Perception Paradox with Zivile (Zivi) Ein
Sep 16, 2026 · 15 min · 10 segments
After a major pivot, Teemu went from building a standalone customer success tool to creating AI agents that bring product-led growth directly into the developer environment. Teemu Kinos shares what…
Teemu KinosGuest
Zivile EinHost
Yeah, we began full time like after like we had a little bit like a non-traditional way of kind of a building because we've done this before.
Of course, we validated our hypothesis quite severely because we knew quite a lot of people from the ecosystem.
So we were able to run these interviews with them and that enabled us to raise the pre-seed round.
We launched our first MVP in the end of It was like a turn of October, beginning of November, which was horribly wrong.
I've kind of put it very bluntly that we were trying to fix a 2026 problem with a 2016 delivery model, which meant that it was very like a traditional, you go to Scanner.ai and you log in and you build it and Blah, blah, blah.
But like the whole hypothesis and the whole innovation has been from the work from Michele and Teppo that how can we actually build like full end to end automated agents.
But I was contacting these people, like, have you had, like, any challenges? And it was very, like, it became very evident that people wanted to have, like, maximum amount of ways to configure how these customer success, like chats and widgets and tooling in general.
looks like, but then we were like, okay, now we are starting to build like a lovable to customer success and growth functionalities to the web, which didn't make like literally any, any sense.
Then we already started like thinking of how can we be part of these, uh, like development environments like cursor and cloud codes.
rather than building like a separate application, because we understood that everything else is friction.
So if a developer needs to leave from their development environment to an application, which is on Scanner.ai, that's friction, which we did not want to have.
And a good point was when I was talking with Mari Sampson, Luukkanen, she actually came to our office for a day and in the first 15 minutes, she's like, oh, but this is PLG.
And that kind of enabled us to think a little bit differently from the kind of a legacy world.
Yeah, we began full time like after like we had a little bit like a non-traditional way of kind of a building because we've done this before.
Of course, we validated our hypothesis quite severely because we knew quite a lot of people from the ecosystem.
So we were able to run these interviews with them and that enabled us to raise the pre-seed round.
We launched our first MVP in the end of It was like a turn of October, beginning of November, which was horribly wrong.
I've kind of put it very bluntly that we were trying to fix a 2026 problem with a 2016 delivery model, which meant that it was very like a traditional, you go to Scanner.ai and you log in and you build it and Blah, blah, blah.
But like the whole hypothesis and the whole innovation has been from the work from Michele and Teppo that how can we actually build like full end to end automated agents.
But I was contacting these people, like, have you had, like, any challenges? And it was very, like, it became very evident that people wanted to have, like, maximum amount of ways to configure how these customer success, like chats and widgets and tooling in general.
looks like, but then we were like, okay, now we are starting to build like a lovable to customer success and growth functionalities to the web, which didn't make like literally any, any sense.
Then we already started like thinking of how can we be part of these, uh, like development environments like cursor and cloud codes.
rather than building like a separate application, because we understood that everything else is friction.
So if a developer needs to leave from their development environment to an application, which is on Scanner.ai, that's friction, which we did not want to have.
And a good point was when I was talking with Mari Sampson, Luukkanen, she actually came to our office for a day and in the first 15 minutes, she's like, oh, but this is PLG.
And that kind of enabled us to think a little bit differently from the kind of a legacy world.
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