Why 90% of New Products Fail — AI's Surprising Fix with Milad Zabihi

What we talked about.

In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Milad Zabihi, co-founder and CEO of Peakage, an AI powered consumer insights platform helping CPG brands build products people actually want. Milad shares his journey from coding as a kid in Iran to studying in London, working in growth roles at Rocket Internet and other startups, and founding a ride sharing company often called the Uber for Iran. He explains how a personal moment, receiving irrelevant baby diaper samples, sparked the idea for Peakage after realizing CPG brands often launch products without truly understanding their customers. Milad discusses how Peakage built a community of over five million shoppers, uses AI to verify response quality and guide users through testing, and how COVID accelerated demand for in home product testing. He closes by describing his vision for a fully agentic research platform that can design studies, recruit testers, and analyze data with minimal human input, predicting the broader market research industry will follow the same shift within a few years.

Milad Zabihi explains how Peakage uses AI to stop CPG brands from wasting millions on products nobody wants.

The questions, and the answers.

Can you give us a peek into what Peakage does?

Every year a lot of new products launch but many fail after a few iterations because they are not right on taste, packaging, or pricing. We built Peakage to make consumer testing accessible and easy, using AI throughout. We help brands from early market gap analysis through concept validation, prototype and sensory testing, packaging testing, and finally positioning and messaging when they launch.

Take me back to what it was like growing up in Iran and when you first got interested in tech.

I'm a millennial who grew up with x86 computers. I started coding in school with a Logo app, basically a Microsoft Paint style tool where you coded shapes like triangles and circles. I got fascinated with programming, studied computer science, and even built a ticket agency system before university. Eventually a professor introduced me to marketing, which pulled me toward growing startups.

You've worked at Rocket Internet, Mosio, and other growth and marketing roles across continents. Was there a common thread pointing you toward Peakage?

Yes. Most of those experiences were about building behavior and culture around new tech, like teaching people to use their phone to get a ride. Growth from promotions fades once you stop them, but if you build a product into someone's lifestyle, the growth becomes natural and organic. That mentality carried through every startup I worked with before Peakage.

Have you read the book Hooked, and does it relate to building habit forming products?

Yes, I have. They talk about it from the product side, but that's exactly what it is. We sometimes forget about that aspect and chase hype or trends instead, but building habit forming products or solutions is still true and still matters.

What was the specific moment that made you realize the CPG industry was broken when it comes to understanding consumers?

I saw companies spend huge marketing budgets on products that never sustained. The idea really started when I received irrelevant free samples, like baby diapers, even though I had no kids. That pushed my co-founder Cena and me to dig into how CPG brands launch products and whether they actually interview potential customers the way tech companies do.

You started Peakage during COVID. Did the pandemic validate your digital first approach or create new challenges?

It created a lot of challenges, from supply chain disruption to everyone staying home, but it also validated our approach. Before COVID, testing mostly happened at central locations with focus groups. With people staying home, there was a big need to test products at home, and we leveraged that timing to build our platform and streamline recruitment, fulfillment, and data collection.

You've built a community of over five million shoppers. How do you ensure the feedback is genuine and high quality?

We combine standard market research quality checks with AI. We collect data incrementally, profile users over time, and can flag inconsistencies. We don't rely on third party panels since we have historical data on our own users. We also use AI to guide users through open ended questions so the qualitative data brands need is actually captured well, not just to filter bad responses.

Looking five years out, where do you see Peakage and the broader consumer insights industry?

In the next year we want Peakage to become a fully agentic platform where a brand just gives one input or interview and gets final results, covering study design, recruitment, and analysis. Longer term, I think the whole market research industry, including big agencies that rely on humans doing manual work for clients, will shift toward tools like ours.