We stopped doing most of what we were good at, on purpose.

For the past several years we've been the team that could take on almost any hard problem a customer put in front of us. That included identity, blockchain projects, workflow automations and everything in between. A prospect would describe a messy, expensive workflow, we'd go in, and we'd build the thing that fixed it.

We were good at it. Customers were happy. The work was genuinely interesting, and most of it was paying. That's exactly what made narrowing hard. You don't walk away from work that's working because it's failing (at least in our case). You walk away because you've decided something else matters more.

Here's what we decided: we'd rather own one job completely than automate a hundred jobs halfway.

The product that can do anything

I've found that the most comfortable but insidious story to tell yourself, and your board, is that you're building a platform. A platform sounds bigger. It sounds more defensible. Best of all, it lets you say yes to every customer, because whatever they need, you can point the platform at it. For a company that likes solving hard problems, that's a very easy story to fall in love with.

The trouble begins, however, on the other side of the table. A product that can do anything lands in front of a buyer as a question, not an answer. It asks them to imagine the use case, to configure the thing, and then to supply the judgment about what good looks like. You think you've handed them leverage. What you've actually handed them is a toolbox, when they walked in asking for a result.

Most teams don't have the time to become experts in your tool on top of doing their actual job. The few that do tend to resent that the real work landed back on their desk. We watched smart customers get genuinely excited in the room and then stall for weeks, not because the technology couldn't do it, but because we'd made the hardest part (deciding what to build and proving it worked) their problem instead of ours. That's not a feature gap you can close with another release. It's the shape of the thing.

Breadth stopped being rewarded

We're also seeing the market reward the narrow product with a lot more urgency than it used to, and penalize the everything-platform with a lot less patience.

The clearest tell is where serious money is paying attention. Bessemer, not exactly a firm prone to fads, published a full vertical-AI founder playbook in January 2026, and the consensus it reflects is blunt: the do anything agent pitch is mostly closed, but the do one painful job brilliantly pitch is wide open.

On the other side, Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027, and the reasons it lists (unclear value, runaway cost, weak controls) are mostly what happens when you point a general-purpose tool at a problem nobody scoped tightly enough. Even the public-market read points the same way: by one industry count, horizontal software multiples compressed hard over the trailing year while the focused vertical players held up.

None of this means breadth never works. It means breadth is a late move you earn after a narrow win, not the position you open from. You get to be a platform once you've been undeniably the best at one thing first. We had the order backwards.

What focus actually costs

I want to be honest about the price, because the build in public version of these stories usually skips it.

Narrowing meant turning down revenue from real customers we liked, for problems we knew we could solve. It meant telling good prospects no, and watching some of them go elsewhere. It meant giving up optionality, and the comfort of being able to say "we could always pivot into that," which it turns out is a more addictive feeling than I expected. And internally it meant the hardest adjustment of all: a team that had measured its worth by how many different things it could do had to start measuring itself by how completely it could do one.

That last part is the real cost, and it shows up daily. The payoff, at least until the wedge is proven, is mostly conviction. You feel the things you said no to immediately. You feel the focus pay off slowly. Anyone telling you that trade feels good in the moment is selling something.

A product that runs, not a tool you operate

The deeper reason we narrowed isn't really about market timing. It's about what we think a good product owes its buyer now.

The version of this we believe in is a product that runs one job on its own, end to end, and leaves a record of what it did, so the person who owns the outcome can trust it without babysitting it. Not a console they log into and operate. Not a set of capabilities they assemble. The result, delivered, with the receipts attached. That's where the real leverage is for a growth leader: they get the outcome, and they don't inherit the responsibility for wiring it together or proving it worked.

You can't build that by being a little bit good at everything. A product that takes the job off someone's plate has to be deeply, specifically good at that job, including all the unglamorous parts (the messy data, the edge cases, the moment something goes wrong and someone needs to see exactly what happened and stop it). Doing that well for one job is a year of hard, specific work. Doing it for a hundred jobs is a pipe dream.

So we picked the one job, for one kind of team, and we're building toward the product that runs it. The shape of the bet is the whole point of this note: we'd rather be the obvious answer to one expensive question than a plausible answer to all of them.

If you're making the same call

If you're a growth leader or a founder sitting with some version of this decision, the question I'd offer is the one we avoided for too long. We stopped asking "what could we build for this customer," which is flattering and nearly always gets you to a long maybe or a slow yes. The harder one we finally asked is: "what's the single result we could own so completely that nobody would think to assemble it themselves." When we finally answered that honestly, most of the roadmap fell away, and what was left got a lot clearer.

I'm still partway through learning whether we got it right. If you're weighing the same trade, I'd genuinely like to hear how you're thinking about it.

Sources and further reading