Having worked at Typeface for almost a year now, one thing that's become clear is how different the enterprise marketing space is from anything else I've been a part of.
I was the fifth U.S. engineer on the Ads team, and I've watched our product go from early prototypes to becoming the highest revenue generator at the company. Even as we've scaled Ads Arc — migrating from HTML to manifest JSON, unifying ads and image into a single design editor, and building our ads agent — it's obvious we still have work to do if we want individual features to feel as razor-sharp as the best point solutions.
Looking at companies like Creatopy, Canva, or Icon: they often crush it in a single lane (video generation, templates, resizing). That focus shows up as smooth UX and fast, optimized workflows. Typeface's bet is almost the opposite: cover the full spectrum for large enterprises so they don't have to stitch together ten different tools.
The Enterprise Buyer Mindset
Enterprise customers operate on long timelines. Vendor approval can take anywhere from six months to a year, involving procurement, legal, security reviews, and multiple layers of sign-off. Once a tool is in, the bar for switching is extremely high. Incremental improvements won't cut it — you need a massive step change, sometimes on the order of 50% improvement in cost, speed, or efficiency, to even get considered.
That's why many enterprises prefer one vendor that can do it all over stitching together a dozen best-in-class point solutions. Every extra integration is another potential risk: more contracts to negotiate, more systems to secure, more support relationships to manage. The hidden costs of complexity add up fast.
Breadth Over Depth
This creates an interesting trade-off. A broad platform might not always match the specialized depth of a focused competitor, but it solves the larger pain point of consolidation. For enterprises, "good enough across the board" plus seamless integration and scale often outweighs "best in one category."
Of course, this approach comes with its own challenge: making sure breadth doesn't slide into mediocrity. If every feature is just average, adoption suffers. The best enterprise platforms find ways to elevate core workflows while still covering the full spectrum.
But here's the catch from a developer's perspective: working in this model means teams are constantly retrofitting features to align with company-wide standards, rather than optimizing purely for speed or depth in one area. The leadership strategy pushes us to deliver breadth first and depth later, which can make the day-to-day engineering work more complex.
And unlike B2C apps, where usage metrics and customer feedback flow in almost immediately, enterprise customers don't give us that kind of visibility upfront. Until a pilot or contract is signed, data is limited, so we're often building in the dark — with fewer signals to guide iteration.
The Long Game
The real advantage of this strategy shows up over time. Once enterprises adopt a broad platform, it becomes deeply embedded in their operations. As contracts grow and relationships strengthen, vendors can keep upgrading their product to close the gap with more specialized competitors. The moat isn't just the product itself — it's the combination of switching costs, trust, and long-term partnership.
Takeaway
Enterprise marketing is less about dazzling with a single killer feature and more about building trust, reliability, and scalability. Smaller tools will always shine in their focused niches, but the long-term bet is that enterprises want one trusted partner who can handle it all — even if that means sacrificing a bit of polish in the short term.
That's the game we're playing at Typeface — and winning it is harder, but the payoff is bigger.