Development of SeeBiz.com began in 2015 at Rapid Web Services. By the time I joined in 2018, the platform was still in internal testing, three years into its development. I was brought on to lead go-to-market efforts, and the CEO asked me to learn the product deeply before planning anything. The digital marketing team was new too, most of them hired around the same time I was.
The platform itself was built for manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers across a range of SME industries, a genuinely useful tool on paper. That phrase matters. A product can be useful on paper and still be hard to use, and a go-to-market plan built on the paper version would have been selling something nobody had tried as a customer.
Testing It as a Customer Would
Before touching any go-to-market planning, I built three personas representing different types of target users, each with their own demographics and pain points. Then, instead of reviewing the product from a planning document, I opened a test account for each persona type and worked through the platform as an actual new user would. A planning document describes the product the team intended to build. A test account shows the product a customer actually meets.
That’s where the problem became clear. The platform had a lot of capability, but basic, essential actions, uploading a product listing, managing inventory, connecting with suppliers, were hard to find. If I was struggling as someone motivated to understand the product deeply, an actual SME owner exploring it for the first time would likely give up much sooner.
Understanding Why
I asked the developers directly why the platform felt this way. Their answer: over three years of development, the team and the requirements had both changed multiple times, and the group finishing the build weren’t the ones who’d shaped the original vision. Nobody had gone back to simplify what had accumulated.
Nobody had made a bad decision. Each change made sense when it was added. What was missing was someone whose job was to look at the whole product from the outside.
Making the Case Before Making the Change
I put together a presentation for the CEO and CTO, arguing that we needed to hide non-essential features for launch, not remove them, and reveal them gradually after users were comfortable with the basics. Hiding kept the platform’s full capability, while giving a new user a clear starting point. The goal was a clean UI and UX with only the essential features, organized clearly, with on-site step guidance for new users.
After several meetings with the developers, myself included, the CTO agreed to rebuild the platform’s structure around that feedback.
The Trade-Off
That decision meant my first two months at the company went almost entirely into working with the development team, not my own marketing team, delaying the go-to-market work I’d actually been hired to lead. But it meant that when I did start planning the launch, I understood the product at a level most go-to-market leads wouldn’t, because I’d helped shape what it eventually became.
What Changed
Within six months of launch, the platform signed up more than 200 B2B clients.
The 200+ sign-ups weren’t just a marketing result. They were proof that the two months spent fixing the product, before writing a single ad, were the actual go-to-market strategy.
Digital Marketing & Growth Strategist
