The Story of Viable: Building the Future of Experience

Sometimes the best business ideas come from watching someone else solve the wrong problem perfectly. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel Erickson revealed how Viable’s journey began with a simple observation: Superhuman, one of the fastest-growing email companies, was spending twelve hours every week manually analyzing customer feedback.

The Hidden Cost of Success

After fifteen years in tech, including roles as VP of Engineering at Ease and CTO at Gettable, Daniel had seen his share of company-building challenges. But one particular problem caught his attention: how successful companies struggled to make sense of their customer feedback.

“When I started to talk to them and other companies, I realized that there was a huge time suck in the manual analysis side of that process,” Daniel explains. “In fact, Superhuman themselves were spending about 12 hours a week just analyzing that data.”

A False Start That Led to Truth

Viable began as Viable Fit, a turnkey solution to help startups measure and improve their product-market fit. The inspiration came directly from Superhuman’s public methodology for measuring product-market fit. The initial response seemed promising – over 500 companies signed up to use their tool.

But Daniel and his team quickly discovered a fundamental flaw in their target market: “There’s actually not a whole lot of money to extract from pre Product Market Fit startups.” This realization could have been devastating. Instead, it led to a crucial insight when they noticed large enterprises using their tool for entirely different purposes.

The Real Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

The team’s investigation revealed a startling truth about enterprise feedback challenges: “80% of data that is collected by companies today is unstructured text,” Daniel notes. This includes “survey responses and App store reviews and social media mentions and call transcripts and help desk tickets and all of those kinds of things.”

This fragmented feedback created a unique problem for product teams. As Daniel explains, “Product tends to be the team that needs these insights from those other teams.” Product managers would routinely ask different departments about customer complaints or sales objections, but they’d only hear about “the most recent thing or the loudest thing” – never getting the full picture.

Building the Analysis Engine

The pivot from product-market fit measurement to enterprise feedback analysis wasn’t just a market shift – it required rethinking their entire approach to AI and data analysis. Instead of providing tools for analysts, they decided to build the analyst itself.

“What’s different about us is that we are actually building analyst,” Daniel explains. “We’re not building tools for analysts. Our end user is the business user who would normally be going to analyst to get this information.”

The AI Moat Strategy

Understanding that data alone wouldn’t be enough to defend their position, Viable took a sophisticated approach to building their AI capabilities. “With any sort of AI startup, I believe that your biggest moat is always going to be your data moat, specifically around training data,” Daniel notes.

They built this advantage through two parallel approaches: embedding feedback mechanisms directly into their product (“When you thumbs something up, it actually tells us that was a good answer, and so we can use that as training data going forward”) and developing systematic approaches to generate high-quality training data internally.

The Future of Experience Analysis

Looking ahead, Daniel sees Viable evolving beyond simple analysis into what he calls “generative analysis.” The vision involves creating more interactivity in their system, “allowing our customers to guide analysis of the analysis that we’re doing for them.”

This means moving beyond just aggregating and analyzing feedback to actively helping teams achieve their goals. As Daniel explains, they’re working on “tying company goals back to customer feedback and helping you use customer feedback to achieve those company goals.”

The future isn’t just about better analysis – it’s about turning customer feedback into actionable insights that directly drive business outcomes. For Viable, the journey from product-market fit measurement tool to enterprise experience analysis platform is just the beginning of a larger transformation in how companies understand and act on customer feedback.