The Secrets Behind Disco’s Mid-Market & Enterprise Sales Growth

Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,

Disco counts some of the world’s largest upskilling programs and startup accelerators as customers of its social learning platform. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Disco Founder and Co-CEO Candice Faktor explained more about the company’s growth journey.

Key takeaways:

• Initial demand can be alluring, but make sure to track costs of acquisition, cost to service, and retention as well to get the whole picture.
• Product-market fit is a continuum, but you can feel it through inbound demand and high retention.
• Focus on compounding your product, adding every sprint to build the best possible solution for your ideal customers.

Selling into mid-market and enterprises is the dream for many companies; it’s a reality for AI-powered social learning platform Disco.

After initially marketing to solopreneurs and the creator economy, larger organizational leaders asked how they might use the platform as well. That created an opportunity not just for new revenue, but true product-market fit.

Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Founder and Co-CEO Candice Faktor shared a peek behind the curtain at the company’s growth and go-to-market motion.

Fall in love with the problem

From the beginning, Candice said the Disco team never wavered on its core belief that learning is best done in cohorts and with a community.

However, the team had to make a decision—will the platform support communities with a learning element, or support learners by giving them community or social tools?

Ultimately, the team “fell in love” with the problem of learning, in particular upskilling, so that became the focus.

“We think the best way people learn is together,” said Candice. “... When you learn with other people, you get support, you get feedback, you get discussions, you get discourse. And we really believe that if you want to get learning results, you need to have a social learning experience.”

Go where the budgets are

Disco’s first go-to-market plan focused on the creator economy, with marketing campaigns targeting solopreneurs and influencers who wanted to add live or cohort/social learning to their offerings.

There was high demand amongst creators for the platform, but ultimately the team realized that course creation meant a heavy platform for creators to manage. So while demand was high, so was the cost of acquisition and cost to service.

Meanwhile, mid-market and enterprise businesses began reaching out to Disco.

Candice explained that two types of businesses started inquiring about the platform: learning businesses ready to scale further and enterprises with internal use cases for employee growth, partner enablement, and customer education. And more to the point, these organizations have budgets allocated to solving this problem.

“We started getting inbound demand from mid-market to enterprise customers and realizing we actually are a better fit for these customers than we are for smaller solopreneurs or creators,” said Candice.

Focus on a flywheel

Having initial interest from enterprises doesn’t guarantee success; you have to build a sustainable growth mechanism.

Here’s what that looks like at Disco:

First, the team gets customers through inbound demand and founder-led sales. This approach helped close clients like Toronto Region Board of Trade and xPrize.

Second, growth comes from telling customer stories because “people care about who your customers are.”

“We tell our customers’ stories and we let them tell the story of why they've chosen Disco,” said Candice.

Third, Candice added one more element to the flywheel: thought leadership.

Sharing SEO content on their blog—on top of ICP-focused resources like their Learning Community Playbook— helps fuel the top of the flywheel, educating prospective customers and showcasing Disco as a brand with a strong vision for the future of the space.

Compound the product

In the early days, the team had a studio services model where it helped influencers like Margaret Atwood or Rogert Martin build courses. While that was a marketing technique at the time, it also helped the team truly understand what goes into creating a course and creating an enterprise platform.

From there, the team started building up the platform so that it could support the needs of larger organizations, for instance “table stakes” like GDPR compliance and API connections.

But Candice said AI became a “gamechanger” for the team as it changed the cost equation for Disco—not only could they develop more quickly, but the resulting features helped all parties save time. For example, customer-facing features like AI-powered course creation, member engagement, and assessments means significant efficiencies for learning leaders.

“Things compound, and I think this is really important for startups: we could not have gone after the size of organizations that we're going after now with the product we had two years ago,” said Candice. “... We kept iterating on the product and making it better every single sprint.”

Pour fuel where it’s working

As Disco continues to grow, Candice doesn’t take product-market fit for granted. She’s continually tweaking the growth flywheel and working with customers closely to ensure the product continues meeting their needs.

This is a key piece of advice Candice shares with other founders, both from her experience at Disco but also her decade-long career scaling global startups like Wattpad: always go back to the problem and the product.

“Pour fuel on the fire of what works with the customers you want and who love your product,” said Candice.