We had customers before we had a product: How we built Outmin around real needs, not assumptions.
When we started Outmin, we didn't have a product. We had a prototype, some slide decks, and what I'd like to think was a pretty compelling vision for how bookkeeping should work.
The idea was simple: bookkeeping is repetitive, rules-based work that pulls people away from what they should be doing.
Business owners should be running their businesses. Accountants should be helping clients grow. Nobody should be stuck manually processing invoices and reconciling bank statements.
We believed AI could handle all of that. But before we built anything, I needed to know if that belief held up in the real world.
My job from day one was to get out and talk to people. Business owners specifically. The type of people we thought we were building for. I needed to understand their challenges, what they were paying for bookkeeping, and what they actually wanted to see in a solution.
I spent around nine months doing this before we had a real product.
By the time we went live in January 2021, we had customers waiting. People who had seen what we were building and wanted to sign up before we even launched.
That doesn't happen by accident.
Too many founders have their heads down
Too many early-stage founders spend months building in isolation. They're convinced they understand the problem. They've talked to a few people, maybe run some surveys. They know what needs to exist.
Then they launch and (surprise, surprise) it doesn't really work. The product doesn't quite fit what people need, or it's built in a way that makes sense to the founder but not to users.
What happens is this massive misalignment between what they built and what the market needs. They've burned months of runway, lost momentum. Now they're trying to course-correct while also trying to sell something that isn't quite right.
The alternative is harder upfront. It means getting comfortable with not having all the answers. And it actually means showing up with prototypes and half-formed ideas and asking people to poke holes in your thinking.
But if you're out there talking to your target users while you're building, you avoid that misalignment. You're adjusting in real time based on what actually matters to them.
What those nine months actually looked like
For us, it was more than collecting feedback. We were trying to validate whether we were solving a problem worth solving.
I talked to business owners about how much time they spent on bookkeeping. What frustrated them. Why they paid tens of thousands of euros a year for it. What they wished existed but didn't.
I also let them beat up our thinking. Showed them how we were planning to price it. Walked them through the vision of how it would work. Asked if they'd actually use something like this.
Some feedback completely changed how we thought about the product. Some of it confirmed we were on the right track. The results speak for themselves.
And the best part was that by the time we launched, these weren't cold leads. They were people who had been part of the journey. They understood what we were building and why, and they trusted that we'd listened to them.
When you involve your potential customers in the building process, they become advocates before you even have a product to sell.
The mistake people make with validation
There's a difference between asking people if they'd use something and actually getting them to commit.
A lot of founders do customer discovery calls where they pitch an idea and the person on the other end says, "Yeah, that sounds interesting. I'd probably use that." Then the founder walks away thinking they've validated the idea.
But interest isn't commitment. People are polite. They don't want to tell you your idea is crap. They'll say it sounds good even if they have zero intention of ever using it.
What matters is whether they're willing to put something on the line. That could be money, obviously. But before you have a product, it could be time. It could be a letter of intent. It could be an agreement to be a design partner or pilot customer.
We had people who said they wanted to sign up before we launched. That's different from people saying it sounds like a good idea. Those people were willing to take a risk on us because they'd seen how we worked, how we thought about the problem, and they believed we'd deliver.
That's the kind of validation that actually means something. For us, at least.
Why this still matters today
We're a different company now than we were in 2020. We have a product that automates bookkeeping end-to-end. We process transactions daily, reconcile banks, suppliers, and sales monthly, and give business owners and their accountants clean, audit-ready data without the manual work.
But we still operate the same way. We're constantly talking to our customers and the accounting practices we partner with. We're asking what's working, what's not, what they need that we're not giving them yet.
A few months ago, we realised our direct sales channel wasn't going to get us to the growth numbers we needed. One channel has a ceiling. So we started building partnerships with accounting practices as a second way to acquire customers.
For practices, the value is different than it is for direct clients.
They don't want to do bookkeeping themselves but they need clean data for VAT returns and year-end accounts. We handle the bookkeeping, they get access to reconciled books through our platform, and they can free their staff to focus on compliance and advisory work.
That only worked because we spent time understanding how practices actually operate. What their pain points are. Why bookkeeping is a bottleneck for them. We didn't just assume we knew.
If we'd built that channel based on assumptions, we'd have wasted months trying to force something that didn't fit. Instead, we talked to practices, figured out what would actually work for them, and built around that.
What I'd tell other founders
If you're early-stage and heads down building, take a break. Go talk to the people you're building for.
And I mean actual conversations where you show them what you're thinking and let them kick around your ideas.
And yes, it can be pretty uncomfortable sometimes. You'll hear things you don't want to hear. You'll realise you've been wrong about stuff you were certain about. But you'll also find the people who will become your first customers if you listen to what they're telling you.
The glamorous version of starting a company is having a vision and executing on it. The reality is a bit messier. You have a hypothesis. You test it. You adjust. You test again.
The companies that win are the ones that figure out what people actually need, not just what they think people need.
We didn't have customers before we had a product because we got lucky. We had customers because we spent nine months earning their trust and building something they'd already told us they wanted.
No hack. Just putting in the work before you ask people to give you money.
