Case study · 0→1 and scale
Maximl: taking industrial workflow automation from zero to $500K ARR
Maximl builds software that guides frontline industrial teams through safe, auditable work. I was on the founding leadership team as a product manager and launched its cloud workflow-automation platform.
- Role
- Product manager, founding leadership team
- Company
- Maximl Labs, seed to Series B
- Domain
- Industrial workflow automation, frontline safety
- Team
- 3 PMs, 4 designers, 4 QA engineers
- $500K
- ARR in year one
- ~50K
- users in year one
- 25%
- faster time-to-market
The problem: critical work runs on paper
Industrial operations in sectors such as oil and gas, power, mining and chemicals depend on checklists, standard operating procedures and audits to keep people safe. Much of that still lived on paper and in disconnected systems, which made standards inconsistent, compliance hard to track and the state of the work hard to see.
The people carrying out that work were largely frontline, blue-collar workers. Safety and productivity both depended on the procedure being followed correctly, every time.
What we built
A cloud platform of rule-based, smart workflows. It turns procedures, checklists and audits into guided digital workflows that frontline workers follow on the job, while the office teams coordinating with them see the state of the work as it happens. It was built for industrial workplaces that want a safer environment without losing productivity.
A procedure, SOP or checklist
Often on paper
A guided digital workflow
Frontline workers follow it step by step on the job
A rule is broken
Instant alert
Steps complete
Visible to office teams
How it scaled
In its first year the platform reached $500K in ARR and about 50,000 users, and time-to-market came down 25%.
Encode the safe way to do the job as rules
Instead of asking workers to remember procedure, the workflows carry it. Each step of a job is defined once, enforced the same way every time, and checked as it happens.
Design for the person on the floor, not the person in the office
The users who mattered most were frontline, blue-collar workers doing physical jobs in demanding environments. If the workflow slowed them down, it would be skipped, so it had to fit the work rather than interrupt it.
Open distribution through a partner
Selling into industrial companies one at a time is slow. Building the first partner channel, with DuPont Sustainable Solutions across LATAM and Europe, gave the product a route into customers that already trusted the partner.
Build the team and the operating rhythm alongside the product
I hired and managed three product managers, four designers and four QA engineers, set OKRs, and introduced Agile and scrum, so the product could keep shipping as the company grew from seed toward Series B.
What carried forward
Rule-based workflows that guide people through the right next step show up again in the entitlement-aware recommendations at Zuora. Partner-led distribution shows up in the Okta, Microsoft and SailPoint integrations around OneID. And building a team while shipping is the same work I later did mentoring product managers at scale.
Read the OneID case study →Read the unified experience case study →Building a product from zero?
I'm always glad to compare notes on 0→1 launches, first partner channels and growing a product team.
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