Grove HR · SaaS · 0 → 1 → scale → exit
Turning a corporate venture around and into a product-led SaaS business.
A corporate venture had spent more than a year building an HR platform but was struggling to turn strong engineering capability into a product customers would buy. The business needed a clearer market, product and commercial model before it could grow.
I joined Grove HR as General Manager to lead the turnaround: repositioning the product around underserved SMEs, shifting the company to a product-led growth model, rebuilding the leadership team, and aligning product, engineering, sales and customer success around one growth system.
Within 18 months of launch, Grove was serving more than 1,000 customers across 10+ markets.
1,000+
Customers within 18 months
10+ markets
Across Asia and beyond
$10M
Independent valuation
Strategic exit
Acquisition by a strategic investor
The situation
A team that couldn't turn software into a business.
A corporate venture had spent more than a year building an HR technology platform.
The engineers were technically very capable, but the venture was struggling to turn that capability into a product customers would buy. Development continued despite the lack of traction.
The venture had inherited many of the habits of its software-outsourcing parent: requirements came first, engineers built what was specified, and commercialisation happened afterwards.
I was hired as General Manager to assess the situation and turn the venture around.
The challenge
A startup being run with an outsourcing mindset.
The entire team had inherited the software outsourcing mindset, which is to "build what is asked for" rather than "build what the market needs".
A product company is built the other way around: start with the market, test assumptions quickly and build around what customers were actually willing to adopt and pay for.
More engineering or convincing to take another approach was not going to work. A full turn around was needed.
01
Building before validating.
Product development was moving ahead without enough evidence that the market wanted what was being built.
The organization was effectively trying to sell what it built, instead of learning what customers would buy and building what it could sell.
02
No clear market wedge.
The product needed a sharper answer to three basic questions: which customers should we serve, what problem should we solve unusually well, and why would they choose us?
Without that focus, both the roadmap and the go-to-market motion remained diffuse.
03
The wrong organization for a startup.
Some capabilities could be inherited from the parent company. Most could not.
Product management, growth, commercial leadership and customer success needed people comfortable operating with incomplete information, rapid experimentation and direct accountability for business outcomes.
04
Change without destabilizing the parent company.
Resetting the venture also meant changing roles and moving some employees back into the outsourcing business.
That had to be done carefully. The venture needed a substantially different team without creating unnecessary disruption inside the parent organization.
The solution
Rebuild the company around a market, not around the software.
I started with an overall assessment of the situation: team morale, product strategy, positioning and market needs.
Besides personnel change, one of the major realization was that the company needed to focus on a totally different market, with a totally different product strategy and positioning.
I also had to face with the delicate task of moving people back into the parent organization without creating a political mess.
01. Diagnose before reorganizing
Understand what was worth keeping before changing the team.
I started by assessing the organization from several angles: team morale and capabilities, the existing product, customer demand, the commercial pipeline and the assumptions behind the roadmap.
That gave me a fact base for changing strategy and personnel rather than treating the turnaround as a wholesale reset.
02. Reset the market and product strategy
Focus the company on the underserved SME market.
The strategic reset started with the market.
Instead of competing primarily for large enterprise deployments, we focused Grove HR on small and medium-sized businesses that were underserved by traditional HR systems.
SMEs needed a product that could be understood quickly, adopted with relatively little implementation support and provide value without a long enterprise sales cycle.
That pushed us toward a product-led growth model, supported by inside sales rather than a traditional enterprise field-sales organization.
03. Rebuild the leadership team
Build a startup team inside a very different parent company.
Executing the new strategy required capabilities the parent company did not have.
I worked closely with the board on personnel changes, including cases where employees moved back into the parent outsourcing business.
Keeping the board involved was important. The venture needed room to build a different organization while maintaining trust and avoiding unnecessary disruption elsewhere in the group.
I then recruited key leadership externally across product and go-to-market roles, deliberately adding experience and perspectives.
04. Integrate product and GTM
Make growth a shared operating problem.
Product-Led-Growth (PLG) companies are not built as a typical tech company.
The product itself was part of acquisition. Onboarding affected activation. Product usage influenced conversion. Customer success revealed adoption barriers. Inside sales concentrated on customers showing real buying intent.
That required a different DNA, with tighter coordination between product, engineering, marketing, sales and customer success.
I set out to build a transparent and empowering culture where things moved fast, at the rythm of metrics instead of opinions.
The business outcome
From stalled venture to international growth in 18 months.
Within 18 months of launch, Grove HR had expanded into more than ten markets across Southeast Asia as well as customers in India, Europe and Africa. More than 1,000 small businesses were using the platform, and an independent valuation valued the company at ~$10 million.
The company was later acquired by a strategic investor.
1,000+ customers in 10+ markets
The combination of self-service product adoption, digital acquisition and inside sales allowed Grove to expand without building a conventional enterprise sales organization in every market.
Within 18 months of launch, more than 1,000 businesses across 10+ markets were using the platform.
From $0 to $10M valuation in 18 months
The turn around made the venture a valuable and commercially growing SaaS company.
An independent valuation approximately 18 months after launch valued Grove HR at $10 million.
A product people actually used
Growth alone mattered less if customers adopted the software and then abandoned it.
Among Grove's power users, the platform was being used on 4 days out of 5 each week, an important signal that the product was becoming part of customers' normal operating routines rather than occasional administrative software.
Strategic exit
The business was ultimately acquired by a strategic investor.
The turnaround had created a valuable product company with a defined market, repeatable growth motion and an organization designed around that model.
The growth model
Product-led growth meant designing one growth system, not separate departments.
When the product itself drives acquisition, activation and conversion, traditional boundaries between marketing, product, engineering, sales and customer success must become seamless.
Here is how we implemented this Product-Led-Growth (PLG) approach.
The turnaround was less about software, and more about building the right startup culture.
The original team already knew how to engineer software, but lacked the DNA to drive commercial growth.
I rebuilt the culture around the market, not around software. We focused on the customer journey, and aligned product, engineering, sales and customer success around that journey.
PLG was incidental and a by-product of choosing our specifict positioning. But once it was set, the entire company aligned around that product & GTM motion
Aligning all these pieces is what turned the company around and allowed it to grow quickly.