Common Advice to Founders: Focus Again

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 has built a modern cloud-based time and attendance platform for SMEs 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 sold to Visma in 2022 following 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 endgame determines your strategy early on, including your growth model and many other important decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Focus - Choosing one clear use case and market unlocked faster growth than chasing horizontal HR suite ambitions across Europe.
• Optionality First - Designing for multiple future paths gave founders leverage rather than forcing a sale based solely on valuation.
• Revenue - Layers Inbound, outbound, and partners created resilience while steadily raising average contract value and predictability.
• Exit Readiness - Warming buyers years early turned selling into a strategic process rather than a rushed financial event.
• Customer Success - Investing deeply in retention created low churn and made Woffu more attractive to long-term acquirers.
• Builder Mindset - Great CROs zoom in and out, connecting go-to-market execution with strategy, culture, and long-term outcomes.

Quote from Luigi Mallardo, Chief Revenue Officer at Woffu

"We chose our focus of ICP and focus of use case, to reduce the space of market optionality to get more business optionality. You see what I mean?

"The advice I give most often is to focus, which doesn't mean to close off the option of having 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 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."

Links

• Luigi Mallardo on LinkedIn
• Woffu on LinkedIn
• Woffu website

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