Sell to learn before you scale the machine

The hardest lesson for me to learn over the past year has been to slow down. Even though we need to move fast.

Over the last six months, our team at Ziplines has been working hard to show meaningful growth with our B2B audience.

Historically, we’ve focused on, and had a lot of success selling, our university-backed certificate programs to individual learners trying their best to stay relevant in a fast-changing workforce.

But we started seeing a clear signal: the individuals taking our courses saw the value in the experience and wanted to bring that to their teams.

Especially when it comes to AI upskilling. You’d be hard-pressed to find a company not thinking about this. Most know they need to be using it, but don’t really know where to start.

We saw an opportunity.

We’ve had a lot of early traction, mostly from existing learners and some organic inbound. Our win rate looks strong, feedback has been great, and our ARR is growing every month.

So naturally, I wanted to throttle things up and start moving quickly to build the top of the funnel.

AI has unlocked a new world of opportunity when it comes to building the funnel. It’s exciting. It’s overwhelming. But I wanted to dive in headfirst.

But after dozens of conversations and some strong early traction, it became clear: we have more to learn, and we’re not ready to scale yet.

Our courses are built for individual learners. Our B2B ICP wants shorter, more configurable learning. They want the learning to be LLM-specific. They want something their teams can tackle in two to three hours per week versus our existing eight to ten.

So the operating rule I’m using at this early stage in our growth now looks like this:

1. Treat every deal as a research interview with revenue attached.
2. Resist building the full outbound machine until the offer is clear enough to defend.

Outbound still matters. And we’ll get there. In order to set ourselves up for long-term success, and to avoid wasting valuable budget and resources, we’re moving forward with intention. Yes, we need to move fast to grow this line of business, but we’re learning what buyers will buy, at what commitment level, with which tools, and under what packaging.

In the end, scale is the reward for clarity. Not the shortcut to it.