Harvester
Valentin Huang saw a gap in the market for product management tools built specifically for the product manager's workflow. While tools like Trello and Jira dominated for development planning, they weren't optimized for the upstream work of collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing customer feedback. Harvester was designed to sit upstream of these development tools, creating a single source of truth for customer voice.
Valentin (paired with another co-founder also named Valentin as CTO) and a third advisor, Jeremy (a CPO at a large French SaaS company), spent three months building the product. The team of three bootstrapped with €15k in funding cobbled together from school grants and love money from friends and family. They launched earlier in 2018 in France, focusing initially on Paris-based product managers.
The startup didn't pursue traditional paid customer acquisition. Instead, they invited beta users organically and grew to over 100 active beta users within approximately two months of launch. The strategy was to focus entirely on product-market fit and stickiness metrics before monetizing, giving them time to refine the product based on real user behavior.
Harvester's differentiation centered on deep integrations with tools where customer feedback already lives—Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, and others. Users could pull feedback into Harvester, identify priorities and opportunities, then automatically push validated features to Trello or Jira for development. The team measured success not just by login frequency, but by how much feedback users imported, how much they analyzed and tagged, and crucially, how many features they exported downstream to development tools. This showed real workflow value. They planned to add NLP and machine learning for automated feedback categorization to serve larger enterprises at higher price points.
By mid-2018, Harvester was targeting a summer launch of their pricing model: starting at €100/month for teams up to three product managers, scaling with more integrations and automation features for larger organizations. The focus remained on nailing engagement metrics before monetizing, ensuring that when they turned on billing, users would already see clear value in their daily workflow.
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