On this episode of Beyond the First Wins — our podcast about what happens after the plateau, when early wins are no longer enough — we sat down with Martin Thoma, co-founder and CTO of Bliro, a conversation-intelligence tool for European enterprise salespeople. Bliro helps salespeople prep, capture, and follow up on meetings, handling the manual busy-work so they can focus on the relationship.

From "build first" to "ask first"

Martin and his co-founder Maurice met studying engineering, and like a lot of technical founders, their instinct early on was to build. They made tools for problems they assumed existed but that, in the real world, didn't. The turning point with Bliro was simple but hard: flip the coin and ask people what their problems are before building. As Martin put it, you're young, you learn how to build, so the first thing you do is build — you want to showcase your skills, and you're idealistic, sitting in cafés thinking about how to make the world better. That can produce something visionary, but it may be too far ahead of what people need right now.

Focus on the leaking bucket

Reflecting on the first year, Martin says nearly all their decisions were wrong — it was a period of learning. They over-indexed on individual customers instead of generalising, struggled to say no, and focused too early on the top of the funnel — more marketing, more users — while retention was low. His lesson: always focus on retention first. You can pour as much water as you want into a leaking bucket; if it's leaking, the water flows out. Fix the bucket, then pour. The other big learning was focus. A conversation-intelligence tool could be used by anyone, so their customer base was scattered and it was hard to find the signal in the noise. The shift came from an internal decision — identifying their strengths, USPs, and ideal customer profile — and committing to build for one specific segment while still selling to anyone the tool fits. That clarity ("is this important for the exact group we build for, or is it noise?") became a question they ask on every iteration.

Design is trust

There was a moment, Martin says, when they were genuinely ashamed of how the product looked — early apps that "looked like the 80s," pre-ChatGPT, all built by an engineering team with little design skill. They realised the design inconsistencies were actively harming the business. Hiring someone to create a design system did three things: sped up development through standardised, reusable components; gave the sales team confidence in what they were selling; and signalled trust — and trust is the main thing Bliro sells. The product captures conversations and writes notes so a salesperson doesn't have to; that only works if the person trusts it. First impressions are design, and design has to convey that trust from the first contact.

One big bet, and a feedback engine

Feature-wise, Martin says they avoided big bets and stayed analytical — everything powered by customer feedback collected from sales calls, ride-alongs, emails, and forms, distilled into a table, turned into insights, and mapped to product components so they can see where feedback concentrates. Every six weeks, he and Maurice do "product weekends" to find the signal in the noise. One lesson there: some weaknesses aren't worth fixing. Customers kept asking for speaker identification, and the team spent ages on it — until they realised the product's quality wasn't degrading without it. You shouldn't force-solve a problem that doesn't want to be solved yet. The one genuinely big bet they're still unsure about: broadening to mobile, desktop, and web — plus doing their own audio processing — very early, which created a huge burden. The learning: stay focused much longer, especially on how many platforms you take on.

Listen to the full conversation in the video above, and see what a focused redesign looked like for Bliro in our case study.