Another trip around the sun. As is our custom, we use this occasion annually for a brief exercise in self-reflection.
(By way of reference, here are the retrospectives from last year, two years ago, our 5th anniversary, our 4th anniversary, 3rd anniversary, and first. Somehow, we missed our second birthday – likely for the best as the terrible twos can be particularly ugly for startups.)
Traveling down memory lane, let me set the stage as it was in 2016:
When we first started, the NAIC had not licensed a new Annual Statement vendor since 2001.
(TL;DR – for those who are not familiar with Gain’s business: the salient fact is that all U.S. insurance carriers have a series of regulatory reports they must complete over the course of the year, and an NAIC-certified vendor must be used to complete the filings.)
The legacy vendors had badly underinvested in their offerings over the interim. Their technology was outdated; the end user experience, poor. Gain’s bet was that a modern software approach would improve outcomes for financial reporting teams who had no good option for statutory reporting.
In founding Gain, we identified an opportunity that we found exciting. In 2016, our target customers, however, were decidedly much less enthusiastic about our prospects.
Yes, folks readily acknowledged that their current solutions were frustrating and dated. However, often in the very next breath, they predicted that neither their company, nor others, would ever change to a new solution.
I would summarize their logic along a few lines:
- Change is hard. Gain’s initial challenge, as an unknown and unproven startup, was to displace a current vendor for a mission-critical business process. These legacy relationships often dated back a decade or more.
- Particular markets and certain business roles are particularly resistant to innovation. Gain sells to insurance carriers – an industry with a well-deserved reputation for being a technology laggard. Compounding this: our target user/buyer is an accountant – a profession where comfort in the current process, however painful, often trumps openness to explore change.
- Moreover, there was deep skepticism that any new solution promising meaningful improvement was even possible. This conclusion was deeply rationale and seeded in personal experience, as insurance accountants had been forced to use archaic solutions for so, so long.
In short, at the outset, financial reporting teams simultaneously complained about the shortcomings of their current solution, and still predicted that Gain’s idea for a modern approach would never get traction.
So… eight years later, how’s it going?
Very, very well. Gain is growing, steadily taking market share from our competitors across the board. (Put another way: of the six NAIC-approved vendors, Gain alone is growing. All others are shrinking.)
Over four hundred carriers now rely on Gain for their stat. filing process each quarter.
What of the prediction that few carriers would shift from the incumbent vendor’s solution?
Here’s how and why Gain has overcome the incumbent vendor/switching costs challenge:
- Indeed, EVERYTHING about Gain’s software is a better experience, often in ways that could not be understood until our software solution was finished and in the marketplace. Seeing is believing.
- Unlike every other IT implementation project, switching is very easy and remarkably quick – ours (a form-based filing with a enforced data model across the industry) represents a unique use case. We have focused on removing all friction from setup and onboarding; the time elapsed between contract execution and customer use is typically measured in days.
- Gain’s reputation is stellar. Our managed growth strategy, prioritizing customer success first and foremost, has translated to a superlative customer experience.
Another year in the books – onwards and upwards.
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