Martijn Verbove@verboveProduct · #12

This post is a bit more personal. It is about Daniel and me, and how we got to building Doczen. We did not come together around a trend. We came together around a problem that had been very real in both of our worlds for a long time. Before Doczen, Daniel Volkenstein had spent years close to large organizations and the consultants working around them. He saw how much time and effort went into understanding how companies actually worked beneath the surface. Not the polished version. The real version. The one spread across teams, functions, and people who each hold a different part of the picture. On my side, I had lived that from a different angle. I had worked in consulting myself, where a big part of the job was gathering input from stakeholders, pulling signal out of a lot of noise, and trying to understand what was really going on inside an organization. Later, while building startups, I felt the same thing again internally. When you are gathering intel across a team of almost 100 people, you realize very quickly how much important context lives in conversations, habits, workarounds, and unwritten knowledge. That stuck with both of us. Again and again, we saw that some of the most valuable information in a company does not live neatly inside a system. It lives in people. In fragmented notes. In back-and-forth conversations. In observations that only come out when you ask the right person the right question at the right moment. And that is where things start to get hard. Because once you begin collecting all of that input, the challenge is no longer getting information. The challenge is making sense of it. Seeing patterns. Spotting what is broken. Understanding what matters. Turning a messy discovery process into something clear enough to act on. That is a big part of what led us to Doczen. Not a grand plan from day one. Not an abstract market thesis. Just years of seeing the same pain from different sides and knowing this part of the work was still far too manual, far too fragmented, and far too dependent on information staying trapped in people’s heads. Doczen came out of that experience. Out of sitting close to the problem. Out of seeing how hard it is to analyze what teams, clients, and stakeholders are really telling you. Out of believing that if you can structure that layer properly, you can help companies move with a lot more clarity and confidence. So this is not just a company we are building. It is a problem we both know personally. And in many ways, that is exactly why we care so much about solving it.

Explains problem-solving origin and organizational insight