Day 3. The list was cold outreach, a Business Model Canvas, and one customer interview. All three got done.

Cold outreach: sent, silent

I sent cold emails to the companies from yesterday’s qualified list. No responses yet. Too early to read anything into it, but worth writing down that the count so far is zero.

Lean Canvas

I built a Lean Canvas to force myself to be precise about what I’m building, who it’s for, and how the money works. Putting it on one page made the weak spots obvious.

The biggest open question that fell out of it is channels. I have “personal outreach” and then a question mark. I know how to reach a handful of companies through my own network and one cold list. I do not yet have a repeatable way to reach the German Mittelstand at scale.

Customer interview

I did one interview with a Mittelstand CEO. Three things came out of it, in increasing order of how much they changed my thinking.

First, the need is real. Documentation is genuinely required, and today they do it with slower, more manual mechanisms. That’s hypothesis 1 getting a little more solid: the pain exists and they already spend effort on it.

Second, on-premise is table stakes. He is currently turning down lots of cloud AI vendor that lands on his desk, because his crown-jewel IP cannot leave the building. I’d been treating “EU-hosted” as the differentiator, but for this segment EU hosting alone won’t be enough.

Third, and this is the one that’s rearranging the whole thing: the hard part isn’t the tech. People resist documenting because they’re afraid it makes them replaceable, sometimes to the point of reporting false numbers so their process stays a black box. Following up with employees to get them to document also took considerable effort.

Hypotheses

  1. Knowledge-loss pain, pay five figures once — small positive signal. The need was confirmed; willingness to pay 5000 euros was confirmed.
  2. Let an AI talk to employees — no new data, but the interview points at why this one is hard: the resistance is about job security, not technology.

Tomorrow

  1. Rebuild into an on-prem solution.
  2. Work in the trust and control aspect from the first interview.
  3. Think about channel experiments.