Chris Wickson | Co-Founder @ Akkroo and Twice Exited Founder | Finding New Opportunities Within Scaleable Niches

In this episode we talk to Chris Wickson about his journey from launching his B2B SaaS startup Akkroo, to it being acquired for $34m by Integrate in 2019 - which after his earn out period leaves him currently with the fresh vista of being an active angel investor.

However, instead of taking the obvious path of trying to leverage their point of view and market expertise, he and his co-founder are actively seeking out problems in verticals they have relatively little experience and insight into. 

The logic being that rather than double down on their pre-existing confirmation biases towards certain industries and sectors, by coming afresh to a sector they may be able to see how they can leverage solutions and fresh thinking into legacy systems and markets.

We drill into this further by exploring a term called ‘Scaleable Niches’ that has come up in previous episodes of the podcast. This posits that instead of looking at and evaluating horizontal B2B SaaS based opportunities, the new and untapped value lies in going deeply in verticals where genuine insight, product driven IP and innovation play a lot more prominence.

If in this case new models are needed to map and chart where the most promising Scaleable Niches are and also the type of founder you might need to align with and back? A founder who has sufficient exceptional Founder Market Fit that they can propel you into and provide the unfair advantage in terms of deep market insight, networks and expertise that a Scaleable Niche with blue sky potential might provide.   

As we will with all guests now on the podcast, we then overlap the insight of Chris’ founder’s journey onto different aspects of The Switch Deck - key shifts effecting the future of the early stage venture ecosystem.

 

Connect further with Chris:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wickson

 

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