Nila's Anthony Jacob on GTM Sequences: Scaling Consumer Learnings Into Enterprise Customers
Nila's Anthony Jacob on GTM Sequences: Scaling Consumer Learnings Into Enterprise Customers
Words by Anthony Jacob Founders Factory
January 19th 2026 / 8 min read
When I started building Nila, I didn’t set out with a perfectly formed go-to-market strategy. What I had was a very real problem, a lot of uncertainty, and a strong instinct that the only way to get this right was to stay as close to customers as possible.
Nila supports people living abroad who are responsible for the care of ageing parents and relatives back home. We help families coordinate trusted, on-the-ground care from navigating hospitals and paperwork to wellness checks and day-to-day support in markets where healthcare systems are fragmented and trust is hard to establish from thousands of miles away.
Nila sits at the intersection of healthcare and family responsibility. Our customers are often balancing demanding jobs in countries like Canada, the UK, US, or Australia, while trying to make sure their parents receive safe, reliable care in places like India. When something goes wrong they’re often a 12-hour flight away.
From day one, we believed the business would eventually scale through B2B partnerships with banks, fintechs and platforms serving diaspora communities. But we also knew that if we got the fundamentals wrong on what families actually needed, what they trusted, and what they were willing to pay for, then no partnership would save us.
Looking back, the single most important decision we made was starting B2C first, even though it meant slower growth.
Why we chose B2C when B2B looked more attractive
On paper, B2B was tempting from day one. We were building a product for people in the Indian diaspora, many of whom work in banks, fintechs and large corporates in Canada, the UK and US. It was easy to imagine partnerships with remittance companies, banks or insurers distributing Nila to tens of thousands of customers at once. But the problem was that we didn’t yet understand the customer deeply enough.
Nila sits at the intersection of healthcare, trust and family responsibility. This isn’t a space where assumptions survive first contact with reality. We needed to understand not just what people said they wanted, but how they behaved when something went wrong with a parent thousands of miles away. So we made a deliberate choice to start B2C, even if it meant slower growth.
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Subscribe on SubstackSubscribe on LinkedinExtreme proximity beats early scale
Our first ~60 families came not through funnels or partnerships but conversations, referrals and a lot of manual work.
Our product was essentially me and the personal WhatsApp number of almost every early customer. I checked in with them every few weeks. Then after a few months I asked what was working, what felt stressful, and what they didn’t trust yet. Those conversations shaped everything:
What services mattered versus what sounded slick on a pitch deck
How we explained the service on the website
Where trust broke down in moments of stress
What good care actually meant to families, not to service providers
Some of the most important product decisions we made didn’t come from data dashboards but uncomfortable WhatsApp messages when we’d got something wrong.
If you’re early, proximity is your unfair advantage. You can’t outsource it, and no partnership will give it to you.
Nila: A snapshot
- Founded: 2024
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B2C exposed the real job-to-be-done
One of the biggest lessons B2C taught us was that customers weren’t buying “healthcare” or “insurance”. They were buying peace of mind during the 72 hours they couldn’t get on a plane.
That insight completely reframed the product. It changed how we staffed operations, how we trained caregivers, how we talked about Nila publicly.
Had we gone straight to B2B, we would have been selling the wrong story and partnerships would have quietly stalled.
Validate who your customer is and build for them
There was a clear moment when B2C taught us the all important lesson that manual systems don’t scale trust. As we grew past the first 60 families, WhatsApp and spreadsheets started to crack. The fact that we were continuously double checking people’s information was a sign that operations were becoming fragile.
That was the signal to invest in the product, not for the sake of a glossy UI (which I believe we achieved anyway), but because the cost of getting it wrong had become too high. In other words we’d grown to the point of needing automation and backend improvements - rather than building in the hope that slick upgrades would draw customers and retention.
By the time we reached 50–60 families, we knew:
Exactly who the customer was
What they were willing to pay
Which services drove retention
Where technology actually mattered
Only then did it make sense to raise money and build properly.
Why we waited to sell to businesses
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about B2B partnerships: they don’t fix unclear products. They amplify them. Banks, fintechs and platforms don’t want to help you figure it out. They want something proven, de-risked and easy to explain internally.
Because we’d gone B2C first, by the time we started serious B2B conversations:
We had real unit economics
We had case studies and customer stories
We knew which markets converted best (distance and time zones mattered more than we’d expected)
We could clearly articulate why Nila worked
Those early B2C customers also became our strongest advocates. Many of them were senior operators in banks and tech companies. Because they’d lived through the journey with us, they were willing to make introductions and those intros were warm in a way no cold outreach ever is.
What I’d tell founders building today
If you’re early and debating GTM, here’s the guidance I’d give myself in hindsight:
Start where feedback is fastest, not where revenue looks biggest
Earn the right to scale before you try to distribute
If trust is core to your product, stay uncomfortably close to users
Partnerships work when your story is already true, not when it’s aspirational
The learnings from our consumer-first GTM approach set the foundation for our success selling into B2B segments.
The lesson for founders building for the unknown
If there’s one thing I’d tell founders working in hard-to-abate sectors, it’s to not over-optimise for today’s market. You don’t need to know exactly where the world is heading, but you do need to design for uncertainty. That means:
Building transferable systems, not point solutions
Focusing on adaptability, not perfection
Solving problems that remain painful even when assumptions change
Markets and policies will change and demand curves can surprise us, but technologies that survive are the ones designed to flex.
For Thunderstone, that means rethinking extraction not as a fixed process, but as an evolving capability that can support whatever future the world ends up needing.
That’s the only way mining and mining technology can remain viable in a future no one can fully predict.
About Anthony
Anthony Jacob is the Founder & CEO of Nila, a cross-border senior care platform connecting diaspora families with trusted, on-the-ground healthcare support for ageing parents. Based across London, New York and Bangalore, Anthony is building Nila to modernise how families coordinate care internationally. Prior to Nila, Anthony led growth across Asia and East Africa at Taptap Send, helping scale one of the world’s leading cross-border remittance companies, and previously founded and led Anjara, backed by Antler and Eigenspace. His career spans venture-backed startups and high-growth environments including Bus.com (YC W16), where he focused on pricing and strategy. Anthony brings deep experience in cross-border finance, growth and operations to tackling one of the most urgent challenges facing global families today.
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