From our own problem to a product

We did not set out to build a product. We built this because we were annoyed.

The first version was for us. One company, our competitors, our accounts, our market. It ran weekly and put reports in our inbox. Within a month two things had changed. We stopped guessing in meetings, and we started forwarding reports to people who had not asked for them.

Then we showed it to a few people outside the company. The reaction was not "nice tool". It was "can I have that for my accounts". Every one of them recognised the problem in about ten seconds, which told us more than any market research would have.

That is when it became obvious. The gap we had is not ours alone. Almost every B2B company says it monitors its market. Very few do it on a schedule, and the ones that do usually depend on one dedicated person and a spreadsheet.

Turning a working internal tool into something other companies can use is real work, and mostly not the fun kind. A short list of what actually changed.

Every account needs its own memory, its own sources and its own reports, with nothing leaking between them. Setup has to work without us in the room, because a product where the founder does the onboarding is not a product yet. Cost has to be metered and capped per account, because the AI work is the expensive part and one runaway job should not turn up as a surprise on an invoice. Email has to be a first class surface with proper delivery and unsubscribes, since most readers will never log in. And we needed an operator side, so we can support a customer without poking around in a database.

None of that shows up in a demo. All of it decides whether this survives its first fifty customers.

So that is where we are. A tool we built to fix our own bad habit is now a product we are taking to market, with plans, pricing, and a trial cycle you run on your own market rather than on a canned example.