“It’s been a story of a lot of pivots”: Day 1-1000 of Insight7

Odun Odubanjo became obsessed with data during his time as a computer engineering student at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in southwestern Nigeria. He recalls using J2ME, a technology for developing applications and games on older mobile phones, to build mobile applications for Java-supported phones.

Although he was skilled at programming, he was drawn to understanding how data could be used in real-world scenarios.

Fresh out of university, he cofounded Twinpine, a mobile advertising startup, in 2011. The company eventually evolved into a cloud-based marketing data platform, pulling him deeper into data-driven decision-making.

Still, that passion for working with data didn’t let up. Odubanjo relocated to Toronto, Canada, in 2019 to join Security Compass, a cybersecurity startup, as a Product Innovation lead. But as he gained more experience, he noticed a disconnect in how data was used.

During his one-year stint at Security Compass, Odunbanjo said he found teams relying on spreadsheets to manually piece together insights, struggling to turn information into something usable. Later at Shopify, an e-commerce company, where he worked as a Product Lead for three years, he encountered a more complex version of the same problem: companies had access to data but lacked the clarity needed to act on it.

“It was clear to me that there needed to be tools that would help you really understand your customers and markets, and then use that data to make the right product and market decisions in your business,” he said. “I immediately recognised that there was an opportunity here.”

In May 2022, Odubanjo set out to build Insight7, an AI-powered platform designed to help businesses turn qualitative data—such as interviews and customer conversations—into valuable insights.

Insight7 operates in the conversational intelligence and customer experience analytics market, projected to reach $27.4 billion in 2026 and grow to $60.3 billion by 2036, according to Future Market Insights, a market research company. The startup primarily serves United States-based mid-market and enterprise businesses, and has seen growing adoption in European markets, including the United Kingdom and Germany, according to Odubanjo. It is now expanding into Nigeria.

Insight7’s earliest version aggregated job postings and mined them for company insights. The thinking was that if a company was hiring for certain roles, the data could reveal what it was building. That kind of intelligence could help sales teams identify prospective clients and better product positioning.

However, the model required a large volume of data to be useful, making it difficult to execute, according to Odubanjo. So, he scrapped it.

When he tried again, he changed the model. This time, instead of collecting external data, he built a system where companies could bring in their own data, and Insight7 would synthesise it. The pioneer team had four engineers and later grew to seven. Their focus was building the product, testing it with potential users, and refining it based on feedback.

“The early days were us just trying to figure out a product that could analyse interviews for product managers or product teams so that they could understand their customers better,” he said. The final product launched publicly in January 2023.

After Insight7’s public launch in January 2023, Odubanjo’s focus shifted from building the product to adoption.

“There was a lot of confusion around what we were doing,” he said. “The idea was to prove that conviction.”

So, he reached out to founders and product leaders in his network to show them what his product could do. He said he walked them through the problem of understanding customer behaviour from qualitative data, such as interviews and conversations, to explain why it mattered that they use his solution to fix the problem. He posted consistently on LinkedIn to build an audience around the idea and get the product in front of as many people as possible.

For a while, it seemed to be working for him. He explained that he was getting in front of decision-makers at large companies—he declined to disclose. They understood the problem and, in some cases, described it as serious. But these conversations kept ending with interest and not commitment.

Even when Insight7 started making money, bringing in a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue, according to Odubanjo, it did not change his conviction that the product made sense. But, but it was just not a priority for the people he was speaking to.

“There was revenue,” he said. “We could see that there was something here, but we couldn’t get traction. It was clear that the urgency of the pain wasn’t there.”

For Odubanjo, Insight7’s day 500 felt like being stuck, but not for much longer.

Insight7’s first pivot came in 2024.

After months of trying to convince product teams to act on a problem they acknowledged but would not prioritise, Odubanjo and his team were forced to redirect their focus when a representative from an unnamed market research company, who was already working closely with quantitative data, requested the solution.

“We did more research, and we understood that there was this whole segment of people who were doing a lot of market research that required qualitative analysis,” he said. “So we just pivoted at that point; focused the same product on a new market, and created a lot of content around it. We started to see traction.”

“We were still passionate about helping businesses transform how they leverage data to make decisions and serve their customers better,” he said. “But if we didn’t pivot, we wouldn’t exist now.”

That newfound stability only lasted for less than a year.

With the increasing popularity of general-purpose AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, and the products offering similar analytics capabilities, sometimes for free, competition intensified for Insight7. So came the startup’s second pivot.

This time, it began to reshape its product to focus on analysing customer service calls and using the data to train employees. That idea came as a request from one of its users.

“We felt we could use the same underlying platform to build a new user experience for that,” Odubanjo said.

He explained that the demand for the new version of Insight7 outpaced the old, and by the end of 2025, revenue had tripled. “It’s been a story of a lot of pivots, he said.

Odubanjo described those transition periods as “pivot hell,” a phase where a product is not fully working and its next direction is unclear.

“It’s challenging, but also very exciting because we have the conviction that our customers need our current products,” he said.

Insight7’s current iteration reflects these pivots.