Storyboard. CASC:::.DEScene 1: corporate scene. Looking back on it, when we first started the company, I can see that the original vision for Cascade was actually kind of fuzzy. We'd come from backgrounds in the corporate world, where we'd seen people's daily struggles to find meaning in their work We'd also seen how woefully inadequate the software solutions were at the time to solve this problem - with clunky old HR software being as close as. most companies ever got to implementing a system to link goals to strategyScene 2.lauching the first version. The first version of Cascade ended up being little more than a modern(ish) corporate goal management tool. Some of the more open-minded HR departments liked and implemented it, and a few smaller companies liked the idea of moving from no structure at all to at least some form of goal-based management. We launched a simple performance management module, as well as some functionality to manage role descriptions and career progression, But the truth is that our hearts were never really in to make Cascade into another |HR software, and so we never fully committed to taking the software in this direction.Scene 3. Strategy. As an alternative, we started to lean into the ‘strategy’ space more and more. We published hugely popular blog posts on topics like 'How to write a vision statement’ and started to attract a reasonably large community of business professionals who were passionate about strategic planning and execution. We were also very popular with consultants as our software took the concepts that have been around in strategic planning for years, and turned them into a platform that a broader audience could relate to.Scene 4 & 5. Rocket The ‘strategy’ phase of our company brought a huge amount of growth and product awareness. Despite being completely bootstrapped, we managed to grow the company to $4m in revenue and achieve the top ranking on software review sites in the Strategic Planning Software! category. We also had quite a few reasonably large enterprise deployments behind us, where Fortune 500 companies, governments and other large entities had deployed Cascade (some more successfully than others) to hundreds or thousands of people and were using it to drive a level of cohesive strategic reporting that most of them were happy with.Scene 6. Control center issues. But there were issues. We always felt that getting these larger clients to a point where they actually ‘launched’ the tool to their workforce was taking way longer than it should. So long that in some cases, our primary contacts at the company would leave (or be forced out) before the platform had even been used very much. In almost all of these cases, those companies would churn, and as a team, we'd be left to rue what could-have-been if only we'd deployed a few months earlier. There was also the level of Customer Success that these accounts required to maintain engagement in the platform. Our Customer Success Managers were constantly finding themselves in a position where the companies were asking for their advice on the actual content of the strategy. Companies were concerned that launching their strategy was a one-shot-opportunity and that they'd rather delay | the launch than to launch something imperfect.