AI SaaS product design · Seed to Series B · Enterprise sales

“We lose to a technically worse product”

The model is the differentiator. The experience decides whether the enterprise buyer can tell. We design the moment your model’s advantage becomes visible to the person who signs.

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What the gap is worth €144,000 to €240,000 in new ARR a year Illustrative inputs, so swap in your own

The deal you should have won

Your evaluation scores were better. Your engineers ran the benchmark twice to be sure. The champion was enthusiastic on every call.

Then the email arrives. They went with the other product, the one your team still calls a wrapper. The reason given is “overall fit”.

In between, something like this usually happened. Your champion walked into a room with the CFO and the head of operations and tried to explain, in their own words, why your product was better. The other vendor’s product had given its champion an easy sentence to say. Yours had not.

The belief that loses the deal

Most technical founders hold a reasonable belief: if the model is clearly better, the market will notice. In a technical evaluation, it often does.

Enterprise deals are not decided by the technical evaluator alone. The operations lead, the finance lead or the head of legal forms an impression in the first two minutes, before anything impressive happens. To them, the model is invisible. All they can judge is what the product shows them.

Where the advantage goes missing

These are the patterns we look for first in products where AI output is a core part of the workflow

  • The first two minutes carry no evidence

    The value arrives after setup, after a prompt, after a wait. By then the evaluator has formed a view.

  • The output arrives without a reason to trust it

    There is no source, no confidence signal and no way to check. A technical user will forgive that. A budget holder usually does not.

  • Uncertainty is handled in the model, not on the screen

    Either every answer carries a disclaimer, which teaches people to ignore disclaimers, or none does, and a wrong answer looks exactly like a right one.

  • Data handling lives in the terms of service

    Procurement asks what the product does with their data, and the product itself never says.

  • Your champion cannot repeat the demo

    After the call, they explain the product to their leadership. If the product does not give them the words, the deal slows down inside a company you are not in.

Before Series A: the first three minutes

At this stage the demo is the sales process. A non-technical evaluator decides in the first three minutes whether the product looks ready for their company.

The question we start with is simple: when a non-technical person sees the product for the first time, what is their reaction before anything impressive happens? If you do not know, that is the first finding. If your round depends on this demo too, read what investors check after the pitch.

Series A and B: losing to a better presentation

You have the data that your model is better, and the competitor closed the deal anyway. That is not bad luck. It is a presentation gap, and a presentation gap has a price.

Here we start with a different question: what does your champion say to their leadership after the demo? The sentence they need is usually the value proposition the product is not yet showing.

What the gap is worth

Illustrative inputs, so swap in your own:

enterprise demos a month

Demo-to-close at %

An illustrative peer close rate of %

€ ACV

We plan for closing 30 to 50% of the gap, not all of it, which gives a target of 23% to 25%.

3 to 5 points × 10 demos = 0.3 to 0.5 more deals a month

0.3 to 0.5 × €40,000 × 12 = €144,000 to €240,000 in new ARR a year

At that ACV, one lost enterprise deal is worth more than seven Clarity Sprints at €5,500.

Annual gap = (target rate − current rate) × monthly volume × value per unit × 12

Run it on your own pipeline with the conversion gap calculator.

Before you book, three questions

  1. For every ten enterprise demos, how many become customers, and where do the others go?

  2. When the AI output is wrong or low-confidence, what does the user see?

  3. Is design the problem at all?

    If your demos convert well and deals die in legal over contract terms, the experience is not where the money is. You do not need us yet.

From first call to a demo that holds up

  1. A 30-minute call

    Bring a demo recording or a login. A principal tells you what an enterprise evaluator is likely to see in the first two minutes.

  2. A two-week Clarity Sprint

    We use the product the way your enterprise buyer would. The report maps where evaluators lose the thread, how the trust layer around AI output could change, and a conservative ARR figure on each fix. €5,500 to €8,500, with a written guarantee.

  3. The work, two weeks at a time

    Fixed scope, one output per sprint and a recorded walkthrough instead of a status call. Your engineers get dev-ready files: specs, tokens and documented states.

If the answer turns out to be something you can fix without us, the report says so

What the buyer sees afterwards

BeforeAfter
The model’s advantage shows up after minute five The first two minutes show why the output can be trusted
Wrong answers look the same as right ones The user sees confidence and sources, and can check
Procurement asks about data and you send a PDF The product answers the data question on screen
Your champion improvises the pitch to their CFO The product gives them one sentence to repeat
Valeria Shumska and Ivan Kraskov, the two principals at Spirixx

Who does the work

The two principals on your first call do the work. The work is not handed to a junior team.

  • Valeria Shumska

    Co-founder, Head of Product Strategy and Design

    MSc in computer engineering, 10+ years in systems and product design, focused on complex systems.

  • Ivan Kraskov

    Co-founder, Design and Communication Principal

    20+ years designing for startups and scale-ups, across product design, UX strategy and front-end.

Your model, your prompts and your roadmap stay private. A mutual NDA comes before any sensitive conversation, and we never publish client work. How that works.

FAQ

Do you understand AI products, or will you tell us to make it cleaner?

We look at the layer between the model and the buyer: how output is shown, how uncertainty is communicated, what the user can verify. “Cleaner” is not a finding.

Our problem is sales, not design. Why talk to a design studio?

It might be sales. Look at where deals slow down. If it is the demo or the evaluation, the experience is usually part of it. If it is contract stage, it usually is not.

We have a designer. Where do you fit?

Alongside them. An internal designer is usually fully booked with feature work. We add the measured layer above it: which flow to change, and what changing it is worth. More on in-house versus studio.

Can we use AI design tools instead?

You should use them. They produce screens faster once you know which screens to produce. Deciding that is the part the tools do not do.

Is the Sprint cheaper than one lost deal?

At a typical enterprise ACV, yes, by a wide margin. The Sprint is €5,500 to €6,500, or €8,500 with a technical architecture review, and the fee is credited in full if you continue within 90 days.

Let’s find the two minutes that lose the deal

Bring a demo recording or a login, and the number of demos it took to close your last deal.

Tell us about your project and the number you’re trying to move. You don’t need a finished brief, just a specific problem.

You talk to Ivan or Valeria, not a salesperson. Write today and you hear back the next morning, Central European Time.

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