Arlo Mistake #1 - Starting with a solution and not a problem

While starting with a solution before understanding the problem is a well-known mistake, we entrepreneurs still fall into this trap when it presents itself differently. Here's how I made this mistake at Arlo—and why it cost us months of development time and potential customers.

Arlo presented differently because we started with an internal tool. EnPowered had built up a small financing brokerage to help customers finance energy projects such as batteries, LED lights and solar projects. Our internal tool requested financial statements (or tax returns) to validate revenue, existing debt and so on. We used AI to automatically classify the documents and extract the relevant information from it. If the documents weren’t the right ones, we would notify the borrower in seconds so they could upload the correct documents.

In July 2024, we took this internal tool and started pitching it to lenders and brokers in the market. We set up phone calls with our existing lending partners to get their feedback. The calls were positive but lacked clear next steps and we realized that our account managers at lenders were not the buyers for this software. It took me almost two months of calls to get the feedback that really mattered - “your product looks great but it only does 60% of what I need”.

The biggest mistake was not stepping back to analyze the core problem for our customers. I pushed forward with the solution we had already built focusing on how we could “add on” the undefined 40% of product that was missing. It placed our development team on a treadmill of building  feature after feature - document validation, custom forms, templates - with the mistaken belief that with this next feature the product would be “good enough” to win over customers.

If we had stepped back and truly understood our customers' workflow, we would have discovered their biggest pain point was their email inbox. Sales people were drowning in reminder emails and digging through endless threads to find buried documents. The very place where 90% of their loan communication happened was where we weren't. We launched email integration in May 2025 but that was too late. If we had integrated into their inbox, automatically sent reminders for missing documents and parsed emails to find documents they received it would have made for a very different product and sales experience.

We had our best sales month ever in June after launching email integration—proof that we'd finally found the real problem. But those months of building the wrong features had already cost us momentum and burned through our runway. The lesson? Even when you think you're being customer-centric, you might just be polishing a solution to the wrong problem. Start with the inbox—literally and figuratively—where your customers actually live.