Our brand got roasted at a recent pitch we did.
We presented Spryngbase as a community plus whiteboarding tool. The idea: employees could map their own workflows and discover where AI could be useful, then engage with the community to keep learning and growing. We walked in with energy. We walked in with a vision. And we had receipts.
We had one paying client and another interested one, and also a workshop set up with a software provider who provides software to lawyers. We believed that what we were providing had weight.
From the get-go, the jury began with: "The time-to-value for your product seems ultra-long: users need to first sign up and then learn themselves before they actually have their aha moment." One jury member quipped: "Why can't you just launch this as a newsletter?"
No questions about the team. No questions about our scaling plan. No questions about customer conversations. That's when we felt it wasn't what we had anticipated.
For the first couple of hours, we were in denial. Delulu is the only sololu? We claimed we just had a bad day. But as we dissected the feedback, we realized that perhaps we had a lot of work to do.
Here's what the dissection actually revealed.
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LinkedIn Lies?
We thought the solution we had resonated. We had added lawyers to our network on LinkedIn, asked them to contribute to a report about AI adoption in the legal sphere in Belgium. They did. We had actual signal from actual customers.
We also held a webinar for lawyers where we saw decent interest.
Credits: Spryngbase
But in all of this we hadn't yet pitched them a solution or given an indication of what we were doing. We were trying to be everywhere, all at once. Not committing to our solution. We wanted something scalable but we just didn't know where to go.
So we thought of a SaaS solution. And the feedback from advisors, working at reputed organizations was great. But at the pitch we were challenged by that very premise. We were not able to convince the jury. And we just were not able to reconcile it in our heads: how do we weigh actual signal from actual customers against feedback from people who were advisors to SaaS products for a living?
That's the failure mode, stated plainly. The lawyers responded. That was real. But we hadn't closed the loop. The advisors felt like validation because they spoke the language of what we were building. However, the lawyers were the reason we were building it.
The advisors who gave us positive feedback, I haven't gone back to them to say the jury tore it apart. We needed all of their feedback to be able to move forward. Of course, they were all right from their own perspective. We just need to be more cautious about listening more to the customer.
What I mean is: we need to be more deliberate about whose validation we're collecting, and what it's actually validating.
The sting of "why can't you just launch this as a newsletter?" is interesting to sit with. We had partially anticipated that our solution could become a content system. But we do believe there is potential to go beyond that. Mainly because content systems already exist. What doesn't exist is a support system to help people effectively navigate AI solutions. That's the thing we're actually building. But the jury didn't see that, and that's on us. We were too spread out in what we were offering to make the real value land.
We slept over it. And then we came to the conclusion that we need to focus more, pick one niche and one customer type, and not go too broad. We all arrived at it individually and then spoke over it and agreed. No "I told you so." No blame. Just a team willing to dissect something uncomfortable together.
The thing I keep returning to isn't the pitch itself. It's the months before it, when the feedback felt real precisely because it came from people whose opinions we respected. That's the dangerous part. Proximity to smart people can feel like proximity to the truth. It isn't, really.
We had lawyers in our network. They showed up for a report. But despite that we were looking for validation in the rooms that felt safer. Advisors speak your language. They get the product logic. Customers just tell you whether it solves their problem.
Your customer is the only one who can tell you if you've solved their problem. Everyone else is giving you feedback on an idea. We were in the wrong room. We just didn't know it until we got roasted in the right one.
Grow-th Architect is where I (Shreya Vaidya) think out loud about brand-building, positioning, and the slow work underneath the visible stuff. If this resonated, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it.