I work for a later stage company with multiple hundreds of millions in funding from large, institutional investors.
I started very recently but have dug deep into the technical specifications of our product.
I will also note that we are a hardware based SaaS platform, meaning we sell a piece of hardware that collects data and our platform displays that data with supplemental/automated analysis.
It turns out the product just...doesn't really work. It returns the wrong metric around 30% of the time, ie., our main use case is to track X but we don't pick up on X over 30% of the time it occurs. Obviously, this completely skews our data set and the validity of our analysis.
I have since learned that we went to market with a product that makes up the majority of our sales without having ever done any sort of quality assurance analysis. As in, no one tested how well we detect X for over a year after the product went to market.
We are now working with multiple fortune 500s who are just started to have access to our data, which has finally spurred QA initiative and how we just recently arrived at the 30% error metric.
Truthfully, I feel a bit uneasy about the ethical implications of selling a hardware/platform that has accuracy metric this low.
I'm reaching out here to get feelers on whether this is normal or not. Do other start ups not QA test before GTM? Is it ethical to not disclose an error rate this high that obviously skews analysis and takeaway for our clients?
Looking for any feedback or similar stories to gut check whether this is normal in the start up world.
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