Building Before You Know

Jorma Piir at LIFT99 is building Pixit around the hidden side of pet healthcare while learning to embrace
“I don’t know.”

When the Problem Hurts and the Oxygen Runs Out

It was the spring of 2025 when I had to take my dog to an emergency veterinary clinic in the middle of the night. The situation was serious, but the vets moved quickly, got the immediate problem under control, and we made it home that same night. Still, something kept bothering me. We had spent several stressful hours and hundreds of euros trying to access medical information that already existed. It simply was not available where and when we needed it. One piece was in one system, another in a different one; some was in files, some in emails, and some only in my memory. Pixit was not born that night. A simple question was: why shouldn’t a pet’s health record travel with the pet? That question eventually became Pixit. The beginning was anything but glamorous. One of our first workspaces was a phone booth in a friend’s office. It worked perfectly well until longer calls made it feel like we were literally running out of air. In hindsight, not a bad metaphor for an early-stage startup. The next logical step was LIFT99. It had more oxygen, obviously, but more importantly, it put me in an environment full of people who were building things too. For me, the real value is not the desk or the meeting rooms. It is the chance to put an unfinished idea in front of other founders before you have time to fall too deeply in love with it. While that sounds obvious, we still managed to do the opposite.

Learning to Choose Your Battles

In the early stages, a lack of ideas is rarely the problem. Almost every conversation suggests another module, feature, or workflow you could build. The hard part is deciding which one actually deserves your limited time and money. A good idea is not automatically a priority. One mistake made this very concrete. We fell more in love with a solution we had imagined than with the problem itself. We built a specific module for exchanging clinical test data. The feedback was enthusiastic: “Yes, we need this.” “This would be really useful.” It sounded like validation. Then we asked the harder question: was the value strong enough for people to pay for it or change the way they already worked? Suddenly, the picture became much less clear. It became one of the most useful wrong bets we have made. People can recognize a problem, love the solution, and say it is needed, yet still not be willing to pay for it or change the way they work. “Useful” does not automatically mean “valuable.” At least not valuable enough to justify putting your limited resources into it. Since then, we have tried to separate enthusiasm from evidence. Before committing serious time to a feature, we ask what behaviour it changes, what friction it removes, and whether that value is strong enough to earn priority. That is what choosing your battles means in practice. The same logic shapes Pixit’s broader strategy. We do not want to build another clinic management system or compete with the systems clinics already use. We want to connect them. Connect, not compete. The value should come from turning existing information into one coherent, usable health record for each pet, not from rebuilding what already works.

Learning to Embrace

“I Don’t Know” That wrong bet taught us something else: we should have said “I don’t know” much earlier. The more we build Pixit, the more useful those questions become. Which features are genuinely essential for owners, veterinarians, and clinics? Where is value created first? How do expectations differ between different user groups? Which integrations remove enough friction to become indispensable? We have hypotheses, but a hypothesis is not a fact. As a founder, you have to believe in the problem enough to build something while staying flexible enough to change your mind about the solution. Not knowing is not the problem. The problem starts when you no longer want to discover that your first answer was wrong.For us, “I don’t know” increasingly means one thing: that is probably what we need to test next. That is why Pixit’s next phase is less about launching and more about learning. Over the coming months, we will gradually invite more people into early testing so we can see what happens in real use: where people get stuck, how they use the product differently from what we expected, and what they actually find valuable.

We are looking for curious pet owners who are willing to use Pixit early, tell us where it helps, where it gets in the way, and what would make it genuinely useful in everyday life. That kind of feedback will help us learn faster and choose the right problems to solve next. Pixit’s next chapter has not been written yet. This time, we want to write it with the people who will actually use it.

Whether you became a pet owner this year or have been one for years, join Pixit’s early stage testing at pixit.vet and take part in shaping the next step in pet healthcare.