What To Learn From Accidental Product Companies

In my work with fast-growing SaaS companies, I’ve noticed: Most didn’t start out as tech companies or with expert product teams.

These businesses identified an unmet customer need and built a minimum viable solution first, hacking it together in whatever way they could. Following initial success, the solution grows and expands in response to customer’s needs over many years. Eventually there’s an epiphany. “Underneath the success is product software at the core, and we’re not governing that as well as we’d like”. I call these Accidental Product Companies, and I love them.

What Makes a Company “Accidental”

By accidental product company, I mean a business that establishes traction and growth in a market first, and only later recognises technology is core to their model. Often—not always—the founding team lacks expertise in software engineering and product management (and/or marketing, sales, customer success and more for that matter).

One company starts as a service-oriented business. After manually delivering the service for a while, they realise it can be codified into a software product to scale the business exponentially. And so it begins.

Another company starts out as a single-feature product created as a side hustle to address a specific pain point. Others use and adopt it—since they have the same pain—and it grows organically into something much bigger, one add-on at a time.

These founders know their customers’ needs but have little experience creating digital products. They accidentally wind up running successful software businesses.

Domain Knowledge Outweighs Product Skills

Leaders in accidental product companies have domain expertise from working in the industry they sell into, and they’ve usually experienced the customer’s pain firsthand. All of the pain. Many times. And in different ways. They’re experts on the problem.

This insider understanding enables them to build solutions users love, with no product management playbook in sight. They’re not designers either, but that doesn’t matter. Because they know the workflow and what to build, having lived the pain themselves.

Take Canva. While teaching design software to university students, Melanie Perkins realised the programs were too complex and expensive, inspiring her vision for design to be simple, online, and collaborative. With her experience teaching and using design software, Perkins recognised the need for an easier design platform, and this was the genesis of Canva.

James Dyson fits here too. Out of frustration with the poor performance of vacuum cleaners that would constantly clog and lose suction, he took his background in engineering, and set out to design a more efficient cyclone vacuum. After years of prototyping, Dyson launched a bagless vacuum cleaner that would revolutionise the industry. Personally, I’m not a fan of the stick vac, but we can argue about that later.

Now contrast that with a favourite startup crash and burn story—FanHero. Charlie Guo had exceptional training, serial entrepreneurs as mentors, and every opportunity at YCombinator. But the idea was awful, because he had no real experience with the problem FanHero was trying to solve.

The Downside of Accidental Origins

Being an accidental product company isn’t without downsides. Founders often make early technology decisions that are right at the time, but regretted later. For instance, choosing a less-scalable tech stack to achieve a fast market launch. Left unchecked, this complicates future extension of the product. What should be straight forward changes aren't, because underlying software has evolved into a Big Ball of Mud. Now you’re stuck deciding what to do. Invest significant resources to fix it with limited benefit in the near term? Or, get results faster with hacky workarounds that add to the problem and creates more risk. Tough call.

Customer experience architecture is the same. It’s typical to design for a few early adopters with advanced needs at the beginning. It’s the right decision in that moment, but one that bites later. Over time, foundation use cases and workflows get baked-in, and high value customers get comfortable and don’t want to change. But the existing solution isn’t a good foundation to create the next generation of customers and pursue nascent opportunities. Do you scrap what you’ve got and fund a multi-year product transformation? Build a new shiny separate thing that can’t integrate with the old thing? Or settle for putting lipstick on a pig, and pass the problem to marketing to solve? All terrible options.

Pay attention at the right time to avoid these scenarios. Transition to being an Intentional Product Company at the goldilocks moment. Focus on how teams are aligned to strategy, and integrated up, down, and across the company. You’re looking for coherent action from engineering, product management, design, sales, marketing and more. Getting that right is the first step in making better decisions, finding steady successes, and avoiding future pain in your product organisation. Sounds easy... Isn't.

Start with Strategy, Not Capabilities

Despite pitfalls, accidental product companies show us that deep domain expertise can outweigh technical skill in the early days. Founders obsess over a compelling opportunity first, and sweat the detail about the right way to create the product later.

It starts with high conviction for an opportunity, clear vision for what the future looks like, a coherent strategy for how to get there, and a target market that’s big enough to pay back on the investment needed to grow a product company.

Don’t worry about capability and process at the beginning. Instead, lose sleep over customer and business assumptions. Do just enough to learn the right things to adapt and improve your strategy. Get to the next destination. Just don’t leave it too late to grow up. You can’t stay scrappy forever.

Success Doesn’t Have To Be Accidental

Look at Tope Awetona. He always wanted to be a tech entrepreneur. After working in sales for several years, he started dabbling in small online businesses, though his first two attempts failed after just a few months.These early failures provided valuable lessons. Tope realised he had started those businesses not because he was passionate about solving a real problem, but simply because he wanted to start something.

For his next attempt, he was determined to more fully understand an actual pain point he had experienced firsthand. After extensive research, Tope zeroed in on the frustrating experience of coordinating meetings. He signed up for every scheduling tool he could find and carefully evaluated them.

After six months of tireless examination, Tope became convinced that he could build a better solution. He staked his life savings to create the initial product for his new startup, Calendly. He felt confident Calendly could succeed by focusing on fixing a widespread consumer pain point he intimately understood. His familiarity with the problem proved critical to Calendly's growth and success.

It's a great story because it combines the best from both perspectives. Like FanHero, Tope’s early attempts failed because the opportunities weren’t worth pursuing, and the strategy was lacking. But his success came when he found the right problem to solve, combined with a high-conviction strategy, and hard-won experience of what matters for product success from past failures.

Let's be more like Tope.

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