Why Customer Conversations Are Your Fastest Path to Product-Market Fit: The Accelevents Story

Most SaaS founders think they understand their buyers. The truth? Many are building in a vacuum, guessing what features matter and hoping they stick.

Jonathan Kazarian, founder and CEO of Accelevents, learned early on that the fastest way to scale wasn’t just to ship features — it was to build a constant feedback loop with the people using his platform. That loop became the backbone of his company’s growth from three people to more than 120 in under two years, landing them on the Inc. 5000 list at #181 with 2,000%+ growth.

The Pivot That Made Buyer Intelligence a Survival Skill

Accelevents started in 2015 as a tech tool for in-person fundraising events. When COVID hit in March 2020, their event-driven revenue dropped to zero almost overnight.

Kazarian had two options:

Stay in the live-events lane and wait out the storm.
Pivot hard into virtual events — a space where big players like Zoom and Hopin already dominated.

They chose option two. But here’s the twist: they didn’t build the platform in isolation. They co-built it with customers in real time, collecting input on what event organizers actually needed, wanted, and were willing to pay for.

Lesson 1: Invite Customers Into the Build Process

Kazarian’s team didn’t just launch an MVP and hope for the best. They partnered closely with their earliest virtual-event customers, setting the tone from the first interaction:

“We’re in this together. Your ideas won’t fall into a well — we’ll act on them.”

That mindset had two benefits:

Customers felt ownership over the product, increasing loyalty.
The product roadmap stayed tied to real event-organizer problems, not internal assumptions.

Lesson 2: Feedback Is Worthless Without Follow-Up

Accelevents built their buyer-intelligence engine into daily operations:

Intercom live chat with a median first-response time under 30 seconds.
Direct phone calls to unpack the why behind requests.
Customer Experience (CX) team empowered to escalate insights directly to product.

The fast feedback loop wasn’t just for support — it was a constant source of product-market-fit data.

Lesson 3: Treat Support Like a Growth Channel

In event tech, the product is the experience. If an event organizer is left hanging for 10 minutes during a live conference, that’s a lost customer — and potentially dozens of lost prospects who were attending the event.

Kazarian’s insight: in a market where your platform is seen by hundreds of potential buyers during a single customer’s event, every flawless support interaction is a sales touchpoint.

Lesson 4: Align Incentives With Customer Success

The Accelevents team knows the better an organizer’s event performs, the more likely attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors will become customers themselves.

That incentive alignment changed their posture:

They didn’t just troubleshoot — they coached.
They offered as much hands-on help as the customer wanted, from fully self-service to white-glove guidance.

Lesson 5: Let Culture Drive Buyer Intelligence

When you’re scaling from 3 to 120+ people in under two years, culture can easily break. For Kazarian, the safeguard was hiring people who:

Thrived on urgency.
Saw themselves as partners to customers, not just support agents.
Believed their feedback mattered — and could prove it by pointing to changes in the platform.

That culture meant the CX team didn’t just answer questions; they actively hunted for insight.

Key Takeaways for SaaS & Tech Founders

Make customer feedback loops intentional, not incidental. Build them into your processes and tools.
Respond faster than your market expects. Speed builds trust, and trust builds retention.
View support as marketing. Every interaction is a live demo for future buyers.
Coach, don’t just fix. Help customers succeed at their goals, not just use your tool.
Hire for mindset, not just skillset. The right people will surface the insights you’d never think to ask for.

Why this matters for your SaaS or tech company: Buyer intelligence isn’t a side project — it’s your competitive advantage. If you’re not building a systematic way to listen, learn, and adapt to your market in real time, someone else will.