He made 100 cold calls a day. Now his startup is worth $600M. | Harman Narula, Founder of Canary Technologies

Most enterprise startups chase the wrong problems. They build solutions for hypothetical pain points discovered in customer interviews, then wonder why adoption stalls. Harman Narula took the opposite approach when building Canary Technologies: he made 100 cold calls a day to find problems so urgent that hotel managers would interrupt their shift to talk about them. That relentless focus on immediate pain helped Canary reach a $600 million valuation by solving workflow problems that hospitality teams face every single day.

Narula's framework for identifying real customer problems cuts through the noise of standard market research. "There's gonna be two kinds of problems," he explains. "Maybe the ones that are so big, they don't show up that often, but they're massive. And then the ones that just showed up in the last thirty minutes. Those are usually the things you wanna go after because people already know that these are big problems."

This distinction matters more than most founders realize. The massive but infrequent problems get attention in boardroom strategy sessions, but they rarely drive urgent purchasing decisions. The problems that surfaced in the last thirty minutes are the ones that make a hotel manager's day miserable right now. They're searching for solutions, complaining to colleagues, and desperate for anything that works. When Narula cold-called hotel operators, he wasn't selling them on a vision of the future. He was offering relief from today's chaos.

The approach worked because it eliminated the guesswork about product-market fit. Narula could tell immediately whether he'd found a real problem by watching customer reactions during demos. "Do their eyes light up and they kinda say, oh my god. I didn't even think about this, but now you show me this. It's like, I have to have this, or is it like, oh, yeah. That's kinda cool. There's so many other things going on," he describes. That binary response became Canary's north star for product development.

Most founders would have pivoted to inbound marketing once they proved initial traction. Narula doubled down on the harder path. "Our perspective was like, look. If we can nail outbound and we can do that in a scaled way, in a way where the unit economics are positive on that, that's the harder thing to do. When we layer on inbound here, the CAC is gonna go down."

This counterintuitive strategy paid dividends as Canary scaled. Building a machine that could profitably acquire customers through cold outreach meant they had solved the hardest part of the growth equation. Any inbound leads that came later would only improve their unit economics, not rescue them from unsustainable customer acquisition costs.

The timing element of Narula's problem identification framework deserves particular attention. Problems that showed up thirty minutes ago have natural urgency built in. They're fresh, painful, and haven't been rationalized away yet. By the time a problem becomes part of someone's regular complaints, they've often built workarounds or resigned themselves to living with it. Narula caught problems while they still hurt.

Even Canary's path to Y Combinator reflected this opportunistic approach. Harman Narula admits they "actually submitted our application a little bit late because we weren't planning on applying to YC, and then we probably saw a tweet or something. We were like, oh, we should do that." They had a broader vision for transforming hospitality technology, but they focused their application on the specific workflow problem they were solving right then.

The lesson for other enterprise founders is clear: stop looking for problems that might exist and start finding problems that definitely exist. Make the calls. Watch the reactions. Build for the chaos happening right now, not the strategic initiatives happening next quarter. When someone's eyes light up during your demo because you're solving their most immediate pain point, you've found something worth building a $600 million company around.