This is the first edition of Listen to Decide, the ReveLumi newsletter.
Here we’ll talk about why listening to customers matters, techniques to do it better, and what we’re learning as we build ReveLumi. All with one goal: making better decisions from real conversations.
I start with a case from 2010 that stayed with me from my time at Locaweb, Brazil's leading web hosting company.
In a conversation with Irene Liakos, founder of Product Circle, we landed on a point I couldn’t stop thinking about. We were talking about why so many product teams accumulate data and still make the wrong decisions. Irene made a sharp observation:
Most people look at what users do. Very few try to understand why they do it.
That insight took me back to something that happened at Locaweb. In 2010, we were evaluating whether to build and operate a marketplace connecting web developers with people and companies that wanted a website. On paper it made a lot of sense. We were the largest hosting company in Brazil, we had successfully launched a Website Builder and an Online Store, and we had been serving both sides of that market for years. Usage data from our products indicated that this kind of intermediation was already happening organically. All we needed was an agent in the middle to organize, qualify, and monetize that flow.
The data was clear and the reasoning seemed solid. We were wrong.
When we started talking to customers, something emerged that no data could show. In the relationship between a developer and someone who wants a website, there’s a set of commitments around deadlines and scope. These are informal agreements, negotiated directly between the two parties. When a marketplace steps in, the person who wants the website starts transferring those commitments to the intermediary. And Locaweb neither wanted nor had the skills to take on that role. We killed the product.
The right decision was only possible because we stepped away from the dashboards and had real conversations.
Data is indispensable. It tells you what happened: how many people accessed, where they clicked, where they dropped off, what they bought, what they ignored. With enough volume, you identify patterns, anomalies, opportunities. It’s a layer of intelligence no serious company can do without.
But data has no motivation. It records behavior, but doesn’t explain why it happened. It shows the movement, not the reason behind it. And the reason is where the most important decisions live: the ones that prevent the wrong product, the ones that surface a problem nobody had articulated, the ones that change direction before you spend months building the wrong thing. The why only shows up in conversation.
The problem is that talking to customers at scale is hard. Organizing interviews, running the sessions, processing transcripts, extracting insights from 15 or 20 different conversations — it takes time most teams don’t have. The practical result is that teams know they should be talking to customers more, but they don’t. They stick with the data. And the data tells them what, not why.
That friction is exactly what led me to build ReveLumi, together with Anderson Borges. The idea is simple: an agent that conducts qualitative research via WhatsApp, synthesizes the insights, and delivers the why at scale. Not to replace human conversation, but to remove the barriers that keep teams from having these conversations regularly.
Fifteen years after Locaweb, I keep seeing the same pattern. Teams with excellent dashboards making decisions that a 30-minute conversation would have avoided. And that’s what my conversation with Irene brought back to the surface, last week.