Stitched Insights

Demetri Pavlov built Stitched Insights to solve a problem he saw in traditional market research: companies were spending money on surveys and hiring consultants to understand customer sentiment, but they were missing the constant stream of unobtrusive customer feedback already pouring in through support tickets, emails, and customer service calls. His insight was that deep learning and natural language processing could automatically analyze all this existing data—both structured survey responses and organic customer communications—to generate ranked SWOT analysis that was more predictive and actionable than traditional surveys.

When Pavlov first launched in 2018, the company was lean and capital-light. He brought in roughly 10 people (a mix of full-time and part-time) on a budget of about $60K in revenue that year. Early on, he burned "a little under a hundred grand maybe" on things like an unnecessary website redesign and other experimentation. This taught him to bootstrap smarter. By partnering with GSV Labs, he gained access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in credits for hosting, legal services, and other infrastructure, dramatically reducing burn. His team accepted discounted or deferred salaries in exchange for equity, allowing the company to stretch limited cash.

By the time of this April 2020 interview, Stitched Insights had grown to about nine engaged customers—a significant step up from the five mentioned in his previous interview in November 2018. These weren't small pilots anymore; the company had launched a commercial product in the retail space and was running expanded pilots with major brands, including one of the largest media conglomerates and several Fortune 100/500 companies. Pavlov was deliberate about customer selection, focusing on retail and market research as his beachhead markets and leveraging system integrators (who traditionally conducted surveys manually) as channel partners.

The pivot to partnerships proved critical. Rather than trying to sell directly to brand marketing teams, Pavlov found that system integrators and market research firms were struggling with the manual labor of processing customer feedback at scale. By positioning Stitched Insights as a technology layer that could automate what these partners were doing with "manpower and consultants," he unlocked a distribution channel and validation of product-market fit. The company collected approximately $100K in cash from POCs and pilot engagements in 2019 and raised "a little over a hundred thousand" in venture funding to support customer acquisition in 2020. The goal was to reach $1.5M ARR by year-end 2020 with a mix of 2–3 large enterprise logos and 5–10 mid-market customers.

However, the timing was precarious. In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the host challenged Pavlov on whether brands would care about a customer feedback tool when people were worried about survival. Pavlov countered that system integrators were still drowning in support tickets and customer calls, and brands still needed to understand long-tail issues beyond immediate crises—but the fundamental question of demand in a recession remained unanswered.

By April 2020, Stitched Insights was transitioning from MVP/POC phase to commercial scaling. The team had grown to 13 people, still with less than half on full-time salaries. Pavlov was navigating the tension between bootstrapping and raising capital, having brought on strategic advisors and investors from targeted firms. His immediate goal was to achieve Series A readiness by delivering commercial revenue from expanded enterprise pilots, particularly in retail and market research verticals where the value proposition was clearest. The global recession and pandemic were wild cards—Pavlov believed brands still needed to build products and understand customer priorities, but he acknowledged the uncertainty and invited the host to check back in six months for a real update.