A go-to-market that won the room and lost the migration

Go-to-market · HighWire Press · 2023–25

The brief

HighWire had built DigiCorePro: a single-source publishing system that takes a manuscript from article concept through to publication in one configurable workflow. AI-assisted, modular, with a peer reviewer database built in. It was a genuinely modern product in a market not known for them.

It had no route to market. We built one.

Whose work this was

The go-to-market was owned by three of us: the product manager, my manager and me. The PM carried the largest share — they were talking to customers daily, and both the ICP definition and the read on which segments would actually respond came out of those conversations. My manager and I shaped it alongside them.

What was entirely mine was the strategy document and the execution. I wrote the deck. I ran the campaign.

I sized it from the inside out

The instinct with a new product is to chase the biggest addressable market. We did the opposite, and sequenced it in three phases, nearest first.

Phase 0 was existing workflow clients — people already running our older systems, who had the least to lose by moving. Phase 1 was customers already using our other products: they knew us, but had never bought workflow from us. Phase 2 was net-new — university presses, society publishers and associations across North America and the EU.

The logic was that credibility compounds. A publisher considering a workflow migration wants to know who else has done it. Starting with clients who already trusted us was meant to build the reference base that made Phase 2 possible.

That sequencing was right. The problem was elsewhere.

What we were actually up against

Not a feature gap. Almost every publisher worth selling to already ran a workflow system — in practice one of the two incumbents that dominate scholarly submission and peer review. And a great many of them didn’t like it.

That sounds like an opportunity. It isn’t.

Switching a publishing workflow means retraining every editor. It means telling your peer reviewers — unpaid people who do this on goodwill — that they now need to learn a different tool and work out where to leave their comments in it. It means a proof of concept where you sit with the vendor explaining that your XML generates citations one way and you need them another. Then integrating the result into infrastructure the publisher has already built everything else around.

Nobody goes through that because a competitor is better. They go through it when the current system has become genuinely unusable — and even then, reluctantly.

The part I’m still proud of

Every competitor in this category pitches the publisher, because the publisher signs the contract.

But a publishing workflow has three users who experience it completely differently. Publishers care about cost, migration risk and vendor dependence. Authors care about time-to-market, desk rejection, and simply knowing where their manuscript is in the process. Reviewers care about not logging into four separate systems to review four papers, and about choosing what they review rather than waiting to be asked.

So we built the value proposition three ways and pitched each audience on its own terms. It made the product legible to people who influence the decision without owning it — and in scholarly publishing, editors and reviewers influence a great deal.

If I take one transferable thing from this work, it’s that.

What we launched

The POC went live at Frankfurter Buchmesse in October 2023, using a speaker slot rather than a booth. The full product followed in 2024.

Around it: a pre-launch “what’s brewing” social series, a drip email campaign to our list, blogs on single-source publishing, a press release, trade advertising, and a sales enablement kit — product sheet, sales deck, walkthrough video, mailer creative — so account managers could actually carry it.

What happened

2	speaking slots won at consecutive industry events
3	industry consultants and analysts engaged
5	MQLs from the launch event, of which 2 progressed to SQL
5+	RFP invitations
1	client migrated — an existing client on an older system, grandfathered across, no revenue uplift
0	new customers, as of my departure in September 2025

I want to be precise about that last row. Enterprise sales cycles in scholarly publishing run about a year, and I left before several of those RFPs would have resolved. What I can say is that while I was there, nothing new closed.

The awareness worked. We went from a product nobody had heard of to one being discussed in the industry, with two consecutive speaking slots and consultants taking meetings to understand what we were building. In a market this small that is not nothing — consultants are who publishers ask before they shortlist.

It just didn’t convert.

What I got wrong

I built a campaign that treated the buying decision as a value comparison. Better product, clearer benefits, lower total cost — therefore switch.

Publishing workflow isn’t bought that way. It’s a migration-risk decision. Moving means retraining editors, remapping years of metadata, and betting a journal’s production schedule on a vendor you haven’t used for this before. Against that, “better” is close to irrelevant. I watched publishers with visibly struggling infrastructure decline to move, and they weren’t being irrational — the cost of a failed migration is worse than the cost of a bad system that works.

What I’d do differently: build the whole thing around de-risking the migration rather than around the product’s advantages. Parallel running, staged cutover, migration guarantees, a free pilot on a single journal. Make the first step small enough that saying yes isn’t a bet.

And I’d have gone much harder at Phase 0. The one migration we completed was an existing client on an older system — the exact profile with the lowest switching cost. That should have been the whole first year, not the warm-up.