Beyond MVP: How Tensorflight Spent 4 Years Perfecting Their Core Product Before Scaling

In an era where “move fast and break things” remains the default startup mantra, spending four years perfecting a core product seems almost heretical. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tensorflight co-founder Robert Kozikowski revealed how this patient approach to product development helped them win over some of the insurance industry’s biggest players.

The Initial Vision and Pivot

Tensorflight’s journey began in 2016, during what Robert calls a time of “lots of hype for drones.” However, they quickly discovered a fundamental problem with their initial approach. As Robert explains, “If you apply AI, you’re kind of making money on scale. And the problem with drones is that there were just too few drone flights, too much challenges with drone flights to really make it that computer vision startups would succeed.”

The Long Road to Product-Market Fit

Rather than rushing to expand features or markets after their pivot to satellite imagery, Tensorflight took a methodical approach to product development. Robert notes, “The problem didn’t change by a lot, but there was really the kind of real market fit maybe last two years.” This meant spending from 2017 to 2021 focused on one goal: getting the core product right.

Why Perfect Beats Fast

The reason for this careful approach becomes clear when Robert describes the complexity of their problem domain: “There are so many different shapes and sizes, year built standards which geocoding, or in case of commercial properties, you can have multiple buildings per address, multiple addresses per building. So just even figuring out what needs to be insured is a challenge.”

Learning Through Customer Interaction

Instead of following traditional product development methodologies, Tensorflight let their customers guide their refinement process. As Robert explains, “We’re joking that our product management department is our customer underwriter… we just kept talking to a few companies and basically just building what they told us.”

The Technical Evolution

The years between 2017 and 2021 weren’t spent adding features but rather perfecting their core capabilities. Robert describes this period as “working with customers, refining the solution to the level that it can scale automatically.” This focus on refinement rather than expansion helped them build trust with major enterprise customers.

The Results of Patient Development

Today, Tensorflight works with “three out of five biggest commercial property insurers in US. That’s Fortune 500 companies, and they’re using the solution actively over the time.” This success suggests that in complex technical domains, patience in product development can be a competitive advantage.

Looking Forward

Having established their core product, Tensorflight is now thinking about expansion. Robert outlines their vision: “Going deeper into insurance and from just providing just building attributes, we provide additional risk scores, additional more in depth analytics than building attributes.”

For technical founders, Tensorflight’s experience offers a counterintuitive lesson: sometimes the path to faster growth requires slowing down first. By spending years perfecting their core product rather than rushing to scale, they built the foundation for lasting success in an industry where trust and reliability matter more than speed to market.

Rather than following the typical startup playbook of rapid iteration and expansion, Tensorflight’s story suggests that in complex technical domains, patience in product development can be a strategic advantage, especially when selling to enterprise customers who value reliability over novelty.