmap.
Fourteen months later
Basis went from $5.2M ARR to $11.4M ARR. The customer count dropped from 340 to 190 during the transition. Average ACV increased from $15K to $61K.
We thought going vertical would make us smaller. It made us more valuable to the customers we actually wanted.