There's a version of this story where I keep building, raise some money, hire a small team, and grind through the distribution problem until I find a solution. Plenty of founders do exactly that. I made a different call. Here's the reasoning — and why I think it was the right one.
Why I wanted to test if this could be a B2C offering.
The decision to sell direct-to-director rather than to boards or governance platforms was deliberate. I'd seen enough B2B sales cycles to know what I was choosing to avoid: long procurement processes, multiple stakeholders with competing needs, IT security reviews, budget approval chains, and a buyer who isn't the user.
In a B2B model, you're selling to a board chair, company secretary, CFO — people whose jobs are to be conservative about vendor selection. The person who experiences the value — the individual director — often has to get permission from these stakeholders before the buying decision is made.
Going B2C meant the person buying was the person using. Simpler feedback loop. Faster iteration. Lower acquisition cost if word-of-mouth worked.
What the pilot actually revealed.
About 50% of the directors in the early program were genuinely willing to buy directly. That part worked. But something else started happening that I hadn't fully anticipated.
As directors got value, they started telling others. Other directors on the same board wanted it. Then it would get the chair's attention. Then the co-sec would ask about it. Then someone's head of AI would want a conversation.
Very quickly it became clear I wasn't doing a simple B2C sale. I was doing account management across multiple stakeholders at the same organisation — and none of them had budget authority or the direct experience of the pain that the original director had. The buying motion had somehow become enterprise.
Enterprise selling starts with a champion and requires institutional buy-in to close. It's high touch and usually something startups build toward. We weren't equipped to take on those kinds of sales motions. As well, enterprise pricing carries its own flavours. In this case, the individual pricing I'd hit on wasn't going to work — if a board was wholly going to adopt it, the pricing model needed to be completely different.
50% of early adopters would buy directly. But the product's natural gravity was pulling toward board-level adoption — which meant enterprise sales cycles, not individual subscriptions.
Distribution is the other product problem.
A great product that can't get to market dies. An average product that solves a real problem and can reach its customers reliably can win. Distribution isn't something you figure out after product-market fit. It's a co-equal problem that needs its own hypothesis, its own testing, and its own honest assessment.
For Vizory, getting to market meant getting to directors. And directors don't browse app stores, don't respond to cold LinkedIn outreach, and don't sign up for SaaS trials off the back of a Google ad. They act on recommendations from people they already trust. So the question isn't "how do I find more directors?" It's "who already has their trust, and how do I work with them?"
This meant our channel was, effectively, a trusted intermediary with existing director relationships who could make introductions that carry credibility. In reality, this meant board advisory firms, governance consultants, accounting firms with board-level client relationships, investor networks sitting on portfolio company boards, and director education providers. Without one of these behind you, reaching directors at scale means either spending significantly on advertising into a small, hard-to-target audience, or relying entirely on personal network — which works to a point and then plateaus.
I started with the path of least resistance: going directly to directors I already knew. It did indeed work, up to a point. My network got me to the early adopters. The early adopters got me genuine product feedback and some initial users. But converting that into a sustainable acquisition engine required either significant capital or a channel partner. I had limited appetite for the former, and so I pivoted to start looking to secure the latter.
The channel has to mirror the customer.
There's a dimension to this that's easy to underestimate until you're in the market: the channel doesn't just need to reach the customer. It needs to reflect them.
The directors I was trying to reach are not early adopters. They're senior, deeply experienced, and they make decisions based on trust in the people and organisations they deal with. A founder (even one with board experience) and a compelling product doesn't automatically clear that bar. The intermediary needs to be the kind of organisation a director already respects — with track record, existing client relationships, and frankly the institutional weight to match. That's not solvable with a better pitch deck. It's a structural feature of the market.
Why I didn't just raise and build the channel myself.
The obvious question: why not raise money and build the channel independently? Push the Vizory brand, develop the credibility, own the distribution end-to-end?
I could have. But establishing that kind of institutional credibility would have taken eighteen months minimum — and that's before accounting for the fact that board software isn't anyone's most pressing problem. It matters when it's needed and disappears from view the rest of the time. Asking this market to adopt a new tool from a new brand they haven't heard of, while simultaneously building trust in the firm selling it — those are two parallel trust-building problems with compounding timelines. Finding an established partner with existing credibility compresses both dramatically.
Building is getting easier. Distribution isn't.
Evan Spiegel, CEO / co-founder of Snapchat, made this point recently: people spend enormous amounts of time thinking about product-market fit and not nearly enough thinking about distribution. His view — and I think he's right — is that distribution is one of the hardest problems in technology, and it's only getting harder.
AI is making it easier to build. Smaller teams, faster timelines, working product in a fraction of the time it used to take. But getting something to market — in front of the right people, in a context where they trust both the product and the source — that part hasn't been touched by any model.
The barrier to building has collapsed. The barrier to distribution has not. Anyone building right now should treat those as separate and equally serious problems from day one.
The Diligent problem.
Market research made one thing clear: the main competitor I was facing for ASX-listed companies is Diligent. Nobody gets fired for choosing Diligent, to borrow the IBM adage. Everyone I spoke to had some version of the same complaint — it's a document distribution platform that serves administrators, not directors. But switching away from it is hard, politically and practically.
The directors who talked most candidly about this were also the ones who noted they couldn't simply switch. The board had to agree. The co-sec had to manage the migration. IT had to approve the security posture. "I hate Diligent but I'd need to convince five people to leave it" — that's not a simple product problem to solve from the outside.
Board software also has an unusual adoption dynamic. It's critical when a board meeting is approaching and largely invisible the rest of the time. It's not mission-critical the way a CRM or a finance system is — those tools are woven into daily workflows, which means they get attention, iteration, and advocacy from within the business. Board prep tools don't have that.
I see this pattern time and time again in software, particularly in tools targeted at strategy or planning. If you're not part of a user's daily workflow, you don't benefit from the habit loop that keeps other tools sticky. You have to earn your place in a different way — by being so valuable in those occasional use cycles that users actively seek you out when the moment arrives, rather than defaulting to whatever they've always done. That bar is higher than it sounds, and it has real implications for how you design onboarding, how you think about time to value, and how patient you need to be about proving worth before you ask for a commitment.
The exit decision.
By late 2025, I had enough data for a clear-eyed assessment. The product worked. Directors who used it found genuine value. But the path from 'working product with early adopters' to 'sustainable business with reliable acquisition' still had the channel gap in it.
I had two options. Keep building and find capital to fund a longer runway while I solved the distribution problem. Or step back, reframe, and find a partner for whom Vizory was a natural addition to an existing value chain.
I chose the second path. The product was good, but years of experience gave me the clarity to recognise that the channel problem wasn't one I could solve alone, certainly not without taking on an unacceptable level of risk.
The logical home for Vizory is within an established board services organisation — one that already has the client relationships, the credibility, and the governance expertise to position an AI intelligence tool to ASX-level directors. Their value chain runs from advisory services through pack creation to pack analysis and hosting. Vizory is the natural third step in that sequence. With their channel, the distribution problem largely disappears.
So rather than position Vizory as a standalone SaaS product, I've shifted the narrative: the platform is a validated set of learnings about what directors actually need, demonstrated through a working product, that makes most sense in the hands of an organisation that already has the trust required to sell it.