From 0 to Product-Market Fit: How Val Built a Meeting Platform That Users Actually Want

Great products often emerge from solving your own problems. For Val CEO Andy Berman, the journey to building a better meeting platform began with a frustrating reality of distributed work at his previous company.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andy shared how Val evolved from an idea born of necessity into a rapidly growing platform that’s reshaping how teams collaborate.

The Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

At Nanit, where Andy served as COO, the team had mastered complex video analytics. “At Nanit, we very much focus on providing parents with analytics from video. So we track sleep, movement, breathing. We do it all from a video feed. We use computer vision and machine learning,” Andy explains.

But running a distributed team revealed a persistent challenge: “We ran Distributed, we had a lot of people in a lot of different locations, and were always constantly searching for a conference room, catching people up just to move work forward.”

The Failed Search for Solutions

The team tried every available option. “We tried the modern video conferencing tools, whether it was Skype or Zoom or webex, and we just couldn’t find a platform that actually helped us work the way we worked,” Andy recalls.

The core issue wasn’t video quality or connection stability – it was how people actually work in meetings. “Most of the time you’re in a meeting, you have video open on one side, you have a document open on the other side. You’re copiously taking notes,” Andy explains. “And I just thought, there has to be a better tool out there that’s much more focused on collaboration.”

Building for Real Work Patterns

This insight led to Val’s three-phase approach to meetings:

“Before the meeting, everyone contributes to a shared agenda. During the meeting, everyone stays engaged and energized with a suite of collaboration features. And after the meeting, that’s the real magic,” Andy shares.

The “magic” he refers to is Val’s ability to transform meetings into actionable intelligence: “Instead of this repository of meetings, we give you instant searchable, shareable content, and you can share with anyone who needs to know. You also get an instant TLDR of what happened in the meeting about 7 seconds later.”

Differentiating Through Accuracy

In a market full of AI meeting tools, Val focused on getting the basics right. “A lot of people actually talk about AI. They talk about a summary, they talk about instant notes from the meeting. But from what I’ve seen in terms of the products out there on the market, no one actually does it accurately,” Andy notes.

This focus on accuracy resonated with users. So much so that “our user base has, I think, tripled over the last 40 days,” Andy reveals.

Finding Early Adopters

Rather than targeting everyone, Val focused on finding the right early users. “What we’ve done is we’ve partnered with a lot of great channel partners on their startup programs, whether it’s Twilio or techstars and you name it,” Andy explains. “We’re trying to find early adopters where they are and we want people who are coming in to use our product at the earliest days when they’re choosing the new tools for their company.”

The impact has been significant. Users describe Val as time travel because “you could log into after being out on vacation for a week and read the TLDRs from six or seven meetings and know exactly what happened.”

For B2B founders, Val’s journey offers several key lessons about finding product-market fit:

1. Solve a problem you deeply understand
2. Focus on how people actually work, not how they say they work
3. Get the basics right before adding fancy features
4. Find early adopters who share your vision

The path to product-market fit isn’t about building everything users ask for – it’s about solving a core problem so well that users can’t imagine going back to their old way of working.