How Yedem's founder found his niche after a failed year

The Brno startup Yedem, which builds an “operating system” for corporate parking, spent a year and a half stuck in place after raising investment — until its founder Matej Ballo admitted a mistake: the company had been selling its product to the wrong customers. Having changed strategy, the startup is now growing fourfold year on year.

In 2024 Yedem closed a pre-seed round of almost 13 million crowns from the funds Czech Founders VC, Patero and the innovation agency JIC. Expectations were high: the team hired junior sales managers and threw its efforts into winning over the small and medium business segment, which seemed ideal for fast deals and an easy product-market fit.

“We thought we'd grow our people, and they'd grow along with us,” recalls the 33-year-old Ballo. But there was no result: for about a year to eighteen months, the growth curve stayed essentially flat.

The problem turned out not to be the team but the choice of market itself. Small and medium-sized companies, it emerged, don't actually have serious parking problems — with 50 employees and 5 spaces, a spreadsheet in Excel is enough. Large corporations are an entirely different matter: with 5,000 employees and 500 spaces, the same ratio turns into a real headache and a capital burden of tens or hundreds of millions of crowns, since building a single parking space in Prague can cost more than a million crowns.

“The jump between fifty and five thousand employees isn't a linear difference, it's a completely different problem,” Ballo explains. According to him, the company spent a year selling its product to customers who didn't actually need it: “It's the most expensive form of optimism I know.”

Realizing this, Yedem refocused on its real customers — large corporations, manufacturing companies and commercial real estate landlords. The platform connects directly to a building's infrastructure (barriers, cameras, access systems, HR tools) and shows in real time who is parking where and when.

After the shift in focus, the startup began growing quickly — and today it shows fourfold year-on-year growth, having learned a costly but important lesson: loving your product is good, but loving and understanding your market matters far more.