Launching, pivoting and growing a multi-million dollar product from scratch

After rigorous customer discovery, I found that processing plants struggle with monitoring and tracking reliability of their equipment. It is hard to establish the current state of reliability of assets and then figure out goals and targets. We launched a product called Asset Answers which utilizes maintenance management system data to calculate 15 metrics and then provides industry benchmarks to set goals and targets to improve it. I created a pilot program with 5 key customers who co-developed the product with us and then we scaled to 500 processing plants, generating an ARR of $7 M over a year. But after a while engagement dropped as a lot of the metrics were based on poorly collected data. That led us to pivot to providing a data quality analysis and services to improve data quality. We also utilized natural language processing algorithms to fill in the gaps in missing data and identify inaccurate data. That service was very well received as every plant struggled with poor data quality. It generated $22M in it's first year and helped cross sell and upsell other data analytics products.