Market-Led Product Development: How Azumuta Built a Business by Listening to Customer Requests

Most startups begin with a vision of disrupting an industry. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Azumuta founder Batist Leman revealed how letting customer demands guide product development created a more sustainable path to growth.

The Maker’s Mindset

The story begins with technical expertise. “I started programming at eleven,” Batist shared. “I was always super passionate about building things, not only in code, but also like building things with legos, with electronics in the garden, building camps, things like that.” This foundation led him through mechanical engineering and automation studies to a role at a robotics company.

But the entrepreneurial pull was strong. “Then the earth was too big and I started something on my own,” Batist explained. “So I started as an independent consultant doing software projects, basically industry projects, but also I worked for bank related software items. Reliability and security are important, for example.”

The Market Signal

The pivot from consulting to product wasn’t planned – it emerged from pattern recognition. “It was 2015 or something, then came a customer asking, can you create a software tool for making these work instructions here?” Batist recalled. “I did that and a while later another manufacturing company came to me and said, hey, we have a problem with our work instructions here.”

This repeated request triggered a crucial realization: “So then I thought like, yeah, that’s now the second time they are asking me this. Perhaps I can do this as a service and provide them with this software tool online where we manage the service and improve it.”

The Iterative Evolution

Rather than making a dramatic pivot, Azumuta’s transformation was gradual. “It was never like the first 90 days,” Batist explained. “It was always something gradual for me. Like, you’re doing these projects, and then you are building these projects, and in the meanwhile, you’re also thinking about building a product and you’re experimenting with things.”

This iterative approach became core to their culture: “We really have a culture of doing things iteratively. We also listen very well to our customers. So we really started with Azumuta based on questions that we got from the market. So that’s really embedded in our company culture, listening to their customers, engaging with them, thinking with them, and building our product together with them.”

Finding Market Fit

Through this process, Azumuta developed a precise understanding of their ideal customer. “For us, it’s like our sweet spot is a discrete manufacturing… companies that are building complex products that takes a long time to make,” Batist detailed. “So for example, discrete manufacturing where it takes 60 seconds to do your job, that’s too short for us. If it’s a bit longer, like 1 hour, 2 hours to do your job, and then products with high degree of complexity.”

They also identified specific triggers that indicated strong product fit:

• When mistakes are costly: “When it costs a lot, when someone makes a mistake… because there is a danger for recalls”
• During rapid scaling: “If the demand is high in certain moment and companies want to scale up their production really fast”
• With complex products: “If there is a lot of variation in the products, like for example, options that the customer can order, or variance on the product”

The Vision Emerges

This market-led approach didn’t mean abandoning vision – instead, it helped clarify it. “We think that there will always be humans in manufacturing,” Batist explained. “Even if there are lots of robots, there will always be humans doing the oversight, helping the robots… They can’t be forgotten, end up in misery. If your knowledge is in the people’s heads and they leave your company, then all the knowledge gets lost and you have to start over.”

For technical founders, Azumuta’s journey offers a powerful lesson: sometimes the best product strategy is simply listening carefully to what the market is already asking for.