Harrison Rose, Co-Founder at GoodFit on Mapping Your Market, Modern Go To Market, and Lessons from Building Paddle

11 Feb 2026 · 32 min · 13 chapters

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In short

Podcast Episode Notes: Riding Unicorns with Harrison Rose

Episode Overview

  • Title: Harrison Rose, Co-Founder at GoodFit on Mapping Your Market, Modern Go To Market, and Lessons from Building Paddle
  • Description: Harrison Rose discusses his journey as the co-founder of Paddle and his current venture, GoodFit, which aims to enhance go-to-market strategies for tech companies.

Key Themes and Discussions

Introduction to Harrison Rose

  • Co-founded Paddle, a leading B2B billing and payments company in the UK.
  • Currently co-founding GoodFit, a platform designed to assist teams in prioritizing market accounts effectively.

The Genesis of GoodFit

  • Problem Identified: Many teams invest in new go-to-market tools without understanding their target customers.
  • Paddle’s Early Challenges: At Paddle, they faced the dilemma of targeting a vast market with limited resources, leading to the need for a systematic approach to market mapping.

Go-To-Market Strategies

  • First Principles Approach: Harrison emphasizes the importance of understanding market dynamics and customer qualification to optimize efforts.
  • Fundamental Practices: Despite the proliferation of new tools, essential practices like market mapping and qualification remain crucial.

Evolution of Go-To-Market Best Practices

  • The landscape has changed dramatically, with an explosion of sales and marketing tools (from 150 in 2010 to an estimated 16,000 by 2025).
  • Many organizations mistakenly focus on acquiring new tools instead of refining their customer targeting and qualification processes.

Case Study Example

  • Lead Routing Company: Harrison shares an example where a company thought they could target 300,000 companies based on broad criteria but after analysis, the qualified market was reduced to 13,000.
  • This highlights the risk of spreading resources too thinly on unqualified leads.

The Importance of Data

  • Quality Over Quantity: Organizations often need better data analysis to distinguish between truly qualified prospects versus generic demographic data.
  • GoodFit aims to provide insights and tools for companies to better understand their customers and improve targeting.

Lessons from Paddle

  • Relentless Learning: Harrison stresses the need for constant personal and business growth, noting that everything within a rapidly growing company must evolve simultaneously.
  • Experience and Resilience: He recalls challenging moments, such as when Paddle's entire sales team quit, emphasizing the necessity of adaptability and resilience.

Motivation and Personal Growth

  • Evolving Motivations: Harrison reflects on what drives him, moving from a fear of failure to a desire to help others succeed.
  • Creating a Supportive Environment: He discusses the significance of surrounding oneself with capable people and building teams based on strengths and weaknesses.

Future Trends and Predictions

  • Potential Unicorns: Harrison mentions Arx Robotics, focusing on defense, as a company poised for success due to increased government spending in that sector.
  • He also notes opportunities in preventive health and fertility technology as emerging fields ripe for innovation.

Reflection and Personal Insights

  • Dinner Party Guest Picks: Harrison would like to invite Oscar Wilde, Pete Doherty, and Mikel Arteta for an engaging conversation, illustrating his diverse interests.

Key Takeaways

  • Prioritize Qualified Leads: Always assess the readiness of potential customers before investing in outreach.
  • Market Mapping is Essential: Understanding the specifics of the target market can drastically reduce wasted efforts.
  • Continuous Learning is Crucial: Founders must adapt and grow alongside their companies to navigate challenges effectively.
  • Focus on People: Building a supportive and competent team is fundamental to driving success in a startup.

Conclusion Harrison Rose’s insights shed light on the evolving landscape of go-to-market strategies, emphasizing the need for foundational practices amidst the influx of new technologies. His journey from Paddle to GoodFit serves as a testament to the importance of understanding your market and focusing on qualified customers for sustainable growth.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

The Journey to GoodFit

0:45 to 2:52

Harrison discusses the challenges at Paddle that inspired GoodFit's launch.

“But we kind of actually started to come up with the concepts of GoodFit probably right at the very start of even that journey.”

Adapting Go-To-Market Strategies

2:52 to 4:52

Harrison shares insights on evolving go-to-market strategies over time.

“and how it came to be, but that's kind of the initial, I'd like to call it an epiphany, but it was just how we started going to market ourselves, not realizing that wasn't how others were going to market at the time.”

Identifying Qualified Customers

4:52 to 7:48

The importance of targeting the right customers for effective sales.

“And I can give you a really big worked example that we worked through here with a customer of GoodFit recently.”

Data-Driven Market Analysis

7:48 to 12:54

Harrison explains the role of data in mapping and understanding markets.

“Like 96 % of their effort was spent on just companies that were just not qualified to use their product, right?”

Lessons from Founding Paddle

12:54 to 14:00

Key learnings from Harrison's experience as a second-time founder.

“That's the thing that delivers the step-to-day difference in outcome.”

The Relentless Learning Journey of Founders

14:00 to 17:00

Founders must continually learn and adapt to survive and thrive in fast-growing companies.

“But I think the thing that I didn't know going into it was just like the rate and relentlessness of the learning that's required to not only succeed, but to survive.”

Reflective Leadership and Team Building

17:00 to 19:40

Successful founders are reflective and build strong teams to address their weaknesses.

“And I think the founders that survive, I think the 10 years journeys, I did a podcast on this way back with Sastog once I stepped out from Paddle actually.”

Motivation and the Challenges of Entrepreneurship

19:40 to 23:00

Understanding personal motivation evolves through the challenges faced in entrepreneurship.

Navigating Hard Times as a Founder

23:00 to 26:10

Founders face numerous challenges and must maintain high standards to succeed.

Future Unicorn Predictions and Market Trends

26:10 to 28:01

Insights into potential future markets and unicorn companies based on current trends.

“You just have to get out of bed and do it because you're in charge.”
Show all 13 chapters

Emerging Trends in Preventative Health

28:01 to 29:26

Explore the transition from reactive to proactive health solutions and innovative biotech opportunities.

“I think there will probably be other big, big winners in like preventative health.”

Dinner Party Guest Game

29:26 to 30:50

Discover Harrison's unique choices for dinner guests and the intriguing conversations he anticipates.

“I'd probably do Oscar Wilde, like Incredible Wit.”

Reflections on Go-to-Market Strategies

30:50 to 31:46

Gain insights into effective go-to-market strategies and the impact they have on businesses.

“The Spanish Michael Arteta and yeah, Moscow Arden P-Duckty probably.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Hello and welcome to the Riding Unicorns podcast. Today we're delighted to have Harrison Rose. Harrison co-founded Paddle, one of the UK's big tech success stories in the B2B billing and payment space. Now the co-founder of GoodFit, which helps customers implement and scale any go-to-market strategy. Raised over 13 million, Series A led by Notion. So we're really excited to have a chat with Harrison and get into it. So Harrison, welcome to the show. Let's just go straight in. What was the problem that you experienced that led to you launching GoodFit? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it came out of our experience at Paddle, right?

0:34So again, for context, Paddle is very different to GoodFit. It's like a 10 plus year old company, thousands of customers globally, 300 million raised. And we went on a real journey there with our own go-to market. But we kind of actually started to come up with the concepts of GoodFit probably right at the very start of even that journey. I think when we started Paddle, like nobody knew who we were. Nobody knew what we did. We probably didn't know what we were doing, but just scratch, scratch that for a second. But absolutely nobody knew what we were, but we did. and we also operated under a very different kind of billing model to the competitors in the space.

1:06We were like this thing called a merchant record. For those of you that don't know Paddle, it's like recurring billing, checkout payments, things of that nature for software companies. But we had the fortunate and unfortunate problem that I hear a lot from other people with side businesses that we kind of, we had the ability to tell us that any software company in the world, but had a checkout, like an absolutely massive, massive market, a problem I'm sure lots of people have in similar guises. But I was like our one person commercial, I'd like to say army, but individual team whatever you want and then the question you have is given i have the opportunity to kind of sell to this massive market sell to anyone like where do i start like where do i maximize my my limited amount of time and at the time uh i just approached it from first principles so when we started paddle christian and i my co-founder were like 16 17 we had no basically no operating experience whatsoever so the only thing we could rely on was first principles which had blessings at times and curses in others.

2:01But what we did was, or what I wanted to do was I wanted to map the market of like every software company that I could sell to and then gather as much information on them as I could in a systematic way so that I could then prioritize those that I felt were most likely to yield results. Given my limited time, I couldn't work massive portions of the market. It felt like the most sensible thing to do. And that's ultimately how we thought about getting started with GoToMarket. and even fast forward to today, despite the massive changes we've seen in this space, those fundamentals of just like mapping your market, understanding who's qualified you could sell to, who within that should you prioritize your efforts at, that you then go and deploy, go to market motion to or strategy at, those fundamentals still basically exist today.

2:42And yeah, GoodFit was built on some of those concepts. Yeah, and I can tell you about how the investors kind of started to notice what we were doing with data is a little bit different and how it came to be, but that's kind of the initial, I'd like to call it an epiphany, but it was just how we started going to market ourselves, not realizing that wasn't how others were going to market at the time. And it was really how we're gathering and using data that was the kind of unique thing within that process, I think. So Harrison, it sounds like at the time you had this sort of pioneering approach to go to market.

3:13And of course, go to market changes all the time. Go to market strategy change all the time. What's great three years ago is no longer great today because it's such a valuable space, getting more sales, people pay a lot of money for. And so there's a lot of innovation in the space. So over your time at Paddle and now since starting GoodFit as well, what have been the major changes in go-to-market best practice that you're able to sort of advise and productize with your clients? Yeah, I think basically everything's changed and at the same time, absolutely nothing has changed. Like there has been an absolute explosion within the space.

3:49Like I saw a stat the other day, which is like, I think there were 150 like known sales market tools via whatever platform was running the analysis in 2010 or something. And it was like 16 ,000 in 2025. And I think the thing that hasn't changed or the problem people have today, which is maybe more useful to the people is that people buy like tools to solve their problem. They think it's changing all the time and they need to buy this new shiny tool, right? Maybe they're struggling with a funnel, they'll buy SDRs to get some more pipeline or their wind rates are dropping. So they're buying some new AI tool to generate personalized assets for them or whatever right and we've got more and more optionality for some of the stuff that we can experiment with and we'll all solve the world but it's going to change our outcomes and this is the future and as you say in reality in three months time everybody's trying that thing and we'll have to do something else which is why the space is a bloodbath in terms of retention for some of these tools right and i think the the problem is a lot of those tools or the explosion that we've seen over the past five ten years certainly more recently in the past two or three is a lot of this investment uh and new products have emerged in what i call the execution layer so they're the tools that help you actually like i don't know send the email to the prospect or personalize the message or create the landing page or running run run like way and people are that uh yeah their orchestration i think they're solving a very technical problem i think one thing that's been a good thing in the industry is that people have recognized that you can't just go to market using a really generic data anymore and then people wanted to buy data from lots of different places and then actually cobbling that data together in one place and making it usable is quite a technical problem that they're helping solve so it's one of those tools but i'm even thinking more like a little bit further down the valley chain of the stuff that's sending the email or whatever i think most people's problem is three steps before that and it's like before we go and buy the one of the 15 000 tools we ago and amaluate in 2025.

5:43I think the question that people aren't spending enough time on today, but was still the question they should have been spending time on 10 years ago, like we did a paddle without knowing that we're onto something was that are we just sending to the right customers at the right time? And I can give you a really big worked example that we worked through here with a customer of GoodFit recently. So we worked with some really big sales martech tools out there, like six figure deals, like big brand names. Many of them were not able to talk about, but like Clary, salesoft is on our website, for example.

6:12But this particular company is in like lead routing and distribution. So yeah, a visitor comes to your website, they click, give me a demo request. They're the technology which decides who you route that lead to in your sales team. So when we started with them, I asked them, who are you selling to, right? And they were like, well, we sell to North American companies and EMEA companies. They tend to have 50 employees and we're really good in these specific industries. Literally the most like typical answer you'd get when you ask them on what their ICP is. and then I was like cool how many how many companies is that and they're like 300 ,000 and I'm like well do we really think there's 300 ,000 companies in the market right now that are ready to buy your product and like we all know the answer to that question is no it might not be the same as like the TAM side you put in your investor deck it's a different use case for like who are we going to spend our go to market numbers on right now and it's not 300 ,000 people all at once or equal absolutely not so what we did instead was we started to analyze what was true about the customers that they're actually having success than actually winning.

7:07And sure, they were in North America and EMEA, but they didn't have 50 to 500 employees exclusively. They actually had at least 10 plus dedicated sales folks. They were also getting over 50 ,000 unique visits per month to their website. And all of them, funnily enough, had an inbound CTA on their website, because if you don't have an inbound CTA on your website, there's no leads to route. You don't buy a lead routing tool if you're not getting inbound leads. It doesn't make any sense, right? And then when you look at how many companies that is versus what they were doing before, the number went from 300 ,000 to 13 ,000.

7:36And like, that's dramatic because it means that for one in every 23 accounts they were spending money or time on, in theory, wasn't qualified. So for every 23 accounts they worked or run an ad out or send an email to, 22 don't matter. Like 96 % of their effort was spent on just companies that were just not qualified to use their product, right? Yeah, that's astounding in terms of, that is status quo. This is what people do, right? And I think the thing that people get lost in in go-to-market is they're so excited by the shiny new stuff in the execution layer because it's the closest thing to the customer that the customer responds to or tell you is exciting or sexy or whatever but actually you need to still answer those fundamental questions that were important 10 years ago so this is kind of how i i think about it if that makes sense and so how do you do that i think one of the problems people have is i was i was at dinner uh with notion actually the other day and was laughing with a set of founders i'm just like put your hand up if you as a founder have been told that you should focus on your icp and understand it better and like we all just laughed it's like oh funnily enough we're told that we're successful if we focus on our icp it's like cool how like you tell me this over and over again like i'm not getting anywhere not through want of trying or not for this being novel advice to me it's that i don't know what to do and i think the problem people have had historically is that they actually haven't had the breadth of of data and insight into the customers they're winning or losing to actually find real correlation and who they're having success with versus not, right?

9:01Things like industry and employee size do not correlate particularly well with positive outcomes compared to other data that's much more specific to you, your use case, your business. So GoodFit's there to both, yeah, do the analysis, but the analysis is only as good as the insight that you have against the companies in your market. So yeah, we try and map the market of companies for you guys, give you lots of insight into them and then help you analyze them in order to get to market more effectively. But it's the quality of data problem that I think has been the gap over the past decade or so.

9:31And we invested way too much money and time on data and paddle to the extent that our investors are like, this is actually a business, go do it, to my head of robots, hence good fit, because there just wasn't solutions out there to gain it. How granular do you need to go? Again, this is one of those things, space that moves fast, like very quickly, everyone's very easily whittling down which industry they should be looking at, whether they should have a certain button on the website like what are sort of very predictive signals are there that you've discovered and i think there's just two ways to look at it right there's like a point in time signal which might indicate that you should get in front of a customer right now because they're demonstrating some livelihood to buy and they become very competitive because there's limited numbers of them again there's always new ones we can talk about in a second but there's also just broader like prioritization like if your market even if your market 13 000 accounts you've probably got i don't know 10 10 sales reps like even within that you need to prioritize them and there's just almost like a breadth of information you need in every single one of those accounts and also just prioritize them more effectively and like really small gains at the top of the funnel like a one percent increase from your like contact to response rate like has profound impacts to your ultimate pipeline so i think about it in two ways and this stuff can get very very granular right like i have no idea like at paddle we're monitoring one of our big value propositions was helping people sell not only their software product in modern geo but across the world right so for every single software company in the world and i mean for every single software company in the world we know uh what currencies it supports what languages it supports and what price points it says on site what um how much traffic they're getting what traffic they're getting from different regions how the traffic they're getting from a region matches to the localization they have on their site so i can easily just go and draw a circle around here's all the companies that are getting 50 000 visits a month from china they don't support the chinese yuan alipay or mandarin right like that's very very specific to paddle however i'm also working with a company a good fit that sells like maybe it's a bad example uh like an employer of record i'm trying to think of stuff that people know right an employer of record wants to know how do you list this company hiring what percentage of the remote what percentage of the hybrid how many office locations do they have how many open jobs do they have outside of office locations like it's really specific to them and it's like the sources of data are very similar but it's actually how you configure this insight into something that's really relevant to you which is the problem that the good fit solves but you need to have been able to configure the data into something that specific in order to see actual signal right like if i can tell deal which everyone listening will have heard of this company has i don't know want that 1000 remote roles open and that's like 90 of their workforce like they want to prioritize them to that account right much more so than it's in industry manufacturing like no cares like in comparison anyway but yeah that's kind of how i think about it but no no one focuses on that real core question of just like is this company qualified what should i know about them how should i prioritize them and like i bought it try and boiling it down to the most like basic example i could i'm trying to sell my house as i just referenced and maybe you'll get of an outtake of this this this particular podcast but i was like you can spend absolutely ages like optimizing for photos and by god i have uh and the description of the of the web of the of the house on on the on right move we have in the uk or zoopla whatever but like if the people hitting that link or looking at the photos like aren't in the market for a house like it doesn't it doesn't fucking matter to be honest with you so you can deliver the most customized like ai driven like message generative in the world but But you actually need to deliver the single, the most qualified in-market company you can as possible.

13:15That's the thing that delivers the step-to-day difference in outcome. The other stuff's optimization in my head. Still important, but yeah. It's great seeing someone who's gone and done this in a role then might productize it. And there's a lot of founders out there that will be listening and pricking their ears up because, yeah, there's a lot more granular data that should be used to mark out the market for each company. and Harrison just just reflecting a little bit more on the Puddle experience you obviously have taken what you did and how you sort of nailed your mark your go-to-market there into productizing and creating good fit but what were the other key learnings from just being a founder that you've taken into being a second-time founder yeah it's really it's a question like you get asked a lot and like the truth is and I think it should be true of anyone who's gone on like a 0 to 100 billion genius like there's there's constant learning and constant lessons like and if you could point to like three you're probably doing really something really bad to change it like every single day you feel like you're you're learning so much which is probably like the first learning I think I I didn't know I was walking into to be fair like Christian my co-founder always had dreams of like IPOing and running a tech business and I had no idea what I was doing I joined him straight out of school and we went on the journey that we did.

14:37But I think the thing that I didn't know going into it was just like the rate and relentlessness of the learning that's required to not only succeed, but to survive. I don't think it's talked about enough. Like for your business to grow at 3x, 5x year on year, everything in it and everything around it and everyone within it needs to grow at the same rate, right? Every process, your knowledge of the market, you as a founder. and if you don't grow at that rate, the company is going to stop growing at that rate or you're going to get left behind, quite frankly. There's a reason why individuals within companies get outgrowing, why founders get outgrowing.

15:13Unless you can keep up with the growth of the demands of the company as it in itself is growing at an exponential rate, you're buggered, basically. And so be a relentless learner and you're going to have to reinvent pretty much everything within the business on a constant cycle. and the very best founders will preempt the thing that they're going to have to reinvent before it breaks, basically. Where are you learning from? Is this like learning on the fly or is it reading? Is it speaking to other founders who are a step ahead? I think it's the broadest possible set of things. Honestly, I think I was reading a lot in the early days.

15:49I think as we got bigger and bigger and bigger, I read less. I think I was just time poor. I was chatting to Hiroki at GoCardless. that recently just um sold i can't remember who to but they're another notion portfolio company started around the same time as paddle uh another unicorn and he was like yeah i just don't have time to read he was like i get asked what books i read a podcast all the time he was like honestly i mainly learned from doing and learning from others and i think as i got further and further down the path that was probably it i think and surrounding yourself with people who know more than you and do better than you super important and then honestly you you learn as you do make mistakes like the other question you get isn't like what are the key earnings but like what are the biggest mistakes and the thing that i also say back to that is like if you can pinpoint like two massive mistakes that you made like it's weird because actually you make decisions every day most of them are probably wrong and the reason you're successful is because you make 10 subsequent decisions that constantly iterate yourself towards the right outcome quote unquote right or a better outcome it's not even right wrong it's a better outcome right and and maybe that's a learning too it's just like don't get yourself hung up on making the wrong decisions make the fucking decision then iterate as quickly as you can towards a better one i think this thing is like creating a sort of system of self-learning in yourself where you're learning on the fly by making mistakes and seeing certain decisions go really well and then like having the reflectiveness to um even look back at your day and be like okay well what's gone well today what's gone badly and then do that on a three-month period as well is are you a reflective person would you say Oh yeah, big time.

17:25And I think the founders that survive, I think the 10 years journeys, I did a podcast on this way back with Sastog once I stepped out from Paddle actually. The founders that survive like the 0 to 100 million journey and beyond, like I was asked to stay on a Paddle. I was ready to go for quite personal reasons. But like I think the people that survive, one, intensely reflective around how they're performing and what needs to be true for them to be better and grow with the business and are reflective on the business and how it's performing constantly too but also humble right it's just like what's the stuff that's not going very well that i'm quite sure like uh you need to be really aware of and then build build teams around you right like we have really weird stuff happen at paddle that people have found strange since that we didn't know it was weird like i we didn't hire any commercial leadership for like five years like i did everything i was in every deal we had no managers i did every role for like uh four or five years i'm not sure that was the best thing to do i had pros and cons but we hired our first vps of sales and vp of success about yeah four five years into the business both of them lasted for five years from low million well i don't know probably around series a to d and like the average tenure of a vp sales is like 18 months so the first one we ever hired not only didn't last 18 months he lasted five years and went on that journey from low millions in revenue to 100 right same for the success leader and it's it's not only true but it's you need to very quickly spot what are the gaps in these individuals too and then build great teams based on strengths and weaknesses that you need to be obsessed with what are your strengths and weaknesses and what are everyone's around you so that you can all look out for each other and create this great team that works super super well and i think by luck by design by instinct we were quite good at spoiling our own gaps and building building around that that being said we went through four cycles of executive team as people do going on those journeys but but yeah that those two survived most of it well and harrison i mean we we want to get to know founders on a really personal level on this show and uh sort of lift the lid on who the person really is and what motivates them like what what do you think it is that motivates you yeah it's something that i thought a lot about certainly second time around like there's nothing that sharpens your focus more picking what you're going to do next like second time is so hard right particularly if you've had success first time and you have real optionality optionality is just like scary just to some degree right it's like oh god i don't have to wake up today and do 10 hours worth of zoom calls like what am i gonna do in my time like this is weird yeah it's a great question i think for me i've had it honestly i i fell it fell into that business like i i didn't expect to go on a 10-year journey i didn't even know unicorns existed i don't know obviously as well when we started like uh i was completely ignorant and christian was the opposite fortunately in the early days um eventually caught up to some degree still lots to learn from him second time around that's really where the question kind of happened like how do i just love the journey like i was learning so much i was growing so much i was building a business and experiencing things that many people will never get to experience and i was really conscious of that and really grateful for it that being said it was fucking brutal throughout like i had many nights crying myself to sleep thinking we were buggered which is also a good learning for people listening I think first time around but like I thought we were either going to be so wildly successful like I'll never have to work again and who cares what motivates me because I can do whatever I want or we were going to fail so badly that I'm completely unemployable I've never had a job before other than this and like we're wish we're crap and like that was through to probably me leaving the company because I never worked anywhere else right so like truthfully what probably motivated me first time around was just a bit of appreciation for the experience that i was having but like this innate desire of just like i either win here so high that i never have to worry about anything ever again or i lose and i'm completely unemployed while my life's fucked and like none of those things are true maybe you need to think like that in order to be successful like i really think about that psychology quite a lot especially because second time around you don't have that that psychology right i like i'm quite comfortable now unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at things and like you don't have that if this company fails you're fucked because it's just not true so what motivates you second time around i think i'm not sure i would have started another business again a good fit i think the motivation evolved over time but what i realized i love doing and i spent a lot of time reflecting on it was just like helping people be the best versions of themselves both professionally and personally like i think that's what paddle actually allowed me to go and do and why i enjoyed it and then i was like what's a framework or the playground in which i can i can make that true for others basically and i thought a lot about going into coaching of things but i was like actually it's businesses that are like the playground i can create where i can bring people in and help them grow and learn and reflect about themselves and their own joys and strengths and weaknesses and where they want to get to and i started it with alex my co-founder who worked for me at paddle because i just thought he had just such a high ceiling as to where he could be what he could become and i thought he'd he contributed so much to what we'd achieved at paddle and wasn't really rewarded for it and i was like okay let's create this playground where we can really give back to this guy and get going again over time i think the opportunity became so big a good fit that i was also just excited eventually about reshaping a category that's just absolutely colossal and hence the shift from bootstrap to vc back to be fair but it's the people for me second time around and it sounds super fucking cliche but it is true no really really interesting and i mean you mentioned the that it was i mean on the one hand paddle sounds like it was kind of plain sailing you know super fast growth from pretty much but you've just mentioned those thoughts of thinking you know you're buggered what were the hard days like what was so hard every day was hard i think some of it some of it was i'll give you a great example paddle at the time in the early days is going like the first couple of years we were working out what to do maybe just becoming adults i'm not really sure like it was a bit of a mess to be fair we were just backed i think because we were two slightly mad children to be fair before we understood what we were doing but once we got on a path we were growing at 300 year a year which back back in the day was was pretty impressive maybe maybe less so now and we were the fastest growing software company in the uk for a couple of years i think one year we got beaten by delivery like people really love burgers like makes sense like is that a software company i don't know but that same year like all of my sales team quit because they thought we we were rubbish and like like doing really badly and it's like we were setting ourselves such aggressive growth targets that they were just inevitably going to miss that they all weren't getting paid they were really unhappy they thought we were going to die as a business we weren't hitting our targets and they all quit and like i didn't have the the benchmark of just like i'm actually we're we're doing relatively well here and maybe we should just adjust these targets because this just isn't realistic so again experience i think is helpful in just being able to level set like what really is bad and what really is good and is this existential or is this just expectation resetting but yeah there are loads of hard times man like what did you what did you do in that particular example you know your sales team left how do you pick yourself up i mean at this point in time i didn't feel i had a choice right it was like you you and i think this is i heard something from the remote founder since like i'm a processor with employer of records on this podcast but he was just like your job as a founder is to make sure your business does not fucking die like you wake up every single day and you do whatever it takes to drag that thing towards success and like at no point did i consider anything really it was like well we've just lost our sales team looks like i'm in all the deals up until we hire some new ones and we go from there like you you just deal with it uh you can't feel sorry for yourself there's no time uh to to be fair but this is why i think the psychology of first time second time of founder is super interesting to be fair like i'm i'm obsessed with like how do you create the conditions to win second time around where failure feels more like an op well is an option and i think the difference is that you you just need to create the conditions for relentlessly high standards in spite of that and it's just like one of the values that we have a good thing which we've much more purposeful around second time around as a founder is like be proud and raise the bar and like they're really great tools for this it's just like if you walk away from a meeting or this podcast and i don't feel proud for how i performed in it or how i prepped for it or how i read your questions in advance like you probably could have done better you probably should have a word with yourself right like i want every podcast i do to be better than the last one otherwise what's the point right and unless you're holding yourself to those standards it's just really easy to relax and i guess i'm really thinking about how do you create the conditions to to win second time around versus first and this is a massive tangent probably i apologize but yeah it's a different different mode of thinking on like there were hard moments but i didn't have a choice second time around there are hard moments this time around but how do i ensure that we just keep pressing on it if that makes sense yeah i had a great quote the other day the greatest motivation is responsibility which i just think is a nice summary of like when you are responsible for something like the motivation is i don't have a choice i just have to get this done sort of thing So sometimes you can force responsibility.

26:42So having a kid is a good example. You just have to get out of bed and do it because you're in charge. But yeah, that's really, really interesting. Thank you for sharing all that. So Harrison, we're going to just move on to our final couple of questions. The first one is a future unicorn prediction. So obviously you've been in the sector for a while now. You've been part of the unicorn journey. You're on the second journey. I'm sure you've got a good eye for a good company. So I'd love to hear you've spotted another business that you think is going to go all the way as well. Yeah, super interesting.

27:16Like I thought about it in advance. I think one company that I see, I'm not sure I'd make a good investor to be fair. I've done a few angel checks. I don't know. I back businesses that are good, but I wouldn't necessarily take this as a given, guys. But one company I see flying in Robin Capital's portfolio who put in a check to our series A is a company called Arx Robotics. The way I thought about answering the question is just like, where are my CA macro trends whereby there's just great opportunity for businesses? And the sad but true reality is like defense budgets and government and spend in defense is just absolutely soaring.

27:53And these guys do robotics and defense drones of this type of stuff. They're absolutely flying. So I think they're very much on a path to unicorn. I think there will probably be other big, big winners in like preventative health. to be fair i think there's a real mindset mindset shift happening there from reactive to proactive and as things like governments can no longer fund even reactive health super super well based on the macro conditions we're in i think we're going to see a big boom there and maybe fertility too like there's plenty of reading around global fertility crisis like smart biotech on improving i don't know egg freezing embryo transfers who knows and i feel like these are areas that are ripe for write for some smart people to do some cool shit to be fair.

28:36Did you see that YC company that's doing sperm racing? No, but that sounds wild. It's ridiculous and it's legit. They're doing sperm racing. To assess the quality and motility of the sperm or it's just I think it's a bit of both. It's a lot. It's a spectator sport. One hackathon we did at Paddle, we had an amazing Irish irish engineer who was just every stereotype you could imagine but he he bought a number of breathalyzers and attached them to toy cars or some infrastructure well structure that look like a car and he encouraged everyone to drink a number of beers and then you blow into the breathalyzer and then you see which car was the fastest it was amazing i'm not quite so the meaningful journey that your your your folks that you just mentioned might be on but it was pretty cool i'll tell you that for sure so was it the drunker that you got the better your car was i was like he left after a couple years i'm like you should have just made that business because that as a christmas present fly off the shelves like that is ridiculous um gamified drinking yeah terrible i don't even drink anymore so i'd not be so good but yeah awesome well thank you that was great we got loads out of that good question lots of different macro trends and then our final question is our dinner party guest game so again it's just a fun way to get to know you a bit more and understand kind of what your interests are and things so if there was three people you could have dinner with who would they be yeah i've never been asked this before despite being your classic like party starting conversation right i'm half fenced to tell you my family because i'm reading a book right now just talking about how limited and how time is with our family but i won't do that it's too soft i think i probably pick some folks that span my interest probably outside of tech even And I assume I can do Dead People as well.

30:24I'd probably do Oscar Wilde, like Incredible Wit. His take on current affairs, I'm sure, would be pretty hilarious. I'd do Pete Doherty. He's my hero musician, very turbulent rock star. But if you've ever seen him on a chat show, it's incredible value for money. He's been in some mad, mad places across his life. And then maybe Nicolaita, a big Arsenal fan. I think he's an incredible leader. What a combination that would be. I can't imagine how it would go down. Love it. Clearly red wine from the Spanish. The Spanish Michael Arteta and yeah, Moscow Arden P-Duckty probably. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Harrison, you've made my day because I'm a massive Arsenal fan and we've had Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho.

31:06We've had like all the managers, but we haven't had Mikel. Super Nick. Yeah. Finally, we've had Mikel Arteta. Well, look, Harrison, thank you so much for coming on Riding Unicorns. You have literally ridden a unicorn all the way and it's great to see you coming back again and taking all of that knowledge and understanding of go-to-market, which impacts basically every business and productizing that into a way that's going to make a real difference and bring a lot more efficiency. And it's been just great to understand your motivation and learnings and everything. So thank you so much again. Thanks for having me.

31:42Yeah, great to share. Thanks so much, Bess. That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening. to stay up to date with the latest episodes please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform we also have a newsletter called reading unicorns which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media and we'll see you on the next episode

From the publisher

Harrison Rose co-founded Paddle, one of the UK’s standout B2B billing and payments companies. Now he is building GoodFit, a go to market platform helping teams prioritise the right accounts, at the right time, with the right data.

In this episode, Harrison breaks down a simple idea most teams still get wrong: before you buy another shiny GTM tool, make sure you are actually selling to qualified customers. He shares how Paddle approached go to market from first principles, why the “execution layer” has exploded (16,000 tools and counting), and why fundamentals like market mapping and qualification still matter most.

We also get into what he learned on a 10-year unicorn journey, the reality of hard days (including the moment Paddle’s whole sales team quit), and what motivates him second time around when failure is no longer existential.

More from Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

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Harrison Rose, Co-Founder at GoodFit on Mapping Your Market, Modern Go To Market, and Lessons from Building PaddleRiding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology · 32 min
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