99 Percent of Fortune 500 Employees Who Use This Product Hate It. This BIZ Experiences Built a Million-Dollar Business Out of That Hatred. BIZ Experiencesism is all about problem-solving, and finding a common issue can be a great starting place for your business idea.

The idea for Haystack came swift and easy. A way to build Haystack took more work.

Cameron Lindsay, 27, was sitting at his last job in 2018 when he noticed that 99 percent of Fortune 500s have intranet products — and 99 percent of people who use them hate them. In those two 99s, he saw 100 percent opportunity. The incumbents making these internal corporate communications systems were "all older-school," he says. "Employees today want it superfast, super­connected, and delightful." He teamed up with cofounder Haibo Zhao, a former tech lead at Google and Snap, to reimagine a sleek, nimble sports car of an intranet.

Building it would be like planning a subway system for a city you've never visited — so they realized they'd need an innovative approach. They nailed it: When they announced their official launch this March, they did so with $8.2 million in venture backing. Here's how.

1. Find a pilot company.

Lindsay didn't want to build this product in a vacuum. "Having a customer, where we could hear visceral feedback of "I need this,' "I don't need that,' is so much better," he says. But how do you have a customer for a product that doesn't exist? He heard that a tech company was looking for someone to create its intranet, and convinced its team to let him build it as a pilot project. Begin-ning in November 2019, the first two months would be free, then a paying contract would kick in.

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2. Fake it till you make it.

Even though Lindsay and Zhao got a head start, they quickly realized their timeline was off as far as completing the final product. "So we mocked up the whole experience in Figma, a Photoshop-y design tool, while Haibo was building out the engineering," says Lindsay. "I was just convinced that if we could get the contract, we could kick the can down the road." By the end of the free period, they did have an MVP product and some of the employees were testing it, but just as they were about to launch, the company got acquired and decided to use its new parent's system. "It was a harsh blow."

3. Make them pay for it.

Almost right away, Lindsay discovered that a large fintech company was also looking for an intranet and sold it on the same pilot program deal. But a weird thing happened. As the company's employees used the product, they offered almost no useful feedback. Then the free part of the contract expired, Haystack started charging, and "the requests came up and the tolerance level went down," says Lindsay. "It was an interesting insight: When it's free, there's this expectation that things can be buggy. But when customers are paying for it, they're going to ping you about every little thing."

4. Obsess over the feedback.

The fintech company helped Haystack land a leading online bank as its second big customer. The critical comments kept coming. "You really have to check your ego at the door," says Lindsay. But he and Zhao finally had the gold mine of information they needed. One nugget they mined was the importance of security. People had documents and communications they didn't want to leak out, so Haystack developed features to prevent shareable screenshots. Other features developed similarly.

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5. Start with shorter contracts.

At first, Lindsay had no idea what to charge for his intranet — but his initial one-year contracts proved to be helpful there. "It gives you a full year of learning to figure out where your price point sits after that," he says. "Thankfully, we've now reached the phase where I'm preferring two years for stability — ­and just so it's easier to sleep at night."