InnerTrends

Claudio Mororio's entrepreneurial journey began while working as a web analyst. After a customer congratulated him on consultancy advice that earned them $100,000 in three months, he realized he should start his own business. He co-founded PaddyCode, a web analytics company focused on behavioral targeting and email collection through intelligent pop-ups. Starting with zero investment as a side project, PaddyCode achieved break-even in the first year and grew to $300,000 in annual revenue by year three with just three employees.

While running PaddyCode, Claudio became increasingly frustrated with the lack of analytics solutions that could answer the fundamental questions he needed to optimize his own business. He realized that most analytics tools provided raw data and reports, but didn't help users understand what actions to take. This insight—that every company should have access to the same data-driven optimization approach that made PaddyCode profitable—stuck with him. When conflicts with his co-founder escalated, Claudio made the difficult decision to leave PaddyCode as a passive shareholder to pursue his new vision.

Claudio started InnerTrends in 2015 with a clear technical foundation: building raw data tracking technology that could be processed flexibly in any way possible. The first six to eight months focused entirely on this infrastructure. In parallel, he conducted extensive customer interviews starting in March 2015, visiting companies to understand why they struggled to make data-driven decisions despite having access to data.

A pivotal moment came when an investor asked him why InnerTrends was different from dozens of web analytics startups pitching monthly. When Claudio explained the technical capabilities, the investor pushed back, asking how they actually answered customers' questions. Though they weren't doing it yet, this challenge sparked Claudio's realization: the product shouldn't be about data or technology—it should be about answering questions. He tested this concept with five or six product managers that same day, and every single one showed interest.

Claudió and his team built an interface for asking questions but discovered through user testing that nobody could use it. Six user testing sessions failed completely. Rather than pushing forward, he went back to research and customer interviews. By December 2015, they had refined their approach. After user testing success in early January, they launched a private beta.

InnerTrends remained in private beta from January through September 2015. The extended timeline was intentional—they needed to build increasingly sophisticated capabilities to answer more complex questions if customers were ever to pay for the product. This phase was heavily manual and not scalable, but it forced product learning. Their first customer came in early January 2015, with the second arriving in February. The initial tracking implementation took two weeks, but by September this had been optimized to under two hours.

The focus on user onboarding as the primary problem proved transformative. While many companies weren't actively searching for "user onboarding" solutions, they were searching for growth. In June, as InnerTrends began content marketing and blogging, Claudio and his team reframed their positioning around growth hacking while keeping user onboarding as the core engine. This shift made marketing dramatically easier.

A major mistake in the early days was trying to replicate the recipe from PaddyCode—Claudio had planned to build integrations with commerce providers and answer questions about revenue, MRR, and churn across various data sources. After two months of development, they realized this approach failed because business problems aren't solved by isolated datasets. Revenue issues are intertwined with user onboarding, product engagement, and dozens of other factors. "You cannot just take revenue data and hope to actually give something to the customer," Claudio reflected. They scrapped all that code and refocused on solving one problem completely.

This realization came after speaking with many companies at an event. Walking out the door, Claudio called his partners and said they needed to focus on a single problem and fix it completely. Everyone agreed the data they'd collected validated this approach. By pivoting to comprehensive user onboarding coverage instead of scattered data sources, they transformed from a data product into a product that delivered actionable insights and growth optimization.

By September 2015, InnerTrends launched publicly with 10 customers already closed during private beta. The product answers specific questions like "What is different between users who convert and those who don't in their first week?" and provides not just the answer but specific, data-backed actions to improve. Rather than competing with free tools by offering lower prices, InnerTrends targets companies with 500+ new users monthly (ideally 1,000+)—businesses beyond product-market fit with enough data to generate meaningful insights. While their entry price point exceeds $300/month, they've found that companies at this stage recognize the value of paid analytics and are willing to invest. Claudio's vision of helping companies make confident, data-driven decisions rather than relying on "hippo" (highest paid person's opinion) opinions continues to drive the product forward.