Why we pivoted

I said I would do updates on my entrepreneurship journey, so here it is for the past year and January 2026.

Background: We’re both engineers. In early 2025, I was still in my postdoc, and Arnaud (my co-founder) was working in industry, so we were building this on the side.

We built FeedbAct to make employee feedback more human and insightful.

The idea was simple: replace rigid questionnaires with open, conversational feedback, then use AI to summarize and extract key themes for HR and management.

We did dozens of interviews, built an MVP, and started testing willingness to pay.

Then reality hit.

HR is a tough market

It’s crowded, and acquisition cycles are painfully slow. To give you an idea, some companies only run feedback surveys every 2 years—simply because they can’t afford to go through the procurement process more often.

If you target medium to large companies, there’s little chance you’ll do business with them unless you already have a big name or proven results. Companies turned out to be more risk-averse than I expected for this matter (probably my researcher bias). They prefer something that’s proven and safe rather than innovative.

And on top of that, it’s hard to quantify the ROI of feedback/HR tools. The benefits are indirect and long-term, which makes the product feel like a “nice to have,” not an “I need this now.”

Sales friction everywhere

Our sales conversations went well until we reached the “paid demo” stage. That’s when the enthusiasm dropped (classic, but it’s good we tested the willingness to pay early). Even though we could probably have closed a few deals through personal connections, we feared we’d hit a plateau within six months, once we’d exhausted our network.

We also underestimated the friction to entry. Our product required the entire company to adopt a new process. That meant convincing not just HR, but also the CEO and sometimes the board. A few people told us openly: “We’d rather stick with our current tool, even if it’s not great, than add one more platform to our stack.” The phenomenon of “SaaS fatigue” is real.

We weren’t our personas

We built something we, as employees, would have loved to use. But our clients were HR and management—and they had different priorities. We noticed the misalignment in interviews: what excited us didn’t excite them. Their “key features” weren’t ours.

The market moved faster than expected

When we started, it looked like no one was doing what we envisioned. We knew we had to move fast—but five months later, some companies had launched almost identical features and even made them part of their core pitch.

I still believe we weren’t wrong; we were just too little too late. The differentiator we had wouldn’t have lasted another year.

When to stop

There’s always a balance between pushing harder and knowing when to stop. For us, the key signal was when the excitement started to fade. That’s when we decided it was time to move on.

Lessons Learned

• Do your homework continuously. Some companies were already heading in the same direction—we noticed too late. Part validation bias, part of not knowing our market well enough.
• Talk to people early and often. You’re probably not your persona, and your user might not be your buyer. The only way to find out is to talk, listen, and ask good questions (Mom Test style).
• Go-to-market is important. We built a solid product, but we underestimated how hard it is to get it in front of the right people. In B2B, credibility, access, and timing often matter more than product quality in the early stages.
• Integration beats innovation. Even if your idea is great, customers often prefer something that fits into their existing workflow over something entirely new. Next time, we’ll think about integrations and partnerships much earlier.
• Ego is a trap. Stopping was hard for me because I had publicly announced I was working on this. But I managed to convince myself that it’s braver to recognize early when something isn’t working than to double down and dig deeper into the rabbit hole.

What we’re doing now

So I moved to Brussels in January and am now working full time on new ideas. It honestly feels great to have some time to think about new things instead of rushing to the obvious next step. We’ll see what happens.