Nice-to-Have Is Not Enough - Building Must-Have Products with Bea Knecht, Founder of Zattoo

What actually makes a startup work when almost every decision you make is probably wrong?

Founders often believe success comes from better planning, cleaner structure, or safer timing. Béa Knecht argues the opposite.

In this episode of Follow the Gradient, we sit down with Béa Knecht, co founder of Zattoo and one of Europe’s earliest builders of legal live TV streaming. Having founded the company in Silicon Valley and scaled it across Europe through multiple market shocks, Béa brings a rare, hard earned perspective on what actually holds under pressure.

This conversation is not about frameworks or growth hacks. It is a deep examination of how founders think, unlearn certainty, and act when reality keeps changing faster than their plans.

We talk about:

• Why European founders must treat internationalization as a day one survival skill, not a later milestone

• The difference between bravery and speed in decision making, and why waiting is usually just losing quietly

• How to tell a true must have product from a nice to have, using budget and pain as the only honest signals

• Why enforcing structure too early can kill the very thinking startups depend on

• How rapid course correction costs far less than founders imagine, even after public decisions

• What brutal downscaling taught Béa about leadership, dignity, and keeping a company alive

This episode favors judgment over checklists, adaptability over certainty, and clear seeing over confident storytelling in environments where most signals arrive late and incomplete.

Our biggest takeaways, including Bea’s view on what founders consistently misunderstand about must have products:

https://followthegradient.io/p/bea-knecht-podcast 

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Where to find Bea Knecht:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beaknecht/ 

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