In my last post, I shared the unvarnished truth of building a company. Our excitement stemmed from our early success in building the product and securing customers, which was counterbalanced by growth challenges. We learned that obsessing over customers is much more important than obsessing over long-tail features.
We applied what we learned, got a few more customers, but hit a roadblock. Our product wasn’t scaling as we had anticipated. Each new customer required a bespoke solution to integrate our models with their systems. It wasn’t just a one-time setup: continuous updates were needed to align with their evolving business needs. In other words, the effort required to onboard each new customer was exceptionally high, and if we continued on this path, we would become a consulting firm instead of the software company we aimed to be.
We also had to confront a harsh reality. In our rush to jump on the “talk to your data” bandwagon, we hadn’t considered if we even cared about that. This realization led us back to the drawing board. We asked ourselves, “What’s important to us? What’s something that’s broken that we genuinely care about?” The answer is education.
Working in education is really exciting, and it’s liberating to work on something you genuinely care about. Stay tuned for a follow-up update soon.