The Problem That Wouldn’t Go Away
Why Deck exists, where we are, and where we're going.
Matt Teixeira
8 minutes read
I’ve been a designer for five years. During that time, I had (have) four full-time jobs and a string of side projects.
Across all of them, I kept running into the same problem.
Acting on customer feedback was always painfully hard, even when you know it is the right thing to do.
Not because teams do not care. Most good product teams care a lot. it is because customer feedback lives everywhere: user interviews, surveys, support tickets, Slack threads, customer success tools, NPS responses, sales notes, analytics, and who knows where else.
To make a strong case for what customers need, someone has to go through all of it. They have to read, tag, compare, summarize, find patterns, collect quotes, and then package everything into something other people can trust.
That work takes a huge amount of time and effort.
I felt this in small startups with 30 people. I felt it in larger companies with dozens of products in their suite and thousands of employees. Regardless the size of the company, the problem always existed.
If you are a product designer or product manager, I do not think I need to over-explain this. You have probably felt it too.
You know there is customer knowledge sitting somewhere in the company. You know it could help the team make better decisions. But turning that knowledge into something actionable is slow enough that it often does not happen.
That is the problem that led me to Deck.
Deciding to Do Something About It
This pain had followed me for years, but for a long time I did not do anything about it.
Part of that was because I was working on something else. Before Deck, I had built another product called CapitalClimb, a fintech app for stock investing. That experience taught me a lot, but it also left me with one very clear regret: I did not speak to enough customers early enough.
I had reasons for it at the time, but looking back, I knew I had started building before I understood the problem deeply enough.
I did not want to repeat that mistake.
In late May 2025, soon after I winded CapitalClimb up, I started writing about this feedback problem properly. Not as a product idea yet, but as a pain I had experienced again and again.
- What exactly was the problem?
- What did it cause?
- What business outcomes failed to happen because teams could not act on customer feedback fast enough?
- What did it feel like for the people doing the work?
I spent weeks sitting with those questions.
Once I had a clearer view of the problem, I started talking to other people.
I reached out to friends. Messaged designers I had never met. I ran a small survey. I wanted to understand whether this was only my frustration or whether other product people felt it too.
The early signal was clear enough: I was not alone.
Other designers and product managers on different countries and levels also felt uneasy about scattered feedback. They did not like knowing that important customer signals were sitting in different places, disconnected from the actual decisions the team was making.
Designers and PMs felt that unease for slightly different reasons, but the root was the same: customer knowledge existed, but it was too hard to leverage.
Deck's first problem statement document, created in May 24th, 2025
Learning From Previous Mistakes
Because of CapitalClimb, I was much more deliberate this time.
I reached out to more than 100 people on LinkedIn. I was not pitching Deck yet. I was just looking for insight.
I ended up speaking with five people across product management and design, and around 10 more answered a survey I had created. The goal was simple: understand whether scattered customer feedback was genuinely painful, and whether people were already spending time and effort working around it.
These exercises are always difficult because, if I’m honest, I do not know what result would have stopped me from building. Unless the feedback had been extremely negative, I probably would have kept going.
Luckily, the feedback was positive. Negative in this case is good news.
People recognized the problem. They were frustrated by it. They wanted a better way to see customer feedback in one place, understand what mattered, and use it to make better product decisions.
That was enough to keep going.
The Alpha Version
The alpha version of Deck was exactly what it should have been: the simplest possible version that could test whether there was real desire for the product.
The difficult part was that a simple alpha only works neatly when your first users are early adopters.
My first alpha customer was not really an early adopter.
That changed the shape of the first few months. Even though the first days were encouraging, a lot of the initial work became about building enough capability for Deck to be genuinely useful for us.
For example, I prioritized Slack quite early because Slack mattered to them as a feedback source. I also prioritized a lot of other requests for a very simple reason: when your only customer gives you feedback, you listen.
During that period, I was mostly building, learning, adjusting, and trying to make the product useful enough that it could survive contact with reality.
Which, honestly, is the job.
Thinking About Positioning
Around December 2025, about three months after the alpha started, I began thinking more seriously about Deck’s positioning.
I care a lot about positioning and brand. Not as decoration, but as a core part of how a company explains why it exists.
The product itself does not create interest on its own. A product needs a point of view. It needs a clear problem. It needs language that makes people feel, “Yes, that is exactly what I have been dealing with.”
So while I kept building, I also started reaching out again.
This time, I spoke mostly with product managers, senior product managers, senior product designers, and product designers. I wanted to understand which framing made Deck feel most relevant.
At first, I framed the conversations around the pain itself. Did they experience it? Did they care about it? If they did, would they be interested in joining a beta later?
The timing was terrible. It was the last two weeks of the working year, so I did not get much direct interest.
But I did get useful insight.
Product designers in particular were spending a lot of time maintaining and making sense of feedback. The frustration was not only the time itself. It was also the feeling that they had so much customer knowledge that went untouched, unnoticed, and underused.
That mattered to me. I had felt that pain.
Deck was never just about saving time. Saving time is important, but the deeper problem is that companies are constantly collecting customer feedback and still failing to let that feedback shape the product. What shapes the product instead are other 'external' forces.
Gearing Up for the Private Beta
In January 2026, I wanted to go hard.
The plan was to bring Deck into a private beta with a group of customers, work with them to improve the product, and eventually understand whether they would pay for it after a free three-month period.
On the first Monday of the working year, I started reaching out.
My original goal was ridiculous: reach out to 100 people per day, book 25 meetings per week, and bring 50 customers into the beta.
I tested different personas, seniority levels, company types, and messages. Product managers. Product designers. Founders. Heads of design. Mid-level. Senior level. Both in small startups and people in larger companies.
That was probably the period where I learned the most about positioning.
The strongest message was the scattered feedback angle, especially for designers. Most of my meetings came from that positioning.
Later, during the private beta, I learned that even this framing was still not perfect. It worked, but it was not optimal to convert users into paid customers. That is still one of the challenges I am working through.
By the end of that private beta push, I had reached out to around 600 people across three continents in six weeks.
I didn't end up with 50 customers thankfully. That proven unrealistic. I would have gove broke with the LLM API costs. It also was not realistic from a time management perspective. I would have been building the product, onboarding people, taking meetings, collecting feedback, and trying to keep the whole thing moving. It would have been too much.
So I reduced the target to 10.
In the end, I brought 3 customers into the private beta. And then I stopped trying to add more.
That might sound like a failure, but I do not see it that way. At some point, I realized that chasing more beta customers was making me worse at building the product. I was shipping too fast, too reactively, and not at the quality bar I wanted.
So I made a decision: 3 customers were enough for now. A product that 3 true fans is better than one with 10 indifferent ones.
The product could not be compromised.
Now
Today is May 4, 2026.
Deck goes into open beta in two weeks.
It still will not be completely open access. We will limit how many people can sign up each week so we can onboard and support customers properly.
Scaling is not the priority yet. Learning is.
For the first time, I really do not know where Deck will be six months from now. Usually, I try to have at least a rough picture of what the company will look like. But once the product becomes available to more people, a lot depends on things I cannot fully control.
- How will the market respond?
- Is the product working well enough?
- Is the positioning right?
- Does the problem resonate as strongly as I believe it does?
I do not know yet.
And that is fine.
You cannot plan your way into certainty. At some point, you have to go into the unknown and trust that you will figure things out as you move.
Whatever happens next, I already feel like I have won in one important way.
There is no mission in software that matters more to me than helping companies act on customer feedback. Not just collect it. Not just store it. Not just talk about being customer-centric.
Actually act on it.
Because when companies act on customer feedback, they build better products. And better products make software better for all of us.
That is why I’m building Deck.
Stay tuned.