I invested in Oura long before smart rings became mainstream. I started wearing the ring myself only after becoming a shareholder, and today almost everyone in our group's senior leadership team wears one too. Every morning it shows me how well I slept and how recovered my body is, based on heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature. Over time, I began to see how late meetings, travel, or intense training affect my recovery, and I started planning demanding days with that in mind.
This experience didn’t influence my decision to invest, but it gave me something no report could: a real sense of why people keep paying for the product and where it could go next.
Using the product yourself helps an investor see how the tech becomes part of everyday life and what it changes. But that insight also brings the temptation to place too much weight on personal experience. A product may be useful to me. But does that tell me how the company will grow, or only how I use it?
I see using a product myself as a way to understand the business better. It offers advantages that are hard to gain from reports alone. It also has limitations that are particularly easy to overlook when you like the product, the team, and your own investment.
Using a product yourself shows what role it plays in a person's life.
My colleagues and I use Reface's BitePal calorie tracker, and some of these products have made their way into our families too. A demo can show you what a product does, but everyday use tells you much more: whether you actually find time for it, whether it helps you make decisions, and whether you keep coming back once the initial excitement wears off. Growing sales can show that people are interested, but seeing a product become part of a routine gives you a better sense of whether that interest will last.
The same applies to tools we use at work. Our PR team uses ElevenLabs, an AI service for creating voiceovers and dubbing videos and podcasts in more than 70 languages, for tasks like turning large volumes of text into speech. Using it for real work shows you how long it actually takes to get to a finished result, where you still need to step in manually, and where the product genuinely saves time. For an investor, those details help you understand which parts of the job customers are comfortable handing over to the product and what they’re actually willing to pay for.
When you’ve experienced a problem yourself, it’s much easier to see the value of a new solution.
Our team spent considerable time updating reports and presentations, so I immediately saw the value of Rollstack, a company Roosh Ventures invested in 2023. The service automatically transfers up-to-date data into documents and slides, freeing people from repetitive manual work.
Understanding a problem, however, does not establish the market potential of a solution. You need to find out how often other teams encounter it, how much they are willing to pay, and what prevents them from changing their usual process. Personal experience helps you ask these questions more precisely.
Sometimes, you start a business simply because you need the solution yourself.
That was the case with Toogeza, a recruitment agency we built from scratch to meet our own hiring needs. At first, it worked exclusively for us, making us its first clients. The team received feedback from real assignments and could improve the service as it went. Today, Toogeza handles recruitment for the group and works with external clients.
When you use a product yourself, you can give founders much more practical feedback on what works and what could be improved.
It’s easier to explain exactly where you run into problems or why you have to switch to another tool to complete part of a task. That kind of feedback is much more useful than simply asking for the product to be easier to use. At the same time, my feedback still needs to be treated like any other customer’s: how many users have the same need, and does it make sense to change the product because of it?
Using a product yourself can also help you communicate its value. If a feature genuinely makes your day-to-day work easier, but the company isn’t getting that across, an investor who uses the product can help tell that story more clearly. First-hand experience gives you a better understanding of where your expertise can add value, but it doesn’t replace that expertise.
At the same time, I can’t assume that my habits reflect those of every customer.
Other users may have smaller budgets or less time to learn how the technology works. If I spend an hour on setup and am pleased with the result, that does not explain why someone else closed the app after five minutes. The opposite mistake is possible too — I might underestimate a product because I do not face the problem it solves. So I need to question my lack of interest just as much as my enthusiasm.
Once you become a shareholder, it is easy to start looking for signs that you made the right decision. Knowing how much work went into an update can make you more forgiving of a clunky interface, while trust in the founders can make you dismiss glitches as temporary. That’s why I also want to understand why other customers stop using the product and what they choose instead.
Even having happy customers doesn’t necessarily mean the business itself makes sense financially. A company can have a genuinely useful product and still be valued too highly for what it can realistically earn. Understanding why people are willing to pay for a product has to go hand in hand with understanding what it costs to acquire and serve those customers, and whether the business can become more profitable as it grows.
When thinking about a company’s future, it’s important to remember that a lasting need doesn’t necessarily mean a particular product will last. People will always want to sleep better, but they may find an easier or better way to track their sleep.
So the real question is what keeps them choosing one product over another. Is it the accuracy of the data, how clearly it’s explained, convenience, or simply the years of personal data they’ve already built up?
As AI makes similar insights available across more products, companies will need other reasons to keep customers coming back.
That’s why it’s important to keep reassessing an investment even after you’ve made it. Using the product regularly helps you see whether it continues to deliver the same value and whether new updates actually make life easier, rather than adding more friction. And if I find myself getting frustrated with something, that’s a good reason to ask whether other customers are experiencing the same problem.
Tracking my recovery taught me to adjust my plans when the data showed me something I didn’t expect. I try to approach the products in my portfolio in the same way. No report can replace the experience of actually using a product: it shows me what people are willing to pay for, where the friction is, and where there’s room to improve. And if what I learn challenges my original assumptions, I need to be willing to rethink the investment too.
