Focus on user problems before sales or funding

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk with Theresia Silander, CEO and founder of Eatit, about the mistakes her company made early on and what changed once they put the user’s problem first.

Eatit is an app where patients with obesity, prediabetes, diabetes or fatty liver disease get treatment from a dietitian over video, described in the episode as a Kry for dietitian care. The dietitian and the app work together to support patients through the behavior changes behind healthier habits and weight loss. The company’s vision is to make it easier to make healthy decisions, and its mission is to help 100 million people by 2030 live longer, happier lives through lifestyle change.

Theresia is candid about what went wrong. The company started from what the technology could do rather than from a specific problem. They sold to the wrong audience, early tech adopters instead of patients who actually needed care. Their experiments ran too big, with too much measurement and too many data sources, and they tried to squeeze maximum learning from each one too early, which slowed the whole pace of experimentation. They also grew the development team too fast, so build speed and the capacity to run experiments fell out of step.

The course corrections follow directly. Start from a problem rather than from technology. Put energy into understanding the problem before building. Do research out of the building. Either secure real funding or stay lean. Bring in experienced people who have built data-driven organizations. And run shorter experiments with lower expectations for how much each one will teach you.

The takeaway is that sales and funding are downstream of a real, understood problem, and reordering that is what got Eatit moving again.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for Theresia’s full account of the mistakes and the fixes.