Last year, Invest in Open infrastructure embarked on a four-month engagement (June-October 2025) with 2i2c aimed at providing executive coaching and strategic advisory services to strengthen its business development capacity and accelerate progress toward product-market fit. 2i2c is a non-profit organization that designs, develops, and operates interactive computing environments that facilitate workflows for open science and education in the cloud.
IOI's Director of Development, Emma Green led the engagement, working with 2i2c's Business Development Manager, Jim Colliander, and supported by Chrys Wu, Solutions Strategist at IOI. Jim reflected on what the partnership looked like in practice, what it made possible, and the key takeaways from the engagement. Below are some highlights.
When IOI first began working with 2i2c, what were the most urgent business or growth challenges you were trying to solve, and how were those affecting your ability to operate sustainably?
Jim: The core challenge was straightforward but not easy: we needed a credible path to organizational sustainability. Since 2i2c’s formation in 2020, we have built an initial base of recurring revenue. However, much of that recurring revenue had been secured through founders' networks and warm referrals; a pattern the team recognized as unsustainable.
At the same time, we were navigating a significant internal transition. In early 2025, we moved from offering a managed JupyterHub service to a membership model, partly to make the full range of value we provide more explicit. That shift raised harder questions about what kind of organization we actually wanted to be. Some of the team saw our path to scale as becoming more like a SaaS product. Others felt it required more consultancy-style, bespoke engagement. IOI helped us work through that tension and arrive at a shared definition of what scaling actually means for 2i2c — which turned out to be important for our next steps.
What key assumptions about your role and approach to market, pricing, or go-to-market approach did IOI help you test or rethink, and which of those turned out to be the most important?
Jim: IOI guided 2i2c to take a more hypothesis-driven approach to go-to-market strategy, starting with identifying a key assumption that 2i2c had made: that 2i2c could successfully sell directly to Premier-tier customers through cold outreach. IOI helped us think about go-to-market with improved terminology and a scientific approach that centers user needs through user discovery processes.
What we discovered surprised us. Customers were not only seeking access to hubs. They were looking for genuine engagement with the 2i2c team, connections to other 2i2c communities, and a sense of participation in something larger.
On a personal level, the engagement also shifted my perception of my role. I had been conflating three distinct functions: the Farmer (focused on retention and expansion), the Hunter (focused on net new sales), and the Business Development Lead (focused on strategy and building growth systems). Recognizing which hat I was wearing at any given moment changed how I thought about scaling sales.
How did IOI’s engagement influence conversations/enhance alignment between business development, product, and engineering within 2i2c?
Jim: We discovered that we had real internal misalignment — not just on strategic direction, but on how commitments from the sales side were being translated into scoped work for product and engineering, and on how customer feedback was feeding back into what we built.
IOI recommended a recurring customer insights meeting that brings together business development, product, and delivery teams to create a structured cross-functional feedback loop. This has been implemented and we are already seeing improvements in the business-to-product feedback loop within 2i2c. IOI introduced and documented sales ceremonies. We now have a daily Business Development standup, a bi-weekly business strategy meeting, and a weekly engagement meeting. IOI’s Emma joined some of 2i2c’s BD meetings near the end of the engagement to provide real-time coaching and follow-up guidance.
Can you describe a concrete change in how 2i2c now approaches the BD role, sales, partnerships, or product design that grew directly out of this coaching and advisory work?
Jim: IOI helped us develop clear written role definitions distinguishing the Account Manager function from the Business Development Lead function. That clarity reduced some friction.
We also adopted a SAM/TAM horizon framework — mapping our Serviceable and Total Addressable Markets across a three-horizon planning timeline — which shifted our thinking from quarterly wins to a two-to-three year view of market expansion. That longer lens has been useful.
We built a practice of customer discovery. After IOI coached us on survey design, bias, and validation thresholds, I ran a structured customer survey experiment with eleven respondents. The results shaped our product direction and improved our internal consensus.
Looking ahead, how has this work reshaped your confidence to contribute to and drive and what ‘scaling’ realistically means for 2i2c as an open infrastructure organization?
Jim: The most clarifying moment in the entire engagement was probably the reframing of what "scale" actually means for an organization like ours. Our first target isn't AWS-level growth — it's building repeatable, legible processes for five to ten customers of the same type. That sounds modest, but getting there requires exactly the kind of disciplined system-building we needed..
Emma's coaching shifted something more fundamental too. My focus used to be on getting things done; now it's on building evidence-based systems and knowledge that the whole team can work from. That's a different job in some important ways. The 2i2c team is more focused now on learning and building strong internal habits than on task completion — and I think that's the right foundation for where we want to go.
This post is part of our “Infrastructure Showcase” series. To stay updated on posts from this series and more from Invest in Open Infrastructure, please sign up for our newsletter. Interested in IOI’s strategic consulting services to further research infrastructure health, sustainability, and growth on these topics or related areas of work? Get in touch!