Case Study: From First Hire to Acquisition at Onport

This is the closest thing I have to a controlled experiment in building a commercial organisation, because when I arrived there was not one.

The situation

Onport sold marketplace technology — SaaS for companies running multi-vendor commerce. The product worked and there was a technical founder behind it. That was the company.

I was the first hire, and eventually became COO.

What was missing

Everything on the commercial and operational side. Not underperforming — absent. Sales, customer success, support, marketing, finance, operations and partnerships all had to be built from nothing.

That is an unusual starting position, and it changes what the job is. There was no underperforming process to diagnose and fix. The question was only ever: what do we build first, and what does building it in the wrong order cost us?

What changed

Three things, deliberately in this order.

Go-to-market and the website. Before any of it could scale, the company needed a coherent answer to who this was for and why it was worth paying for. That is not a marketing exercise. It determines what you build, who you hire and what you can charge.

Distribution through the Shopify App Store. This turned out to be the single highest-leverage decision. Instead of finding customers one at a time through outbound effort, we put the product where the buyers already were. Distribution channels compound in a way that headcount does not — a listing keeps working while you sleep, and each improvement to it lifts everything downstream.

A complete repricing. The old pricing did not reflect what the product was worth or how customers actually consumed it. We restructured into three plans, with features allocated deliberately across them and API usage on the top plan, so that the customers getting the most value were the ones paying the most. Combined with the revamp, this raised prices — and, more importantly, raised the perceived value that justified them.

What happened to the numbers

ARR went from around €100k to €2.5M at peak, over four years.

The growth came overwhelmingly from the distribution and pricing work rather than from adding salespeople. That ordering matters: the Shopify App Store gave us reach, the repricing meant each customer that arrived through it was worth substantially more, and the two multiplied rather than added.

The acquisition

The company was ultimately acquired by Farfetch, in a process I drove.

I brought Farfetch in as a lead myself, through a conversation with their COO. From there the work was the unglamorous half of M&A: building the pitch decks, running the sessions that explained my areas of the business to the buyer's team, building the forecast, and assembling the due diligence documentation.

That last part is where the operational work of the preceding four years either pays off or does not. Due diligence is, in practice, a stranger auditing whether the story you tell about your business matches the records underneath it. Companies that have been run informally discover during diligence exactly how informal they were — usually at the worst possible moment for their negotiating position.

What transfers

Two things I would take to any company at a similar stage.

Distribution beats effort. A founder-led company's instinct when growth is slow is to push harder through the channel it already has. The larger gain is usually in finding a channel where the buyers are already assembled.

Price is a positioning decision, not a spreadsheet output. The repricing worked not because the numbers were higher but because the structure made the value legible. Customers could see what they were buying and why the next tier cost more.