Viable’s Enterprise Pivot: When Your Wrong Customers Are Actually Right

Success metrics can lie. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel Erickson revealed how Viable’s journey to product-market fit began by questioning what looked like early success – 500 companies signing up for their product-market fit measurement tool.

When Success Isn’t Success

The initial signs looked promising. Viable Fit, as they were then called, had built a turnkey solution inspired by Superhuman’s widely-shared methodology for measuring product-market fit. The product attracted significant interest, but Daniel and his team discovered a crucial flaw: “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 them to notice something more interesting: large enterprises with established product-market fit were using their tool. The question was why.

Finding the Signal in the Noise

The investigation revealed a deeper 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.”

The real problem wasn’t measuring product-market fit – it was making sense of massive amounts of customer feedback scattered across different systems and teams. As Daniel explains, “Product tends to be the team that needs these insights from those other teams… but they have to go to each one of these and they go talk to people about this and inevitably what happens is these people are like, it’s not their job to distill all of this stuff down.”

The Framework for Reading Market Signals

Viable’s pivot reveals three crucial principles for identifying market opportunities:

1. Watch What Customers Actually Do Instead of just measuring sign-ups or stated interest, pay attention to unexpected usage patterns. Enterprise customers were using their product-market fit tool for general feedback analysis – a signal that pointed to a much larger opportunity.
2. Look for Manual Workarounds The team discovered that Superhuman “were spending about 12 hours a week just analyzing that data.” When successful companies invest significant manual effort in a process, it’s often a sign of an unmet market need.
3. Find the Hidden Buyer Product teams emerged as the natural buyer because they needed insights from multiple teams but couldn’t get them efficiently. As Daniel notes, product managers would “go to the head of customer support and say, ‘hey, what are the big things people are complaining about right now?'”

Validating the Enterprise Opportunity

The pivot to enterprise required a complete rethinking of their go-to-market strategy. They developed what Daniel calls “three different channels” for reaching enterprise customers:

1. Initial deals through their investor network, which Daniel considers “probably the best way to sort of get your flywheel going”
2. Targeted outreach based on understanding “who is the actual buyer here, who are the users, what’s our best way in”
3. Content marketing, achieving “about 50% month over month increase in website traffic just from our content initiatives”

The Category Creation Challenge

The pivot also meant creating an entirely new product category. “When you’re creating something new and you’re on sort of the forefront of what’s possible, you don’t have all of that sort of framework built out for you within your target customers,” Daniel explains.

This presented both a challenge and an opportunity. While it meant longer sales cycles and more customer education, it also positioned them to define the space. As Daniel notes, category creators tend to be “if not winner take all, winner take most.”

Lessons for Founders

Viable’s pivot journey offers several key insights for founders:

1. Early traction isn’t always meaningful traction
2. Your most valuable market signals might come from unexpected customer usage
3. The presence of manual workarounds often indicates product opportunities
4. Enterprise pivots require completely rethinking go-to-market strategy
5. Category creation is both a challenge and a competitive advantage

The meta-lesson? Sometimes your wrong customers are actually pointing you toward a much bigger opportunity. The key is being willing to question your initial assumptions and follow the evidence where it leads.