01 · The context: a studio that industrialized the 0 → 1
OSS Ventures builds AI solutions for the manufacturing industry. Twenty-two solutions in the portfolio, 3,800 factories equipped worldwide, and startups of every size: from a large scale-up like Fabriq to a fast-growing startup like Bonx, down to young companies still inside the builder.
The studio's method is well-oiled. An idea (Bonx's no-code ERP, for instance) is confronted with industrial companies to collect as many insights as possible, then co-built with three to five first partners until the product satisfies them, within a few months. Then comes the go-to-market phase: positioning, first segment, first processes, first revenue team. After roughly a year to a year and a half, the startup leaves the studio and takes flight on its own.
"My job is to think and build the go-to-market systems of our startups: design the strategy, translate it into the right processes, put the right tools in place, and recruit the first revenue team."
The 0 → 1, finding product-market fit, is what the studio does best. The 1 → 10, scaling what has been validated, is a discipline of its own. And there is a structural constraint:
"We have a large portfolio, and I'm on my own. My goal is to surround myself with experts who can deliver real operational assistance to the startups on these topics."
02 · Why us: experts who think in systems
Ksenya Borzov wasn't looking for one more marketing agency. She was looking for a way of thinking.
"In go-to-market, there are so many different jobs: marketing, GTM engineering... And the key skill to succeed in an ambitious startup environment, with big growth targets, is systems thinking. It's a quality you end up finding in very few experts."
The classic approach: one agency per silo. The market has organized itself into specialties: the outbound agency sends sequences, the RevOps agency plugs in tools, the marketing agency produces campaigns and content. Each one optimizes its own scope, delivers its deliverables, and moves on. The result: three vendors, three roadmaps, and no one to own the revenue system as a whole. The lead generated by one doesn't connect to the processes of another, and the CRM becomes the grey area between the three.
"In France, and especially in the Paris ecosystem, marketing works in a silo, quite separate from the revenue function. Wrongly so: we sell to enterprise, and without marketing, it's just not possible. And if marketing isn't inserted into a system, it doesn't work."
Our approach: one single system, with outbound, RevOps, and marketing as its bricks. One partner designs the strategy, encodes the processes into the tools, and aligns the channels with each other. One roadmap, one clean CRM, and bricks that reinforce each other instead of merely coexisting.
That's exactly where the match happened:
"Namia's great strength is that they are experts who think in revenue systems, exactly the way we do at OSS. That's quite rare. I found a natural complementarity with our very systemic way of doing go-to-market: strategy bricks, process bricks, and people bricks. It worked very naturally."
With a very concrete consequence at the moment a startup leaves the studio:
"Instead of simply delivering deliverables, they deliver a turnkey system that is scalable and can last for years if you follow what has been put in place. As a result, handovers are always quite easy."
03 · Three portfolio companies, one same journey: from 1 to 10
On that basis, OSS entrusted us with the go-to-market of three portfolio startups, each at a pivotal moment of its scaling phase. Three different contexts, one single approach: not stacking actions, but building for each startup one revenue system where the departments are aligned instead of working in silos.
Concretely, thinking in systems means three things in these missions:
Aligning the departments into one machine. Marketing, content, outbound, sales, and CRM are not separate projects: each brick feeds the next. Content fuels lead generation, leads land qualified in clean processes, and sales executes on a machine where every part talks to the others.
Building on three bricks: strategy, process, people. Strategy sets the segment and the message, processes encode it into the tools and the CRM, and the team plugs into it instead of carrying everything.
Designing for scale from day one. A system that holds when the segment changes, when hires stack up, and when volume grows, without a rebuild every six months.
04 · What this changes for a fund or a studio
A portfolio rarely gets stuck on product. It gets stuck on go-to-market repeatability: every startup reinvents its own machine, repeats the same mistakes, and the learnings stay locked inside each company.
A shared GTM partner compounds the portfolio. What is learned at one company (segments, sequences, data, processes) benefits the next. Every new startup starts its scaling phase with a proven system, not a blank page.
A system outlives people. The first revenue team plugs into a skeleton, strategy, process, and people bricks, rather than into habits. Hires stack up without the machine collapsing, and handovers happen without friction.
The right moment is product-market fit. Too early, there is nothing to encode into the system yet. Too late, the debt is already there. The ideal window opens when the startup starts capitalizing on its PMF.
And tomorrow, the system becomes the prerequisite for agentic AI.
"Systems thinking is key when you want to move fast without everything collapsing. And it will be even more important tomorrow, with systems of AI agents: if you don't think the system through, orchestrating all of that will be very complicated."
05 · The practical takeaway
For a studio or a fund that wants to take its portfolio companies from 1 to 10, it comes down to three decisions:
- Treat go-to-market as a system, with strategy, process, and people bricks, not as a sum of deliverables
- Bring the expertise in at product-market fit, when the skeleton of the revenue function is being set
- Share that partner across the portfolio, so every startup capitalizes on the learnings of the others
"The perfect profile is a startup that has its product-market fit and is just starting to capitalize on it: the first strategic elements, the first processes, a true sparring partner on these topics. And it's just as relevant for startup studios and VC funds with portfolios of startups at that stage: after a hyper-ambitious product phase, it would be a shame not to capitalize on that work."
What if we built the same system for your portfolio?
A startup that just found product-market fit, or a studio or fund with portfolio companies at that stage: we audit your go-to-market and identify your improvement levers in 30 minutes.