Startups, especially successful ones, are born from a real, specific pain—usually one the founders know all too well. They're their own first customers, so in the beginning, solving the problem feels almost obvious; they're building what they know needs to exist.

Finding your first users is also surprisingly straightforward when you're building for people just like you. However, as startups grow, they often fall into "product peacocking"—building features to impress boards rather than users. Often it's the misguided belief that shipping more features than competitors somehow equals winning.

This is a classic example of confusing motion with progress. Your competitor shipping 100 features doesn't mean they're building something users want.

As Uri Levine (Waze’s founder) puts it, you need to fall in love with the problem, not your solution. This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly hard for big companies to maintain this discipline.

Falling in love with the problem means focusing on the people who are using the solution. You go deep into their pain points, their experiences—not building flashy features. This keeps you grounded in creating real value.

Think about it: how many large tech companies consistently prioritize user needs over competitive positioning, market and shareholder demands? Even the most innovative ones often forget what got them there—solving real problems for real people (for instance, not making $3,500 goggles no one asked for).

That’s why we built WhySole. It’s a tool to help companies stay grounded in reality. It turns scattered feedback, lost deals, and competitive intelligence into a shared source of truth. Instead of relying on gut feelings or fragmented data, every team member—whether they’re in product, sales, or engineering—gets real-time insights into what users actually want and care about.

The best startups have this naturally when they’re small. Everyone knows the users because they’re close to the ground. The feedback loop is tight. But as companies grow, that closeness disappears. WhySole helps you keep it.

As companies grow or embrace remote work, crucial knowledge gets trapped in Slack threads and team silos, making alignment exponentially harder. WhySole solves this by putting the right insights at everyone's fingertips—keeping customers at the center of decisions and ensuring every team member understands not just what the strategy is, but why it exists.

The test of whether you need this is simple: as your company has grown, has it become easier or harder to maintain crystal-clear focus on user problems? If it's gotten harder, you're experiencing exactly what WhySole was built to fix.

If this resonates, and you’re tired of the drift that happens as teams grow, reach out. We’re looking for early users who care as much about solving real problems as we do.