Startup Lesson: Talk to Customers Before Building Anything

In our One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual incubator, we always advise entrepreneurs to talk to customers before building anything. We ask them to do as much research as possible. Some listen, some don’t.

Gülin Yilmaz has listened. She is a classic example of the tenets that it pays to talk to customers, and that it pays to do your research.

When she and her business partner first began their venture, it wasn’t through literal product testing, but a testing of the waters – introducing their product idea through discussions with numerous potential customers to gauge a reaction to their future business. What they found was a need, but not the one their venture sought to fill. They scratched the original idea, and instead it was OpsVisibility that was born.

Palo Alto–based OpsVisibility is designed to help the IT sectors of mid-size companies manage their cloud infrastructure. By providing SaaS information management, it serves as a single source of truth (SSOT) for customer systems and can eliminate unnecessary time and energy spent by IT operations departments. By enabling automation, OpsVisibility streamlines cumbersome manual processes, and delivers serious return on investment.

Gülin brings to the table diverse past experience, both in product management with PayPal, and successful entrepreneurial ventures, such as CoachMe and Awardly.

An engineer by training, as well as the recipient of an MBA from Stanford University, Gülin understands the importance of gathering data, and that in the world of business it must be gathered from the users of your product. Through her research, Gülin not only isolated the trend toward automation within the industry, but she addressed demand by developing a product that would eliminate outages owing to human error, thus enabling tech companies to grow faster and repurpose their servers.

Her thorough investigation succeeded in validating both her business and pricing models, and as a result OpsVisibility can draw upon a confident customer base when they launch the first version of the product, which is set to go live in January 2013.

Gülin and her team currently face the challenge of building a business that aligns to customer needs with limited resources. But with a strong base in research comes a structured business plan: OpsVisibility is set to be bootstrapped until the $1 million revenue mark, so budgeting is fixed. And thanks to customer feedback, there is a clear and specific design already in play for the first version of the product.

OpsVisibility’s closest competitors are homegrown, and 95% of them are built within the companies they serve. Gülin hopes customers will overcome the initial skepticism associated with an outside product, especially given that hers has been validated by more than 100 individuals across 62 Silicon Valley–based companies. The goal is to secure 10 customers in the second half of 2013.

With considerable work on the front-end, Gülin managed to bring an entire business from concept to customer validation in only three months. Over the long term, she and her team envision that their SSOT will become a platform on which future cloud intelligence applications are built, keeping these applications both affordable and extensible.