Navigating Customer Need Uncertainty in Early Stage SaaS Startups

Sammanfattning

Title: Navigating Customer Need Uncertainty in Early Stage SaaS Startups Seminar date: 4 June, 2026 Course: FEKH99, Bachelor Degree Project in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, Business administration, Undergraduate level, 15 University Credit Points Authors: Adam Lisnell, Gustav Wickberg, James Nicolson Advisor/s: Joakim Winborg Key words: Knightian uncertainty, effectuation, customer validation, latent needs, lean startup Research question: How do SaaS startup founders navigate uncertainty about customer needs in early product development? Purpose: To examine how SaaS startup founders navigate uncertainty about customer needs in early product development, with particular focus on how founders identify, interpret and act upon uncertain customer need information in situations where those needs are not yet fully formulated or known. Methodology: A qualitative multiple case study with an abductive approach. Empirical material was collected through semi-structured interviews with six founders across four Swedish B2B SaaS companies in early stages of development and analysed through thematic analysis guided by the study's theoretical framework. Theoretical perspectives: The study integrates four theoretical perspectives: Knightian uncertainty as the foundation for understanding genuine unpredictability, effectuation theory describing entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty, the expressed-latent needs distinction and Lean Startup methodology for customer validation. These are integrated into an integrative analytical construct, the UAM Result: Founders did not navigate uncertainty by running structured experiments or following a predefined plan. Instead they started from what they already had, their own experience and networks and let product direction emerge through ongoing customer contact. Asking customers directly what they wanted rarely produced useful answers, because the needs founders were trying to uncover were ones customers themselves could not yet articulate. The most valuable insights came from observation and from the act of building itself. What customers needed also changed over time, meaning founders had to continuously adjust how they validated rather than settling on one approach from the start. Conclusions: Founders navigated customer need uncertainty primarily through effectual rather than causal logic and through relational rather than experimental validation. Direct customer feedback proved consistently insufficient because the needs at issue were largely latent and therefore inaccessible through direct questioning. The most consequential learning arrived instead through observation, co-creation and the act of building itself. The expressed-latent distinction operated as a dynamic rather than fixed classification, meaning founders had to continuously renegotiate their validation approach as needs evolved through interaction.