The Five Mistakes I Made Before Finding Product-Market Fit

I built eNZeTi wrong twice.

The first version was a transcription tool that highlighted intake best practices in real time. It did not work.

The second version was a full AI intake replacement system that tried to handle entire calls. The market did not want it.

The third version is what we have now. It puts real-time coaching in the coordinator’s ear on the exact moment they need it. It works.

Here are the five mistakes I made before I figured out what actually matters.

Mistake One: I Solved the Wrong Problem

I started with the assumption that the problem was incomplete call transcriptions. Attorneys could not see what was said on intake calls.

I was right about that. But it was the symptom, not the problem.

The real problem was: coordinators did not know what to say in the moment. Providing a transcript of what they did not say did not help them.

I wasted six months building a better note-taking system when the market needed a coaching system.

Mistake Two: I Overestimated How Much Training Would Help

My second pivot was convinced that if I just provided the right training material in the moment, coordinators would use it and improve on their own.

I was wrong. Providing information in a crisis is not the same as coaching through a crisis.

A coordinator on a live call with an angry prospect does not want to read a knowledge base article. They want someone to tell them what to say right now.

The gap between “training material available” and “someone helping me in this exact moment” is bigger than I thought.

Mistake Three: I Did Not Understand the Role Confusion

I spent the first year thinking all law firms had dedicated intake coordinators.

Most do not.

The people handling intake calls are paralegals doing paralegal work. Receptionists answering phones. Junior attorneys handling their own calls. Literally anyone but a dedicated intake specialist.

I was building for a role that does not exist in 70% of the market.

Once I understood that, everything changed. Instead of building for “the intake coordinator,” I built for “whoever is on the phone.” That is a much larger market.

Mistake Four: I Made the Product Too Smart

My second version was genuinely impressive from a technical standpoint. It could process a live call, understand objections, generate responses, and surface them to the coordinator.

The problem: it was right only 60% of the time. And when it was wrong, it was wrong in ways that confused people.

I was trying to make an AI system that could understand legal intake with as much nuance as a human attorney.

That was the wrong goal. The goal should have been: be right enough to give the coordinator a starting point, but make the human in the loop so obvious that they never trust the AI to be perfect.

Humble AI is more useful than impressive AI.

Mistake Five: I Did Not Talk to Enough Attorneys Before Building

This is the meta mistake that led to all the others.

I spent three months thinking and building before I ever talked to an attorney about intake. When I finally did, almost every assumption I had was wrong.

The attorneys I talked to did not want AI. They wanted visibility. They did not want automation. They wanted coaching. They did not want to replace people. They wanted to augment people.

I was solving a technical problem I invented, not the human problem that actually existed.

What Changed

Once I started from the assumption that attorneys are skeptical of AI as a replacement, everything aligned.

eNZeTi is not an AI company. It is a coaching company that uses AI to deliver coaching at scale.

That single reframe changed the entire product. It changed the positioning. It changed which features mattered. It changed how we talk to prospects.

All because I finally understood the real problem instead of the one I invented.

The Lesson

The fastest way to product-market fit is to stop building and start asking.

Talk to 20 of your target customers. Do not pitch. Just ask: “How do you solve this today. What is hard about it. If we built something, what would be useful.”

Most founders skip this step. I did. It cost me a year and a failed product pivot.

The second fastest way is to build something extremely simple and see if it sticks. That is what the third version was. A simple coaching prompt. A simple workflow. A simple question: does this help.

It did. That is when I knew we had found it.

Learn what we built at eNZeTi.com. And if you are curious about how to approach building anything, the same principles apply.