How Korl Pivoted from Product Updates to Customer Growth

Startups live and die by how fast they learn. You start with a vision, then build, polish, obsess. But clarity only comes when real users show you where you’re wrong.

At Korl, we set out to streamline how product teams communicate. But the biggest need wasn’t in Product. It was in the teams talking to customers every day.

Why our first approach didn’t work

👉 Our first iteration was useful, but it didn’t solve a critical pain.

The bar for software adoption has never been higher. Buyers aren’t just evaluating whether a tool is useful; they’re asking whether it’s indispensable. With AI-native solutions flooding the market, “nice to have” doesn’t cut it anymore.

The first iteration of Korl was a time saver for product teams, but it targeted communication workflows that most product teams can live with being a bit broken, manual, or inconsistent.

In a world where every team is fighting for budget, software needs to justify its existence beyond simple automation. We realized that if Korl was going to make an impact, it couldn’t just speed up workflows. It had to fundamentally change how teams communicate product value and drive customer growth.

The real problem we needed to solve

💡 We were solving the right problem – communicating product value – but for the wrong team.

In working with early customers, we realized that the pain of bad product communications is felt most deeply not by Product teams but rather by the customer-facing teams tasked with driving adoption, expanding use cases, justifying renewals, and cross-selling.

The reality is that the primary job for Product is to build the right thing. But once a feature ships, the responsibility of making it resonate with the market often falls on GTM teams. These teams are struggling to translate product details into compelling customer narratives.

💬 We heard people in pre- and post-Sales roles say things like:

• “Product is too focused on features and function, not enough on the value proposition.”
• “To take the time to step back, translate, put it in the deck that looks nice and uniform is a half-day heroic effort that people don’t always have.”
• “When it comes time for renewal, customers are like, what have you released? Why should I pay you a 7.5% price increase?”

We had built a tool for Product teams, but the people who needed it most were the ones talking to customers every day.

The pivot: Turning product updates into growth drivers

👉 Product teams ship features, but if those features don’t land with customers, it’s as if they never shipped at all.

We realized that with Product teams increasingly time-constrained and (justifiably) focused on what to build, the real opportunity was helping customer-facing teams directly with transforming that “what” into “why” it matters for each customer.

And this was not just about time-savings. There was a real opportunity to increase retention and drive expansion by proactively arming CSMs, Account Managers, and revenue teams with personalized “value narratives” for each of their customers.

💬 As one GTM leader said to us:

• “Korl isn’t just an internal comms tool. This is directly tied to impact. Revenue. Retention. This really matters.”

Imagining a fundamentally new approach with AI

✨ We had found an urgent pain, but the real breakthrough was realizing that with today’s AI, we could solve it in a way that wasn’t possible two years ago.

The need to translate product capabilities into customer value is not a new problem. But the aha moment for us was realizing how generative AI and agentic workflows enabled us to approach it in a completely different way.

Prior attempts to solve this problem have relied on heavy manual effort to aggregate and summarize disparate data. Inevitably, information became stale and unreliable, so people abandoned the systems intended to solve the product-to-value translation layer.

But agentic AI workflows had made it possible to gather, augment, and enrich siloed data without any changes to how product and engineering teams work.

Korl was already built to organize this fragmented product data. But to unlock real value, we had to connect that product context with a deep understanding of each customer.

The problem Korl solves today

We zeroed in on three critical gaps:

1. Empowering customer-facing teams without burdening product builders

Customer-facing teams need tailored value narratives, but Product teams don’t have time to spoon-feed them. Korl’s Data Agent became the solution, automatically gathering relevant project data from tools like Jira, Google Docs, and Figma, then enriching it with customer-facing language and automatically tying each project to key components of customer value.

2. Doubling down on revenue-critical moments

The key to driving adoption is reinforcing the right feature’s value at the right time. We focused on strategic business reviews, roadmap discussions, and renewal conversations, the moments where product knowledge fuels revenue growth.

3. Bridging the gap between product and customer context for true personalization

The opportunity was to marry data about each customer with product context to enable hyper-personalization at scale. We needed to identify what each customer cared about, then bridge that with product context to help GTM teams deliver personalized value narratives at scale.

Korl is the future of personalized customer engagement

🚀 We’re building for a future where AI enables companies to treat every customer as their most strategic.

The new version of Korl automatically generates and delivers the right presentation or email for each key milestone in each customer’s journey. It automatically tailors content so it’s personalized to each account, what they care about, and where they are in their relationship with you.

Think of it as taking what today the best CSMs and Account Managers do only as needed and only for their most strategic accounts, and scaling it automatically for every customer interaction.

We went from streamlining internal workflows to automatically turning product capabilities into revenue-driving assets. This isn’t just a better process. It’s a fundamental shift in how companies leverage AI to engage and drive value for their customers.

If there’s one lesson we’ll take with us from Korl’s early days:

Stay open. Stay curious. And when your customers show you where the real value is, lean in. That’s where the breakthroughs happen.

📌 Ready to transform product updates into revenue drivers? Visit korl.co to request a demo.