Normenn — how a JTBD sprint helped an AI startup move past the hype to solve a real problem.
Normenn is an AI startup founded by four 18-year-old entrepreneurs. They knew how to build — but they were facing the classic early-stage trap: they had a hammer and were looking for a nail.
In the beginning, their answer to almost every market challenge was simply that they would 'AI it'. When a technical team falls in love with the technology rather than the customer's problem, it's easy to spread too thin, build features nobody asked for, and lose the thread of what the product is actually for.
What they needed was someone to pull them out of the product and put them in front of real customers.
Torun and I ran a JTBD sprint with the team. The goal was to get them out of their own heads and into real conversations — with the e-commerce businesses they were trying to serve. Not asking what tech features they wanted, but finding out what jobs they were struggling to get done.
Through open interviews with online stores of various sizes, the pattern became clear. Not scattered frustrations — one core problem that kept showing up. That was the thing worth building for.
By the end of the sprint, the four founders were pointing in the same direction. Instead of building a generic AI tool that tried to solve everything at once, they had a single, specific problem to solve — one that real users had told them was real.
Today, Normenn knows exactly who they're talking to, what problem they solve, and where their AI earns its place. The sprint didn't just give them a direction — it gave them the evidence to build with confidence, rather than hope.
“The sprint gave us what we needed most: a structured outside perspective. Through open interviews with online retailers of various sizes, we had it confirmed that the problem we wanted to solve was real — not just something we had imagined.”
“The sprint helped us distil the product down to one thing it should do really well. That process is the reason we can build with confidence today, rather than guessing.”
Whether you have a clear brief or a hazy feeling something is off — a conversation costs nothing and usually clarifies everything.
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