The Problem
Today 70-90% of new products and services fail — mostly due to poor validation and lack of product-market fit.
Source: McKinsey & Company
Cost of Development, Failed Pilots and Market Misses
The biggest risk in innovation isn’t the idea - it’s slow validation.
- Slow interview process kills momentum
- Data is inconclusive or contradictory
- Good ideas die waiting for feedback, while zombies survive.
Finding the Real Signal Shouldn't Take 40 Interviews
A design partner—a major bank—put us to the test after completing 40 in-depth interviews with a specific market segment.
When they ran the same discovery goals through Virtual Customer, our top 10 insights perfectly matched their real-world findings.
We don’t replace your customers, but we do help you find the right signal in hours instead of weeks. Use Virtual Customer to stress-test your assumptions today, so you can ask much better questions when you meet real customers tomorrow.
How Virtual Customer Works
AI-powered Virtual Customer transform how you discover and validate early-stage ideas, providing the fast, reliable feedback you need to move forward with confidence.
Not Just Another Co-Pilot
Most AI co-pilots guess based on your input alone. Our Virtual Customer is built on a structured, multi-agent research process that creates a high-fidelity persona before answering your questions. Less hallucination, more strategic insight.
What Virtual Customer Does
Structured research done by a team of 15 AI agents:
What a Standard Co-Pilot Does
*An AI can hallucinate when it lacks information
Real Dialogues, Real Insights
See how Virtual Customer provide specific, actionable feedback across different industries and roles.
Head of innovation in Automotive
Interviewer
Hi! I am the interviewer. I represent Rebel Thinking and I have an idea for a new product I would like to discuss with you. Before we start, what is your name and what are your top 3 responsibilities at your company?
Marcus Rodriguez
Good morning. I'm Marcus Rodriguez, Head of Innovation at MegaHaul Industries Inc. My top three responsibilities are: 1) Driving our new ventures pipeline from concept to pilot, 2) Managing our portfolio of innovation projects to ensure alignment with our strategic goals, and 3) Fostering a culture of experimentation and rapid learning across our business units. What's on your mind?
Interviewer
What are your top 3 challenges when it comes to innovation?
Marcus Rodriguez
Great question. Our biggest headaches right now are validation speed, cross-functional alignment, and AI governance. First, our validation cycles take 18-24 months per major feature, and honestly, 60% of our projects still miss market expectations after launch. Traditional surveys and focus groups cost us $2-3M per cycle and often give us biased insights. Second, with our Thunder Freight, Apex, and Defense brands spread across multiple regions, our teams constantly develop conflicting customer interpretations. R&D, Marketing, and Regional Sales operate with completely different customer archetypes. Third, we see huge AI potential but lack frameworks for safe, compliant deployment. Our legal team demands traceability for automotive safety standards, which creates bottlenecks. What's your experience with innovation validation challenges in heavy industry?
CFO in Manufacturing
Interviewer
How do you handle this today — and what do you dislike most?
CFO Persona
Today it's pure manual coordination chaos. Every payroll cycle, my treasury manager downloads separate files from three payroll vendors, then logs into different banking portals for Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to upload payment instructions. She's literally switching between six different systems just to execute one payroll run. The reconciliation afterward is even worse - my senior accountant spends two days matching bank confirmations against our records, often having to call banks directly when reference numbers don't align. We've built Excel macros to try streamlining it, but they break whenever any vendor updates their file formats. What I dislike most? The complete lack of real-time visibility. When something goes wrong - like that Norwegian incident three weeks ago - I'm blind until someone calls with a problem. I'm running a 400-person organization but can't tell you in real-time whether our largest monthly expense actually processed correctly. The manual dependency drives me crazy.
CEO of a Sports retailer
Interviewer
What is your main challenges in sales?
CEO Persona
Our biggest headache is online hardware sales - skis, bikes, high-ticket items. Customers browse our gear online but abandon carts when it comes to completing those larger purchases. We're solid with apparel and accessories, but hardware? The drop-off rates are brutal, especially on bundled packages where we should be capturing more value per customer. What's your experience with complex product configurations in e-commerce?
Interviewer
A lot - what do you know about the customer buying behaviour when it comes to skis?
What do users say?
“We have used Virtual Customer on a portfolio company and are impressed with the dialogue and insights”
Nordic Investment Company
“I have done research about this for years, but how can the AI know this?”
Researcher at a National Research Institute
“We don’t have anything nearly as advanced as this in innovation today”
A Multinational Corporation
Why Teams Adopt Virtual Customer
- Slow and costly
- Few ideas tested
- Weak concepts linger
- Inconsistent pilot success
- Unclear ROI
- Faster, more predictable innovation
- 10× more ideas explored
- Lower early-stage costs
- Weak ideas removed early
- Stronger overall ROI
Who benefits the most?
Empowering leaders and teams across the innovation lifecycle
The discovery layer for complex B2B decisions.
We help innovation teams compress months of validation into hours, reducing guessing and improving go/kill decisions.
- Live MVP with active design-partner learning.
- Solves multi-stakeholder B2B access friction.
- Preparing for commercial scale and production readiness.
Join our private beta
Right now we are giving early access to a few companies that help us shape the future of product validation.
Be the first to know when we launch.