Product & growth

Forget hiring: how buying a startup gets your product to market faster

Lucian Katzbach Gamification designer & startup coach

2 July 2025Published

3 minReading time

A board with five steps: acquire a startup, integrate the team, use the running product, get to market faster and accelerate growth — next to figures for product, team and growth

Plenty of companies dream of pushing into new digital markets — but building a product team with real punch costs time, money and, above all, nerves. Anyone who wants to start quickly needs more than a good idea: a working team, a market-ready prototype — or a trick.

The lever almost nobody pulls: buying a company instead of building a team

Two routes side by side: hire and build yourself, nine to eighteen months to launch, or buy and start, two to five months — up to three times faster to market

As a chief digital officer — one you first have to find — you are usually facing a Herculean task. Instead of spending months on recruiting platforms hunting for developers and product owners, you can buy an existing startup, working software, team dynamics and proof of concept included. Unusual? Yes. But it is time more corporates thought about it. Because:

Good software teams do not grow on trees.
Productivity does not arrive on day one — it arrives after months of onboarding.
And what if your CDO does not have the team together for another year?

Buying a startup can be the shortcut to:

getting to market faster,
taking on knowledge that already exists,
realising genuine synergies — not just on paper.

Example: a language-learning app as a strategic asset

A language-learning app for real conversations: technology in place, a working team and first market presence, next to the app on a phone showing voice recording, progress and the weekly goal

Take praktika.ai. The app is an AI language coach that talks to the user the way a real teacher would. Instead of multiple choice or vocabulary lists the app holds real conversations — in English, with speech recognition, natural interaction and individually generated feedback from ChatGPT.

Granted: the product is at an early stage. The UX and the teaching approach both have room to grow. But that is exactly what makes praktika.ai interesting for an established EdTech company:

The technology is there: voice-based AI dialogue is technically demanding, and Praktika has already built it.
The team is there: the engineers are productively working on an innovative core problem.
The product is in the market: gaps and all, the entry is done. What it needs now is experience in teaching design and scaling.

This is not a finished product — it is a valuable rough diamond that the right resources can quickly cut into a market leader.

Three stages side by side: a rough stone as untapped potential, a cut stone through focus, and a finished brilliant as market leader

Why build it yourself when you could buy it?

Build versus buy: on the left recruiting, onboarding, delays and high costs with an uncertain outcome; on the right an existing team, finished software, a validated product and faster traction in the market

I have built software teams over my career. Sometimes successfully, often painfully. It takes months to find the right people, onboard them, build a shared understanding and only then become productive. In that time your competitor may already be in the market.

Buying a startup saves you exactly that phase. You take on a working team that has already learned how to work together. You get a product with real market feedback. And you can work with real user data from day one.

Real users from day one: 12,400 active users, 62 percent next-day return, a 48 percent activation rate and the features actually being used — real signals instead of guesses

A bonus: many of these startups are excellent at technology but weak on positioning, UX or teaching design. That is precisely where your own expertise adds value.

Three exercises to get your own thinking going:

The three next steps as cards: think — what is the core problem, for whom and to what end; research — competitors, customer voices and market trends; and ask the AI — gather ideas, sharpen the plan, get feedback

Reflect: what would a startup have to bring for buying it to be faster and more efficient than building your own team?
Research task: search the App Store (iOS or Google Play) for an app that could fit your portfolio and is clearly not a corporate product. How would you develop it further?
Use AI as a sparring partner: ask ChatGPT with this prompt:

An EdTech example: "Which EdTech startups with a language-learning app are currently at an early market stage but show potential for fast growth if they partnered with an experienced company?"

Add your own focus to the question — audience, language, learning context. Then talk through with ChatGPT what an integration could look like.

From acquisition to acceleration: acquire, integrate, accelerate, grow — underneath the effect: double the product pace, 40 percent higher customer satisfaction, 35 percent market expansion and triple revenue growth