How can a small, bootstrapped software company compete against big competitors that have lots of funding—and win every time?
The answer is simple, but it’s not easy for ambitious startup founders to hear: FOCUS.
A small CRM company can compete against Salesforce and win every time—by being the best CRM just for (pick your specific industry) in (pick your specific region).
A CRM just for independent property & casualty insurance agencies in the US with a complete, tailored solution will win every time in that market.
This applies even more in the AI age, when you can’t compete with all-consuming LLMs with tens of billions in funding.
You win by being a focused specialist.
And you can grow efficiently to $10M, $30M, or more in ARR before you have to consider expanding your focus.
Luigi Mallardo joined Woffu as an early angel investor and later became CRO, helping founder Miguel Fresneda shape a practical SaaS growth path.
Based in Barcelona, Spain, Woffu built a modern cloud time and attendance platform for SME and mid-market companies, replacing legacy tools and spreadsheets with a focused, mobile-first workforce solution.
Starting from just €2K MRR, Luigi led growth first through inbound, then outbound, and partner channels, increasing average revenue per account five to seven times.
By 2025, the company reached nearly €500K in monthly recurring revenue, or about €6M ARR, with more than 50 employees and profitable, efficient growth across Spain.
Woffu was sold to Visma in 2022 as part of a multi-year, proactive exit strategy, with a total reported value of €20–30M, including the 3-year earnout.
Luigi shares how early focus, diversified revenue, and optionality shaped every decision.
His biggest lesson: clarity about your end game determines your strategy early on, including your growth model, and many other important decisions.
Luigi describes this important early strategic decision that was fundamental to their successful growth and exit:
“We chose our focus of ICP and our focus of use case, to reduce the space of market optionality to get more business optionality. You see what I mean? We had more options to sell or not later when we focused earlier.
“The advice I give most often is to focus, which doesn’t mean to close off the options of serving more verticals forever, but you need 75% or 80 % of your pipeline on where you are already monetizing and building traction. And then you leave that 20 % of the pipeline to do experimentations in a new vertical.
“It’s one of the historical challenges, especially with young founders: the feeling of losing opportunities if they decide and don’t do everything. But you are losing opportunities if you go too wide and you don’t focus. Just be patient, postpone, and focus on what works.”
Check out this episode with Luigi Mallardo on the Practical Founders Podcast.
