Imagine your roof is leaking, but instead of fixing it, you’re busy choosing the color of your new kitchen. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yet that’s exactly how many founders approach building their startups. They focus on new features, expansion plans, or fundraising while fundamental problems with their business remain unresolved.
After advising more than 20 startups across CEE, the team behind ideiqo has seen these patterns repeat time and time again.
We sat down with founders of IDEIQO, Pavol Čobirka and Eduard Kesely, our AceON Accelerator Batch #6 partners, to discuss why founders keep solving the wrong problems, what investors actually look for, and why having a clear strategy matters more than ever in the age of AI.
What founders keep getting wrong
1. You say founders often build their startups in the wrong order. What does that look like in practice?
What we mean by the “wrong order” is that founders often start building a company from the product backwards, rather than from the customer forwards.
They start with an idea, build a product, add features, and only then try to figure out who really needs it and why. Every successful company starts with the customer, understands the pain and its urgency, defines the problem clearly, and then validates those assumptions through customer interviews, early sales, or other real market evidence. Only after that should the product be shaped around what you have learned.
2. Having advised 20+ startups across CEE, what mistakes do you see most often?
Three patterns keep repeating: a lack of clear strategy, poor prioritization, and misalignment on long-term ambitions.
A good example is international expansion. Slovak startups often expand to the Czech Republic, and Czech startups do the reverse, simply because these markets feel familiar. The problem is not any particular market. But the problem is the logic behind the decision. Founders often choose the next market based on proximity, familiarity, or ease of entry rather than asking: Where is the highest concentration of our ideal customers? Where is the willingness to pay highest? Which market can become a meaningful growth engine? Sometimes entering a more difficult but much higher-value market such as Germany or Austria earlier can create significantly more value than accumulating several smaller markets.
The second pattern is prioritization. Founders often struggle to distinguish what’s critical from what’s merely important or distracting. They spend time on new opportunities while fundamental problems with product-market fit, sales, or cash flow remain unresolved.
Finally, many startups have strong technical solutions but lack global ambition or alignment on their end goal. Do the founders want to build a large company, pursue an early exit, or eventually move on to something new? Each path requires different skills and commitments, and it’s important that everyone is on the same page.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s the absence of a clear strategy for deciding what to do, in what order, and why.
What makes a startup investment-ready
3. There is no universal investor standard. So what does ideiqo actually validate?
There is no universal investor standard, and two investors can look at the same company and reach completely different conclusions. IDEIQO therefore focuses on the fundamentals that almost every professional investor will examine.
First, the economics need to make sense. The market must be large enough and the financial plan credible enough to support a venture-scale outcome.
Second, there must be a clear connection between the customer problem and the product, supported by real evidence that the problem exists and customers care about solving it.
Third, investors need to believe in the team. These must be people who can go through hell, adapt when things go wrong, and still reach their destination.
ideiqo doesn’t predict whether a particular investor will invest. It validates whether the fundamental logic of the company is strong enough for an investor to seriously consider it.
4. If you had five minutes to assess an early-stage startup, what would you ask?
The first thing we would ask is whether they have paying customers. A paying customer is the strongest early proof that someone has a real problem and is willing to pay to solve it.
Then we would ask: How big is your market, and how are you going to capture a meaningful share of it over the next five years?
Their answer tells us very quickly how well they understand their customers, market, sales process, and growth strategy. If they cannot explain how they plan to get from where they are today to a meaningful position in the market, that is a major red flag for us.
5. What do founders commonly discover during fundraising that they should have figured out six months earlier?
One of the common mistakes is that they don't have a data room ready, so they need to build it very fast. It would be much easier if they do prepare materials for the data room constantly. They measure data, sales performance, conversion from visit to sales, etc.
AI, Strategy, and the Founder’s Role
6. ChatGPT can research markets, analyze competitors, and create pitch decks in seconds. Why do founders need IDEIQO?
You can try it yourself, and you might be surprised by how wrong it can go.
We had an intern helping us with analyses, but he didn’t know what structure the analysis should follow. He started working with ChatGPT at point A. He should have moved toward point B, but instead, the conversation gradually took him in a completely different direction.
After two days of working with ChatGPT, the result was a disaster. The material was practically unusable. That’s the problem with LLMs: once you start moving in the wrong direction, you can end up on the wrong island.
With ideiqo, the frameworks and structure are already built in, along with a workflow that ensures the proper business context flows into the business model and value proposition. Nothing is lost, and everything is connected.
Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, ideiqo also connects information across business materials in the right order and assesses the business against investor criteria. It has access to more than 40 sources, including social networks, relevant websites, and comparison platforms, many of which aren’t freely available through general-purpose chatbots.
The goal is to keep founders moving in the right direction while still benefiting from the power of AI. If your destination is America, you don’t want to spend two days sailing only to discover that you’ve arrived in Honolulu.
Mentorship and Acceleration
7. Founders can receive completely contradictory advice from two experienced mentors. How should they decide whose advice to follow?
Sometimes you need to trust your gut feeling. Other times, you need to consider the advisor’s background. If one mentor specializes in sales and another in marketing, you should be careful about following the marketing expert’s advice on sales when it contradicts the sales specialist.
If both mentors have expertise in the same area, you can keep both perspectives in mind, test their recommendations, and see what works.
8. What do accelerators often get wrong when supporting early-stage startups?
One of the biggest challenges we see in European accelerators and incubators is that startups complete the entire programme but still lack fundamental business foundations. Many eventually end up in our advisory programme, where we have to build those fundamentals with them.
That’s one of the reasons we created ideiqo and offer it to accelerators. Our goal is to ensure that when startups complete an accelerator programme, they have the foundations they need for future success.
Through our partnership with ideiqo, we’re bringing this structured approach to AceON Accelerator Batch #6. Founders can use the tool to validate their assumptions, identify gaps in their business strategy, and prepare the fundamentals investors expect to see.
