Customer conversations mattered more than the deck. The strongest signals came from what users already hacked together, not what they politely said looked useful.
Founder experiment · customer discovery · Buerk
Buerk incubator program
A 10-week experiment at being a founder: customer discovery, product assumptions, market pressure, and learning when not to keep building.
What I was testing
Vakilaru started from a pain I understood as a lawyer: litigation work is messy, repetitive, high-pressure, and often poorly supported by tools. The question was whether that pain was urgent enough for a focused workflow product.
We talked to lawyers in India and the U.S., explored workflows around client updates, drafts, deadlines, and multilingual support, and tested whether there was a repeatable market pattern. There was pain, but not enough evidence for this exact direction.
Founder lesson
A real pain is not automatically a product people will adopt.
We applied to YC, got rejected, and eventually stopped. That was not a clean win, but it was useful founder training.
I got better at separating dying pain from nice-to-have features, and at treating stopping as a serious product decision.