About the Client

A global private equity firm came to us while evaluating several niche B2B software companies in Southeast Asia. These were promising founder-led businesses with strong growth, but limited transparency. The client needed help understanding the real day-to-day operations, customer stickiness, and whether the teams behind these companies could scale post-investment.

The Challenge

  • High Founder Dependency Across Targets

 In each deal, the founder played a central role in everything from product decisions to customer relationships. The client needed to understand if these companies could continue performing if the founder stepped back. 

  • Limited Market Data and Visibility 

These businesses operated in a region with little public data, few local benchmarks, and no formal analyst coverage. The usual diligence tools weren’t enough to build confidence around management depth or market size. 

Our Approach

Structured Expert Outreach

We started by carefully screening and selecting individuals who had worked at, competed with, or sold into these companies. This included former employees, enterprise customers, and regional competitors. 

Tailored Interview Design

Each expert call was guided by a structured interview flow. Designed in collaboration with the client to focus on founder influence, team strength, customer retention, and tech scalability.

Focused Qualitative Insights

Our moderators extracted common patterns across interviews, highlighting signals like high turnover beneath the founder or reliance on personal relationships to close enterprise deals.

Micro-Benchmarking

We ran a short B2B survey targeting 25+ decision-makers in similar markets, allowing the client to benchmark sales cycles, onboarding friction, and pricing models across peer companies.

Clear Synthesis & Risk Flags

Our team packaged the findings into short, actionable memos with clear flags and summariesmaking it easy for the deal team to compare targets side-by-side and prioritize follow-ups. 

Results & Impact

The client walked away with a real-world view of each business and not just the pitch deck version. They identified two founder-led companies where the leadership bench was strong enough for scale and passed on one where customer loyalty depended too heavily on personal ties. Our work helped them move quickly and confidently, and we’ve since supported them on other tech and cross-border deals.

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