In the startup world, we’re conditioned to worship at the altar of data.
We’re told to build cases based on data before we build products, to chase quantifiable metrics, and to present spreadsheets that prove a market exists.
But what happens when you discover a problem so fundamental that no one has been able to measure it previously?
For my cofounder Jeremy Yang and me, this wasn’t a hypothetical question. It was the foundation of our company, Veridooh.
Today, we are a global, VC-funded adtech company that provides the very data our industry once lacked. But when we started? We had no data.
All we had were whispers – what Peter Thiel refers to as ‘secrets’ in his book Zero to One.
This is the story of how we launched an MVP based not on quantitative proof, but on the powerful and often underestimated value of qualitative evidence.
It all started with taxis
Our initial idea was straightforward: we wanted to put digital advertising screens on top of taxis.
It seemed like a logical next step for the Australian out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry. We began having conversations, pitching our vision to brands and agencies.
But in those conversations, we started noticing a pattern. It wasn’t excitement about a new advertising channel we were hearing, but a deep-seated frustration with the old one.
The OOH industry, we learned, was a classic black box.
Veridooh cofounders Jeremy Yang and Mo Moubayed
Brands were spending millions of dollars with almost no way of knowing if their campaigns were being delivered as promised. The issue was so baked into the system that it was accepted as the cost of doing business.
There were no reports on ad wastage, no spreadsheets quantifying campaign under-delivery. The problem only existed in quiet complaints, in the frustrated tone of a brand marketer, in the weary shrug of an agency head.
One pivotal moment came during a pitch for our taxi-top idea. After our presentation, a potential client looked at us and asked a simple question: “How would we know if our booked ads have actually been played?”
That question hung in the air.
We realised in that instant that we were trying to sell another menu item to a customer who wasn’t even sure the kitchen was open.
The real, unquantified problem wasn’t a lack of ad space; it was a fundamental lack of trust and transparency.
Pivoting towards a solution
When we paused to reflect, we understood that most of the marketers we had spoken to had told us about instances in which they had seen errors in OOH campaigns first-hand, or worse still, their bosses had.
We quickly realised that this was a gaping hole in the global industry, not just the Australian market.
In 2019, the year we founded Veridooh, the global OOH market was valued at approximately US$36 billion. Suddenly, we understood the whispers we’d been hearing pointed to a multi-billion dollar opportunity, far beyond a niche problem. We made the tough decision to pivot, building an MVP to solve a problem that had no data to back it up.
3 big lessons
For any founder navigating a similar path, our journey serves as a practical guide – a story of how we successfully changed course, guided not by data, but by a whisper and an unmet need.
This is what we leant:
1. Trust the ‘whisper network’ as your first data set
Before you have metrics, you have conversations. Treat them with the rigour of a research project.
We didn’t just hear one person complain, we heard the same frustration echoed in different ways from disconnected sources.
That pattern is your first and most important signal. Hearing the same pain point from a major brand, and from agencies small and large, is the moment you move past anecdotes and identify a systemic failure.
This qualitative consistency is the bedrock of conviction when quantitative data is absent.
2. Translate frustration into your MVP
Your first product shouldn’t try to solve every problem. It should be a direct answer to the most persistent whisper you’ve heard.
For us, that was the client’s question. Our MVP was designed to do one thing: prove ads ran when and where they were supposed to by independently tracking, measuring, and verifying their performance.
Ironically, implementing our MVP meant we were able to collect the first batch of data which the industry was lacking. This quantitative data backed up our qualitative evidence.
This was key in providing the confidence to continue to build and explore solutions for the industry.
While that single tool has since evolved into a comprehensive suite of products, it all began by solving that one core problem first.
3. Pivot with confidence
Abandoning your original idea might feel like a failure, but it’s not. It’s graduation. You’re graduating from your initial assumption to a market-validated need.
Our decision to leave the taxi-ad idea behind represented a confident step towards a much bigger opportunity that the market had explicitly, if quietly, told us it needed.
The confidence came from knowing we were building a solution for our customers, not just something we wanted to sell to them.
Success story
Today, Veridooh is a global company that has achieved triple-digit revenue growth for several successive years. Our platform now generates the concrete, campaign-level data that the industry once lacked.
We continue to listen to our clients and consider qualitative evidence when developing new products. However, we are now a data-driven company, able to back up qualitative evidence with quantitative data thanks to our ability to collect information that was previously unavailable.
It’s clear that solving this trust deficit has had a profound impact on the entire OOH industry.
When we started in 2019, the net media revenue of the Australian OOH industry was A$936 million. By 2024, it had grown 39% to $1.3 billion, which is 11 percentage points ahead of the growth in global OOH in the same period.
Digital OOH, the sector that relies most on transparency, has seen its revenue share rising from 56% to 75% of total net media revenue – one of the highest shares in the world.
This growth demonstrates what happens when you build the tools that foster trust. But we never forget that our success wasn’t born from a spreadsheet. It was born from listening.
For every founder starting out, remember that before the data, there is the conversation.
Don’t dismiss those whispers. They might just be telling you where to find your MVP.
- Mo Moubayed is the cofounder of Sydney startup Veridooh.
