Your second engine might already be inside your product

Every company I've worked with has hit a moment when the thing that got it here quietly stops working. For us at AnchorFree, that thing was advertising. More than 200 million people used our product for free, and for years, ads carried the business. Until they didn't.

What followed were two or three quarters of difficult board meetings, with the numbers moving the wrong way while we still had to fund a massive server infrastructure.

We did what many companies do in that position and looked hard at pricing and business models.

But the move I want to write about was quieter. It didn't make headlines, and it wasn't a new product.

Sometimes the next opportunity is a different route to market for something you've already built.

The customers were already there

Two of the largest consumer security companies at the time already had what we needed most: millions of customers, their trust, and established billing relationships. Their products focused on protecting files and applications on the desktop, but more of their customers’ activity—browsing, banking and shopping—was moving online.

This created a clear strategic opening. Could our VPN strengthen their offering by protecting customers’ privacy, anonymity, and securing their connections, especially on public Wi-Fi?

The natural instinct for a company like ours was to see these giants as competitors, bigger brands fighting for the same customers' attention and wallets. We looked at it differently. We saw an opportunity to put our capability in front of customers through companies they already trusted.

That changed the commercial question. It was no longer "How do we reach every customer ourselves?" but "Who could grow their business by selling what we had built?"

We stopped competing and started complementing.

How we structured the deal

We created a dedicated team and built white-label versions of our VPN that partners could offer to their customers under their own brands.

The commercial structure had two parts:

• Each partner paid for its customized build.
• We received a share of the revenue every time they sold it, whether as an upsell to existing customers or bundled into new sales.

The development fees funded the customization. The revenue share gave us an ongoing stake in the product's success, and we piggybacked on the growth of some of the largest security products on the market.

These partnerships drove 15% growth in our U.S. revenue and helped our partners increase customer retention by nearly 22% within a year.

White-labeling comes with a trade-off: the partner owns the customer relationship and gets the brand credit. That needs to be a deliberate commercial choice, not an afterthought.

The second engine needed its own team

Using existing technology still required us to build a different kind of business around it.

Consumer growth depended on acquisition, conversion and retention across a large audience. Partner growth depended on a smaller number of relationships, negotiated agreements, custom builds and patience.

Different skills. Different KPIs. Different demands on the team.

That is why giving the new business dedicated ownership mattered. It needed people accountable for its progress and goals that reflected how it actually worked.

There is another discipline here for any company trying this: keep the work repeatable.

Development fees can fund a build, but the ongoing revenue still needs to cover delivery, support and a healthy margin.

A partnership that generates revenue can still be a poor business if every new deal means starting again.

Takeaways

1. Your next engine may be a new route to market, not a new product. When growth stalls, most teams reach for a new feature, a new product or a new pricing model. Often the faster path is putting what you already have in front of customers you can't currently reach.
2. The companies you see as competitors may be your best distribution. Large players own customers, trust and budgets. What they often lack is speed and specific capabilities. If you fill a gap they can't easily fill themselves, you become a partner instead of a threat.
3. Structure the deal so the experiment pays for itself, and keeps paying. Build fees can fund the pilot instead of your own runway. Revenue share keeps you earning as the partner sells. But the economics only work if each new deal is repeatable, not a fresh build every time.
4. Give the new engine its own team. A second engine run as a side project inside the first one will lose every fight for resources. Separate owners, separate goals, separate metrics.
5. Make the brand trade-off deliberately. White-labeling means someone else owns the customer relationship and gets the credit. That's hard for teams proud of their product. When growth has stalled, it can be the right trade, as long as you choose it with open eyes.

Where I see this opportunity in AI

Many software companies are hitting a wall today. Customer acquisition is expensive, sales cycles are long, and markets are crowded. At the same time, established players are under pressure to add AI faster than they can build it themselves.

It's the same pattern we saw at AnchorFree. The established company has the customers, the trust and a place in their daily workflow. The smaller company has an AI capability that makes one part of that workflow significantly better. Together, they can offer something neither could alone.

For it to work, two things need to be clear.

1. The customer benefit has to be specific. What actually improves: time spent on a task, error rates, speed of decisions, revenue? "AI-powered" isn't a benefit on its own.
2. The partner needs a commercial reason to sell it. That could be a new paid offering, stronger retention, or a capability that helps win new customers.

If you have strong AI technology, keep your direct sales plan, but also ask: who could make this capability more valuable by putting it inside a product customers already use?

How to spot it in your company

Ask yourself:

• Who already sells to your ideal customer, and what are they missing?
• Which part of your product could stand on its own under someone else's name?
• Which large company in your market would rather buy your capability than build it?
• What would they pay to have it ready in months instead of years?

Your next growth engine may already exist in your technology. Finding it takes a fresh look at who could sell it, how the economics would work, and who inside your company would own it.

I'm Baglan Rhymes. I work with investors, boards and technology leadership teams to turn strong technology into commercial growth.