TRIMSENSE CASE STUDY
Trimsense was born out of a love for sailing and a personal problem. Me and Kaarel, one of my co-founders, were sailing the 29er boat class back in 2018. We were good, but sometimes the others were faster. We began to wonder why?
The conclusion: sail trim. When sailing identical boats, such as the olympic class 49er, the main determinant of boat speed is the way that your sails are set up. The issue was, however, that everyone was doing their sail setup by gut-feel. This meant that it was difficult to recreate things that worked, but also painfully time consuming to actually develop that gut feel.
So we decided to do something about it. We brought data-driven decisions into the age-old sport of sailing.
The initial development phase
Look, as they say, hardware is hard. Especially when you're developing a system that requires deep-tech level sensor accuracy and military grade durability. Now imagine you're doing that with 0 budget out of a friend's bedroom. Well, that's what the first 2 years of Trimsense looked like. Through the hardships, we emerged victorious with a solid proof of concept.
Finding product-market fit
We started, like many first-time founders, by building something we thought sailors would want. As you can imagine, that didn't exactly pan out as we thought it would. It took another 2 years and sifting through 100s of session replays and customer interviews to find out what people actually want. As it turns out, data driven decision making is not only good for sailing fast, but also finding PMF.
Founder conflict
Trimsense was founded by three people: myself, Kaarel (my sailing partner and physicist) and Jarl, the coding wizard. At first, things were perfect, we were all still in university and everyone felt aligned. This honeymoon phase suprisingly lasted for much longer than expected: no sign of trouble for 3 years! But then, reality hit. After uni, perspectives really started to shift and my co-founders started butting heads more and more often. In 2024, they were close to just shutting down the company because they couldn't be in the same room together. Since we were still broke startup founders, we couldn't really afford couples' therapy for them, so I had to step up. It took 2 months and many hours of studying conflict resolution, but I managed to help them understand each others' changing values and learn to be friends again.
Fundraising
2025 was not an easy year to be fundraising as a sailing hardware startup from Estonia. I knew from the get-go that the usual "talk to 100 investors and you'll find the one" wasn't going to work for us. Firstly, I didn't have time to talk to 100s of investors. Secondly, I knew that for most investors, sailtech was totally irrelevant. So I took a different but clever approach that helped me land seed round by talking to 9 people in total, 3 of whom invested. Now that's efficiency. I did the following: searched up a list of angel investors from Estonia, then cross-referenced that list with people that were in the "sailing" facebook group in Estonia. Found their contacts, called, and voila.
Key takeaways
Being a founder is tough, be ready for 70 hour weeks with no progress for a while.
Build something people actually want (with hardware, early validation is tricky)
Don't underestimate the honeymoon phase (more specifically, its ending).
Efficiency is key: talking to the wrong people does more harm than good.
TRIMSENSE CASE STUDY
Trimsense was born out of a love for sailing and a personal problem. Me and Kaarel, one of my co-founders, were sailing the 29er boat class back in 2018. We were good, but sometimes the others were faster. We began to wonder why?
The conclusion: sail trim. When sailing identical boats, such as the olympic class 49er, the main determinant of boat speed is the way that your sails are set up. The issue was, however, that everyone was doing their sail setup by gut-feel. This meant that it was difficult to recreate things that worked, but also painfully time consuming to actually develop that gut feel.
So we decided to do something about it. We brought data-driven decisions into the age-old sport of sailing.
The initial development phase
Look, as they say, hardware is hard. Especially when you're developing a system that requires deep-tech level sensor accuracy and military grade durability. Now imagine you're doing that with 0 budget out of a friend's bedroom. Well, that's what the first 2 years of Trimsense looked like. Through the hardships, we emerged victorious with a solid proof of concept.
Finding product-market fit
We started, like many first-time founders, by building something we thought sailors would want. As you can imagine, that didn't exactly pan out as we thought it would. It took another 2 years and sifting through 100s of session replays and customer interviews to find out what people actually want. As it turns out, data driven decision making is not only good for sailing fast, but also finding PMF.
Founder conflict
Trimsense was founded by three people: myself, Kaarel (my sailing partner and physicist) and Jarl, the coding wizard. At first, things were perfect, we were all still in university and everyone felt aligned. This honeymoon phase suprisingly lasted for much longer than expected: no sign of trouble for 3 years! But then, reality hit. After uni, perspectives really started to shift and my co-founders started butting heads more and more often. In 2024, they were close to just shutting down the company because they couldn't be in the same room together. Since we were still broke startup founders, we couldn't really afford couples' therapy for them, so I had to step up. It took 2 months and many hours of studying conflict resolution, but I managed to help them understand each others' changing values and learn to be friends again.
Fundraising
2025 was not an easy year to be fundraising as a sailing hardware startup from Estonia. I knew from the get-go that the usual "talk to 100 investors and you'll find the one" wasn't going to work for us. Firstly, I didn't have time to talk to 100s of investors. Secondly, I knew that for most investors, sailtech was totally irrelevant. So I took a different but clever approach that helped me land seed round by talking to 9 people in total, 3 of whom invested. Now that's efficiency. I did the following: searched up a list of angel investors from Estonia, then cross-referenced that list with people that were in the "sailing" facebook group in Estonia. Found their contacts, called, and voila.
Key takeaways
Being a founder is tough, be ready for 70 hour weeks with no progress for a while.
Build something people actually want (with hardware, early validation is tricky)
Don't underestimate the honeymoon phase (more specifically, its ending).
Efficiency is key: talking to the wrong people does more harm than good.