A month after launching ReveLumi, I started noticing a pattern in the conversations I had while presenting the product. The people who feel the pain of not talking to customers are rarely the ones who hold the budget to fix it. I decided to use ReveLumi, our research agent on WhatsApp, to listen to more people and test that hypothesis.
I created a survey, generated a link, and posted it in a few product communities, asking for help with a discovery about how people do discovery. A meta-discovery. The first message went out at 11am. Three hours later, I had 42 conversations with insight. Two days later, 82, with 46 completed. I scheduled nothing, recruited no one, sat in on not a single call. The synthesis was waiting for me when I opened the report.
The finding: the biggest barrier to talking to customers is operational, scheduling and recruiting. And the way I ran this research removed that barrier entirely. The method is the proof of the finding.
The pain is operational, and it is the same everywhere
People described the same difficulty over and over. Calendars that never line up. Recruiting that drags. People who do not show up. Emails that go unanswered.
“Plenty of willingness, but it is extremely hard to make it happen without all the scheduling work: booking, canceling, no-shows, showing up with no time.”
This was the majority view, by a wide margin. People know they should talk to users more. They just cannot, because operations eat the time.
“We talk to users less than we would like. Too many urgent fronts, more technical work than discovery itself.”
At a bank, someone was blunt about the cost of this:
“We do no continuous discovery. We interview users only when we are about to start building. It is rushed, and there is always rework.”
The budget decision lives far from the pain
This is the finding I suspected but had not confirmed. The people who feel the pain are in product and design. The people who approve the budget are above them.
“The demand starts with product and design, the ROI has to be very well proven, and then a business case goes up that the CTO has to approve, as long as there is room in the annual budget.”
A product participant captured the misalignment in one line:
“Only product and design talk to customers. So only we feel this need.”
And another revealed the quietest consequence of it. When the person who feels the pain sees no solution, the pain never even reaches leadership:
“I do not speak for leadership. I do not take it to them myself, because there is no solution today.”
The person who feels the pain is not the person who decides the purchase. And sometimes does not even carry the pain forward.
Removing the barrier pays off in better decisions
When we asked what would change with continuous, direct access to users, the answers converged. Faster decisions, less noise, less rework.
“We would have faster decisions with less noise. Today the need reaches us already interpreted by other areas, and context gets lost along the way.”
Another summed up the gain in confidence:
“It would help validate hypotheses faster, reduce rework, and increase confidence in prioritization.”
The reward for solving an operational problem turns out to be strategic. And it can be measured.
The ROI, in two parts
The return on improving discovery has two parts, of different natures.
Operational ROI:
Running 82 qualitative conversations by hand (recruiting, scheduling, conducting, transcribing, analyzing, synthesizing) would take weeks of work.
I had the full synthesis ready in two days, with the first results in three hours, scheduling nothing.
Strategic ROI:
Weeks of development saved for every bad hypothesis the team does not chase. And most hypotheses are bad. Ron Kohavi, who led experimentation at Microsoft and Airbnb, documented that about two thirds of product ideas fail to improve the metric they were meant to improve, and that in mature companies this rate reaches 80 or 90%.
The cost of keeping the team chasing the wrong thing. A squad of six people costs around 200 thousand reais per month in Brazil, 80 thousand dollars in the US, 50 thousand euros in Europe. A month in the wrong direction is that entire amount burned.
The cost avoided of building the wrong product. In 2010, at Locaweb, a conversation with customers led us to abandon a marketplace before writing a single line of code. The data said go ahead, the conversation revealed why not. We avoided the cost of building the wrong thing, and also of operating a product doomed from conception.
Using a tool to help talk to customers does not just save operational hours. It saves the cost of a whole squad running in the wrong direction, and sometimes prevents the mistake you would only notice too late.
What we are doing with this
The second finding is uncomfortable for us. It means the people who love ReveLumi most, the product manager and the researcher drowning in scheduling, are often not the ones who can buy it.
There are two ways to react. Try to create the pain in those who hold the budget, which is slow and expensive. Or arm the people who already feel the pain with what they need to make the case. We are choosing the second. The product manager and the researcher who want to use ReveLumi should not have to build the business case alone. That becomes our job, to hand them the ROI, the metrics, the argument a director will approve.
These insights did not come from a strategy offsite or a consulting deck. They came from 82 conversations that, two years ago, would have taken weeks and probably never have happened. The obstacles would have won.
Data tells us what happened. Customers tell us why. The reason teams stop at the data is that the conversation is too hard to have. Remove that friction, and the why comes back. That is what we are building. I had a real question about ReveLumi itself, and I cleared it up in a few hours, with dozens of conversations with real users.
To take to leadership
If you read this far, you probably feel this operational pain yourself, and the decision to invest is probably not only yours. So use this text. Forward it to whoever decides the budget at your company. The numbers are here, the logic is here, the ROI is here. Talking to customers leads to faster decisions and less rework, and there is now a way to have those conversations without the friction that always got in the way. That is the part the person who approves the investment needs to hear.
Congrats on ReveLumi launch!
This really resonated with me. In my experience, most product teams don't struggle because they don't value customer discovery; they struggle because discovery is operationally expensive. Recruiting participants, finding time on everyone's calendar, dealing with no-shows, consolidating notes... all of that competes with delivery commitments and day-to-day priorities.
What I found particularly interesting is the gap between the people who feel the pain and the people who approve the budget. Product Managers, Designers, and Researchers experience the consequences of limited customer access every day, but leadership often sees only the investment, not the friction behind it. The connection between operational efficiency and strategic outcomes was very well articulated here. When you reduce the cost of learning, you don't just save time—you improve decision-making, reduce rework, and increase confidence that the team is solving the right problem. Great insight and a very clever way to validate the hypothesis.
Congrats on the launch and on the way you used ReveLumi to test your own market hypothesis. That is a strong signal in itself.
I also like the product. ReveLumi clearly has a place in the research toolbox, especially when the real blocker is not willingness, but the operational drag of recruiting, scheduling, interviewing, and synthesis.
The part that made me think most is the late-stage research pattern in some of the answers.
Teams do not only avoid customer conversations because they are hard to organize. Sometimes that argument feels more like an excuse, or a luxury problem, used to justify premature investment into solutions. In many cases, teams simply start too late, after serious investment has already gone into the solution.
At that point, research easily stops being learning and becomes approval-seeking.
Solutionism with a research layer on top.
I guess if a company does not see the value and ROI of early research insights, it will pay for it later through expensive pivots, rework, or products nobody really needed.