A hiring mistake and its lesson

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO of LoyaltyPlant. Max is going to share with us to road he travelled, entering into this industry, his go to market strategies, scaling across geographic region - and much, much more.

Questions

• Before we talk about products and scale, tell us a bit about your path to this point. What experiences shaped the way you think about business and leadership before LoyaltyPlant?
• At what point did you realise you wanted to work with complex, traditional industries rather than consumer apps or “easy” tech?
• Why foodtech, and specifically Quick Service Restaurants? What made you believe this industry had deep structural problems worth solving with technology?
• What made you decide to join LoyaltyPlant, and what potential did you see that others might have missed?
• You’re often referred to as a co-founder today. How did the transition happen from an executive role to shaping the company’s future at that level?
• LoyaltyPlant was close to running out of investment at one point. What were the first decisions that fundamentally changed the company’s trajectory?
• What were the key milestones that turned LoyaltyPlant from a struggling company into a global enterprise business, from the first major client to scaling across 30 countries?
• You’ve worked across the US, UK, MENA, Europe, and CIS. What did you learn about scaling the same product across very different markets, and what absolutely doesn’t translate?
• You built new go-to-market strategies that now generate over 90% of new sales. What did you change compared to a classic SaaS sales playbook, and why did it work in enterprise QSR?
• Margins are shrinking, aggregators dominate, and costs are rising. What’s actually happening on the ground right now in QSR and foodtech, and how should companies adapt?
• Tell us about a decision you got wrong. What did it cost the business, and what did it teach you as a leader?
• What advice would you give founders building B2B products for traditional industries today, especially around scale, partnerships, and staying relevant?

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• Braingrid.ai
• .TECH Domains
• Mezmo

Links

• https://loyaltyplant.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/denevich/