The secret behind Sensay's journey from idea to MVP launch in 6 weeks

Sensay originally set out to build a 'human replica' service aimed at preserving the memories of dementia patients and others. However, in the process of finding product-market fit, the company pivoted its technical direction, evolving into an AI knowledge engine that answers based on specific knowledge and an employee offboarding platform that prevents corporate knowledge loss.

CTO Marco Bettiolo, drawing on his past experience of burning through millions of dollars building infrastructure, wanted to minimize the cost and time spent on infrastructure so that the startup could focus on product development. Rather than pouring energy into building a platform, the company chose a strategy of focusing on the product itself.

To achieve this, Sensay adopted Vercel as a core part of its tech stack, building the following workflow:

• Preview deployments: Every branch gets an instantly testable URL without the need for a separate staging environment, speeding up testing
• Feature flags: Features can be safely controlled and shipped from the main codebase without managing long-lived branches, reducing deployment risk
• Instant rollbacks: Enables immediate recovery in the event of deployment errors, easing the psychological burden on developers

Thanks to this strategy, Sensay was able to successfully launch its MVP in just 6 weeks to meet the schedule for the major conference Web Summit, all without a dedicated DevOps team.