So, it’s been a minute.
Last August, I wrote about leaving my role as COO at CorePlan. I’d spent five years building a commercial engine from zero to $6.5M ARR, leading a $3.2M raise, and figuring out how to make software that drilling contractors actually give a damn about. It was the ride of a lifetime.
I ended that post by saying I was going to catch up with family, get on the chooks, and figure out what mountain to climb next.
Well, I found the mountain. But I didn’t find it by looking up. I found it by looking at the wreckage of great products that were failing to become great companies.
If you’re an early-stage B2B founder in Australia, or if you’ve followed my journey from the sales floor to the mining tech boardrooms, this is for you. Here is what I’ve been doing while I was “figuring it out.”
1. The 72-Hour Failure
My plan for “unplugging” was ambitious. I packed one suitcase, shed 99% of my belongings, and headed to Sydney, then Bali, then Perth, then Colombo. I told myself I was going to do absolutely nothing for at least a month.
I lasted 72 hours.
It turns out that when your brain has been wired for 18 years to see business as a series of engineering problems, you can’t just turn the “debug” mode off. I’d be sitting in a cafe in Bali or hanging with my Dad in Sri Lanka helping him digitise his business, and I’d find myself talking to a founder.
And that’s when the pattern hit me.
It didn’t matter if I was in a coworking space in Colombo or a coffee shop in Surry Hills. I kept seeing the same distinct, painful tragedy: incredible technical products being built by brilliant founders who had absolutely no idea how to build a commercial engine.
They had a car with a Ferrari engine and no wheels.
2. The GTM Mirage
I started talking to dozens of these founders. And I realised why they were stuck.
Australian founders are drowning in GTM advice that was written for a Series B company in San Francisco. They’re being told to hire a “Head of Sales” before they have an ICP. They’re being told to “do SEO” for keywords nobody is searching for. They’re burning $40k on Google Ads to drive traffic to a homepage that lists features instead of business outcomes.
They’ve built what looks like a strategy, but it’s actually just a task list. And that task list is burning their runway.
Watching this reminded me of the early days at Springtech before we repositioned to CorePlan. I realised that the founders who need commercial engine expertise the most – those between $0 and $1M ARR – are the ones who can least afford a full-time COO. But they’re also the ones most likely to be cooked by a single bad quarter of the wrong strategy.
3. Revenue is Just a Messier System
I’ve always seen myself as a systems thinker (blame my Dad being a mechanical engineer). My whole Chapter 01–06 journey – from Telstra retention to UberEATS launches to building the “save the cheerleader, save the world” motion at CorePlan – has been about one thing:
Realising that revenue is just a system with worse data.
Strategy isn’t something you create in a boardroom with a 50-slide deck. Strategy is found. You diagnose the market’s illness before you prescribe the cure. If you can’t explain why you’ll win in three minutes, you don’t have a strategy; you have a wish list.
I missed that diagnostic work. I missed being in the room where the “Yeah, Nahs” happen.
At CorePlan, my best research happened at the pub. I’d be three Swanny D’s deep at an ADIA sundowner, talking to a drilling contractor who’d tell me my product was “great, but wouldn’t work for us.” Learning from people who won’t be polite to you is the only way to find real product-market fit.
I realised I wanted to help founders find that truth faster.
4. What I’m Building Now
So, I built a home for this work. I launched sachee.com.au.
I’m not a consultant. I’m an operator who embeds with founders to build their commercial engine alongside them. I’ve structured the advisory into two distinct modes because the problem changes depending on your stage:
Early Stage (<$100k ARR): This is the zero-to-one build. Finding the beachhead, defining the ICP, and running a founder-led sales motion.
Growth Stage ($100k+ ARR): This is where we professionalise the engine. Taking the process that lives in the founder’s head and making growth repeatable so the board can actually trust the forecast.
I’ve also started sharing the notes from these conversations. I want to make the “advisory” transparent, so other founders can see what doing it right looks like. A great example is Newan at Talvin.ai – a founder who shut down a 50-person agency to focus on 3 enterprise SaaS customers because he understood the power of a deep, dogfooded product.
5. A Note on Building (and the Markdown)
Finally, because I can’t stop tinkering, I’ve been building with AI.
I’m obsessed with how “agentic development” is changing how we ship software. I started a second stream of writing called The Markdown – it’s where I post raw notes on building real products with LLMs, Claude Code, and MCP servers.
It turns out that the same obsession with systems that drove the CorePlan commercial engine now drives how I think about my AI stack. (Yes, my personal assistant is named Bobo. Yes, he has a working memory. No, he hasn’t tried to take over the house yet.)
6. The Next Mountain
If you followed my farewell post last year, thank you for the support. The mountain I found isn’t a single company; it’s the Australian B2B ecosystem.
I want to see Australian founders building companies that don’t just “deserve better,” but actually win.
If you’re sitting in your spare bedroom (or a coworking office in Perth) wondering why your technical masterpiece hasn’t turned into a revenue engine yet – or if you’re ready to make your growth repeatable – I’d love to have an honest conversation.
No slides. No “buzzword salad.” Just a diagnosis of where you’re stuck.
Let’s figure out what’s currently cooked.
Sachee Perera
Perth, Australia
March 2026
