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For founders
Ship Tuesday. Wake to your customers Thursday.
You know you should be talking to last week's signups. You also have a sprint to ship. While you shipped, Totem ran 14 onboarding interviews; themes, quotes, the people who almost bailed are on your desk before standup.
Silent betaFully free in beta
Onboarding Friction, Week-1 Users
Onboarding research. Totem ran this conversation across 14 participants and synthesized what came back into the takeaway below.
Key findingsAI-synthesized from 14 participants
The empty state is the bottleneck, 10 of 14 stalled there before finding their first use case. Six found templates helpful once discovered; four missed the Templates tab entirely. Three said they'd have bailed without "see an example", and five want a guided first-workflow tour from cold start.
- Stalled at empty state
- Templates helped
- Missed Templates tab
- Wants guided first-run tour
- First workflow in week 1
- 40%Positive
- 40%Friction
- 20%Focus
- Responses
- 0
- Fully completed
- 0/0
- Avg. completion
- 0%
- Avg. length
- 0m
From silent-beta calls
“My problem isn't talking to users. It's that the round-trip is four weeks. By the time I have synthesis, I've already shipped the wrong thing.”
— a founder, last week
What founders ask first
“But my early users won't talk to an AI.”
They do, more than you'd expect. Totem introduces itself plainly at the start; the line is "the founder isn't on this call, but every word goes back to them." Most relax once they realise there's no human judgment on the other end. Founders in the silent beta are seeing strong completion on cold week-1 invites, higher than the human-hosted calls they were running before.
What founders start with
The conversations founders keep skipping.
Customer pricing research
Customer Pricing Assumptions Interview
Hear how customers actually react to your tiers, without booking nine 30-minute calls.
Churn diagnostic
Churn diagnostic
The shape of every cancellation, side by side.
Investor reference checks
Investor reference checks
What past customers say off the record.
Why founders pick Totem
- 01
You hear from week-1 users while you're still building for them. Not three sprints later, when the friction has hardened into a churn pattern.
- 02
The synthesis fits in a Slack message. The verbatims are one click away when someone asks you to back up the claim.
- 03
No researcher to hire. No transcripts to skim. No calendar tetris. The work that fills your week, removed from your week.
What changes
What changes for founders.
- 01
3–5 customer conversations per week
The Lean Startup floor for early-stage discovery, and the level most founders intend to hit but rarely sustain when calendars get hostile.
Lean Startup canon · Steve Blank, Eric Ries
- 02
Discovery alongside delivery, not before it
Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres) reframes customer interviews as a weekly cadence parallel to the build, not a quarterly pre-flight check.
Continuous Discovery Habits · Teresa Torres
- 03
From "can I find an hour?" to "what should I ask?"
The bottleneck has moved. AI-moderated interviews collapse the calendar cost; the work that's left is deciding what to learn.
Common questions
What founders ask before they try Totem.
- How do founders do customer discovery at scale?
- By moving discovery from live calls to AI-moderated conversations. Totem hosts the same depth interview with every user in parallel, transcribes each one, and synthesizes themes across the cohort — so a founder can run 14 customer interviews while shipping the sprint, not while blocking it.
- What's the best customer discovery tool for early-stage founders?
- The right tool is the one that runs while you build. Totem is purpose-built for founders running discovery without a research team: one prompt seeds the protocol, every customer gets the same conversation on their own schedule, and the synthesis — themes, verbatims, sentiment patterns — lands in your inbox before standup.
- How many customer interviews should a founder run per week?
- Lean Startup canon recommends 3–5 customer conversations per week minimum. With AI-moderated interviews, founders routinely run 10–15 per cycle without multiplying calendar load. The bottleneck stops being "can I find an hour?" and becomes "what should I ask?"
- Can AI replace customer discovery interviews?
- AI doesn't replace customer discovery — it amplifies it. AI-moderated interviews preserve what makes a discovery call useful (open questions, adaptive probes, transcribed verbatims) and remove what makes them scarce (scheduling, time cost, founder-bandwidth tax). The founder still designs the protocol and reviews the synthesis; the AI runs the calls.
- How do you synthesize answers across multiple customer interviews?
- Cross-participant synthesis surfaces patterns once across the whole cohort, with counts ("7 of 9 mentioned tier confusion"), grounded verbatims, and sentiment-coded themes. The output is one synthesis per study, not one summary per call — defensible in any stakeholder meeting and skimmable in a Slack message.
- How is Totem different from Dovetail or User Interviews?
- Dovetail is a research repository — you bring it your transcripts. User Interviews recruits participants for live calls you still have to run. Totem replaces the call itself: it hosts the AI-moderated interview, transcribes every line, and synthesizes the themes on the same loop. It removes the call, not just the analysis.
Your turn
One line. Then the conversations.
Describe what you'd ask your last six users. Totem will run it with all of them and wake you with the synthesis.
Drop your promptFree during the betaNo cardYour prompt, your data