If you’ve come across anything about NEXT, you probably know that Ronny and I started the company together in 2016.

The company began as a side project during a period in which Ronny and I were toying with different startup ideas and technologies, as entrepreneurs-in-residence at Hasso Plattner Ventures in Berlin, while at summer break from our INSEAD MBAs.

We made great partners, because we both came from families which celebrated curiosity and discovery. Growing up — Ronny in Dresden, East Germany, I in Tehran, Iran — we pushed, pulled, poked, and pointed at anything that made us wonder. Our childhoods were full of “why” questions.

Left: Ronny and his dad poking and pulling on a toy train in Dresden, East Germany.
Right: Moodi, carried by his mom, index finger pointing ready to pop a “why” question.

As we grew up, we continued to ask “why”. In doing so, we realized there were broken things in the world that needed to be fixed or improved.

And we learned we weren’t alone.

That’s why we founded NEXT.

Since then we’ve made it our mission to create software services that help people, teams, and organizations to discover opportunities in their customers’ needs or wants — and develop products that users love.

Our motto is to help clients bring their customers into every decision.

Five years ago, we weren’t positive that people would embrace our discovery-led, user research-driven, and evidence-based ways of creating new products, services, and experiences. But we were motivated by the belief that, if they did, it should be software-enabled, repeatable, and scalable. Thankfully, the market latched on — and we’ve since seen enormous shifts in how teams develop products.

Our customers have big aspirations. The type of disruption they are facing right now offers a once-in-every-few-generation opportunity for growth. To succeed, they’re pushing beyond whack-a-mole attempts at innovation and instead adopting discovery-led practices that put their customer at the center of every product decision.

For that, they need a purpose-built application to collect, analyze, share, and collaborate around their customers’ needs and wants.

And we wanted to deliver this. Meaning NEXT needed to evolve.

And so it has — into a full-blown product discovery platform.

In the past year, we have:

• Released new features that help teams collect, analyze, and share customer needs and wants

• Integrated software tools such as Jira, GitHub, Linear, Miro, Figma, so our users don’t feel as though they are switching between multiple solutions while working

• Introduced a new look and feel, which make NEXT more accessible and fun

• Launched the NEXT Community, which offers our customers an ever-expanding marketplace of proven product discovery frameworks from IDEO, This is Service Design Doing, Board of Innovation, and other thought leaders

We’re doing all this while staying true to our values: think bold, feel vibrant, act open, stay curious.

Our platform is NEXT through and through: user-friendly with one-of-a-kind support — and backed by the same people you know well and love.

We’ve been proud to serve as the launchpad for so many successful products — and it’s been exceptionally rewarding to watch you build better products, with faster time to market, and lower development costs.

“To find is the thing”, said Pablo Picasso. Get started with NEXT now, it’s free forever.

Love 🚀

— Moodi