The $100M Product Playbook
Download the Ultimate Guide to Creating a $100M Product Ecosystem!
Watch the $100M Product Playbook
Lesson 1: The Mrs. Jones Problem
Mrs. Jones called again about her Roku not working, costing the integrator a $200 truck roll to unplug and replug a device. This simple problem became the foundation for a $100M+ IoT platform that scaled to 30+ million devices.
Lesson 2: Outrun the Bear
We rebuilt the same router integration three times in six months following "agile best practices" with hardware vendors. The breakthrough came when we learned you don't have to outrun the entire project timeline - just outrun the hardware vendor's chaos.
Lesson 3: The Right People on the Bus
We hired brilliant engineers who waited for instructions instead of bringing solutions, nearly killing our missionary culture as we scaled across four countries. The companies that thrive are those that hire missionaries, not mercenaries.
Lesson 4: Rebuilding while Flying the Plane
Our platform needed a complete rebuild, but we had five product launches committed for the quarter. Here's how we rebuilt the entire architecture without missing a single customer deadline or business commitment.
Lesson 5: The First Mile Strategy
We celebrated launching dark mode with a clever marketing campaign while our core platform was failing customers with false notifications. This mistake taught us why you can never build second mile innovations on a broken first mile foundation.
Lesson 6: Prouct Alignment
Most engineering and product teams spend more time fighting each other than fighting competitors, slowing innovation and frustrating customers. Our partnership approach enabled 30-minute conversations that accomplished what took other companies hours of meetings to achieve.
Lesson 7: Innovation & Lightning
Our competitors had better individual products, but we dominated the market through ecosystem integration that they couldn't replicate. Extreme specialization enabled patented innovations that created competitive moats worth hundreds of millions in business value.
Lesson 8: The $100M Product Ecosystem
Customers who started with a $50 power strip converted 60-80% of their business to our platform. This ecosystem strategy transformed $3,200 single-category customers into $10,400 multi-category advocates who became our best salespeople.
We believe building optimized and aligned product teams should be easy!
Graham Hardy, CEO & Founder
I help SaaS companies align product and engineering teams to business strategy by applying proven frameworks from building platforms that scaled to millions of devices and $100M+ revenue.
Most platforms fail not because of bad technology, but because of misaligned teams.
I learned this the hard way while building what became the largest Smart Home IoT platform in the world.
Back in 2014, We launched the first IoT platform at Snap One (OvrC). The engineering team was brilliant, but they were building in isolation. Product management had grand visions but no understanding of technical constraints. Business leaders wanted results yesterday but kept changing priorities weekly.
Sound familiar?
The breakthrough came when I realized that successful software isn't just about connecting devices, it's about connecting people. I spent the next decade obsessively aligning engineering, product, and business strategy while scaling OvrC and Control4 to manage over 50 million devices across 18,000 integrations.
The platform that once struggled with roadmap clarity became the cornerstone of a half-billion-plus product ecosystem. More importantly, it generated tens of millions in recurring service revenue because we finally understood that technology serves business outcomes, not the other way around.
But here's what really changed my perspective: I watched countless other companies make the exact same mistakes we almost made. Brilliant founders with game-changing ideas, burning through runway because their technical strategy and business strategy lived in different universes.
Now I help SaaS founders and CEOs who are building software platforms. I help them avoid the expensive misalignment that kills most ventures and instead turn their technology investments into sustainable competitive advantages.
If you're building the next generation of connected products and need someone who's navigated the journey from struggling startup to industry-leading platform, let's connect.
Copyright Averware 2025 - All Rights Reserved