THE STORY

A software company came to me with a marketing problem. They had built something genuinely ambitious — a platform designed to replace the sprawl of tools most companies run on: Salesforce, Slack, Asana, Constant Contact, WordPress, all of it. One system instead of twelve. The pitch was real and the product worked. But revenue had stalled at $500K and they couldn't figure out why marketing wasn't moving the needle.
 

The reason marketing wasn't working was that marketing wasn't the problem. The company was founded by Nepali entrepreneurs who had studied in the US — technically fluent in American business culture but operating a team that wasn't. When American customers ran into issues, they'd get responses that were overly formal, deferential, carefully indirect. In Nepali professional culture, that's respect. In American tech culture, that's evasiveness. Trust eroded quietly and deals stalled in ways nobody could quite name. I'd lived in Nepal long enough to see it immediately: this wasn't a bad team, it was a cultural translation problem that was showing up as a customer service problem that everyone was misreading as a marketing problem.
 

My role was diagnosis and strategic advising — a lot of long conversations with the CEO comparing notes on how each culture would interpret the same situation, followed by written strategy documents they could actually use. The implementation was theirs; they had people far better positioned than me to do that work. What I could do was name what was happening clearly enough that they could fix it. Once the trust problem was addressed, the GTM strategy had something to land on. Nine months later, revenue had grown from $500K to $5M.