Customer evidence for early-stage investments
Founders say they have validated the problem, the solution and the price. Keel turns that claim into evidence your committee can read in five minutes, at whichever stage the founder reaches you.
Where is the founder?
A founder who comes back a round later runs the next study on the same project. The evidence grows with the company.
Inconsistent customer evidence slows investment decisions. Angel groups often receive startup proposals with incomplete or inconsistent customer validation, leading to extra follow-ups, reference calls and longer due diligence.
Try it yourself
We are running Keel on ourselves. Each interview below is a live Keel study: you answer as one of the customers a founder would send it to, people the founder has never met, and your answers land in an Overview we share back with you.
Interview 1 · the problem Live now
Most of the proposals your group screens arrive with customer validation you cannot check, and that costs your committee extra follow-ups, reference calls and weeks of diligence.
Interview 2 · the solution
Your committee could read a founder's shared Overview beside the deck, in the same meeting, without changing how it decides.
Opens soon
What you receive
Founders come to an angel group at three points, each with a different ask and a question your committee cannot settle from the deck. The founder runs the study for that stage; you read the Overview.
The founder says the people have this problem. Nobody outside the founder's circle has been asked.
The problem study. Customers the founder has never met say how many have it, how often, how much it matters, and how well today's way works.
You get: whether the problem is worth a company, before the first cheque.
The deck shows the product. Whether the people it is for would change how they work for it is the open question.
The solution study. The same people say whether it fits how they work, whether it beats what they do now, and what would stop them.
You get: adoption risk named by the people who would adopt it, not by the founder.
The founder has a price and a few logos and asks your group to keep backing them. Whether the price holds, who signs off, and what slows the buy decide whether the money is real.
The money study. The price, the buyer and payer, what they spend today, where the money comes from, what slows the purchase, and a commitment.
You get: which of the six claims held and which did not, as below.
The page a founder shares with your group by link, open on the money study. The example is from a simulated study; a real one looks the same.
Overview · the money · 9 of 22 reached this study
Insights · opens when you tap Purchase friction
Seven of nine said their general contractor's IT review takes four to eight weeks, and anything touching Procore, their project software, has to clear it first. They would pay. Six of nine said they would start a trial; one has signed up. The gap is the review.
The next step the brief gives the founder: clear the review with three general contractors' IT before the pilot, not after.
“We interviewed 30 site superintendents. 90% said documentation is their biggest pain and they would pay $200 a month.”
Validated, in one line. Which part held, which did not, and what stands in the way: you find out on a reference call, if at all.
The price holds. The buyer is the ops lead. The money is in a line they already have. The one thing in the way is the security review, and until it clears, one of nine signs up.
A precise question for the founder, not a verdict: how will you clear IT review before the pilot? And for the founder, a way forward.
How it works
Where customer validation is the open question, ask the founder to run the study for the stage you are deciding on.
Keel writes the questions from the founder's own words; the founder sends the link to their customers; Keel interviews them by text or with its AI interviewer.
The founder shares the read-only Overview by link: the verdict per card, the Insights, the pilot sign-ups and the brief.
The founder runs the study on their own Keel account and spends their own credits. Nothing is billed to your group, and a shared link needs no account to read.
The founder does, by sending the study link to the customers they name. Keel records who answered through their Google sign-in and shows how many were counted on each card; it does not recruit, so who was asked is part of what you weigh.
Before the committee meets, run a Keel problem study with 20 of your target customers and share the Overview link with us.
FAQ
Keel complements your existing due-diligence process by helping founders provide structured customer-validation evidence.
Instead of relying solely on pitch decks, testimonials, and repeated follow-up discussions, your team can review research organized around specific assumptions: whether a problem exists, whether customers would adopt the solution, and whether there is commercial demand.
Keel doesn't replace your investment judgment. It gives you more structured evidence to support it.
You decide when to use Keel. There's no need to require every applicant to complete a study.
For startups where customer validation is an important unresolved question, you can invite the founder to conduct a focused Keel study and share the results.
Our goal is to reduce unnecessary back-and-forth and make customer evidence easier to evaluate, without changing your existing investment process.
Keel provides traceability from research findings back to individual respondent answers.
For group-link interviews, respondents authenticate using Google, allowing Keel to capture their account name and email address. Responses are therefore linked to identifiable accounts rather than being anonymous submissions.
Investors can examine the supporting and contradictory evidence behind findings through the information made available in a shared study report.
Identity traceability improves transparency, but it does not guarantee independent or unbiased research. Respondent selection and suitability for the target audience remain important considerations.
Yes. Keel supports different research checkpoints as a startup develops.
Before investing, founders can test whether the customer problem is real, frequent, and important. During development, they can examine solution compatibility, relative advantage, and adoption friction. Before commercial expansion, they can investigate purchasing behavior, budgets, and buying decisions.
When assumptions change or evidence contradicts the original hypothesis, founders can conduct another study.
Each research round contributes new evidence. A consolidated history showing how assumptions and decisions evolve across rounds is part of Keel's future roadmap.