We Built What People Wanted. Then We Built What They'd Pay For.

After hundreds of conversations, a Product Hunt launch, and months of validation, I learned something expensive: demand doesn’t mean a willingness to pay. But hidden in those "no thanks" conversations was something better.

Act I: The Validation Trap

I followed the playbook: spoke with hundreds of potential customers and identified real pain points. Nearly everyone suffers from missed action items, decisions lost across apps, immeasurable time wasted. I felt it acutely at Apple managing distributed teams across time zones. Attrove would be the solution. "Never drop the ball again."

We launched in October. Demand was solid: several hundred signups, strong engagement, enthusiastic feedback. But conversions to paid were slow; not the signal of urgent, must-have demand I was hoping for.

Turns out coordination friction, while annoying, still registers as "nice to have" when you're an unknown startup asking for money.

I'd validated the problem more than the purchase.

Act II: The Hidden Discovery

But post-launch, something unexpected emerged. Several people reached out asking not how they could use Attrove, but how they could integrate our connections into their own apps and agents. They wanted the infrastructure, not the interface.

The lightbulb: In the age of Cursor and vibe-coding, writing code is trivial. Integrations, security, OAuth flows, CASA approvals—that's the hard part. And we'd already built it.

We'd accidentally built developer infrastructure while trying to build SaaS.

Act III: The Pivot

Attrove Connect is the communications API for AI agents: drop Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Google Calendar, Meet, Teams into any app in minutes instead of months.

Every AI agent needs context from workplace communications. But every developer I've talked to in the past few months has struggled with the same problem: connecting to Slack or Gmail is months of engineering work. It took us months to architect, navigate CASA approvals, and pipe it all together. Why should everyone reinvent this wheel?

Think Plaid for productivity integrations. Dead simple to drop in. Free tier to get started, usage-based scaling beyond that.

The difference this time? We're in conversations with several companies right now, and the willingness to pay is palpable.

The site goes live today. If you're building AI agents or apps that need workplace context, let's talk.

(We're keeping the original app live and supported; it turns out a polished, working product is also great developer marketing.)

Sometimes the best pivots come from listening to what customers actually want to pay for—even when it's not what you built.