Cloaks Off: Outcomes over outputs; questions over statements

An interview with TheyDo's CCO & Co-Founder, Martin Palamarz

Welcome to Cloaks Off, our series that takes you behind the scenes at TheyDo and introduces you to the people shaping our culture and success.

This month, we’re doing something a little different. We sat down with Martin Palamarz, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at TheyDo, to talk about how the company actually started, what remote-first unlocks for a founder, and why he thinks the entire customer experience industry has its priorities backwards.

Martin has lived in six countries: Finland, Poland, Sweden, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. Before co-founding TheyDo with Jochem van der Veer and Charles Beaumont, he spent years running his own strategic marketing agency. Today, he helps key customers unlock value from Journey Management while building what he calls “Tech and Touch,” encoding years of hands-on customer expertise into AI agents and prompts so that his expertise and guidance can reach far beyond his direct customer work.

Here’s how our conversation unfolded.

Take us back to the beginning. How did TheyDo actually start?

There wasn’t a grand vision, honestly. Back between 2016 and 2017, I was consulting on the product side for a global staffing organization, and we kept running into the same wall: teams were misaligned about what to work on next, and they couldn’t articulate why they were prioritizing certain things over others. Journeys were being mapped by hand, on whiteboards and slides, and we started thinking about what it would take to digitize that entire workflow into an actual platform.

After a year of building, we began to see that clients started pulling us in that direction before we fully committed to it ourselves. They began asking for the product we were building, not just the consulting services around it. 

Was there a specific moment you thought, ‘This is worth betting on’?

The real test came during COVID. The three of us, Jochem, Charles, and I locked ourselves in a relative’s cottage on an island for a weekend to genuinely stress-test whether the product had product-market fit.  The hard part was that the "wow factor" was buried deep: you had to do real work to get a team to the moment where the value clicked. We gave ourselves six months to prove it.

Funding came almost by accident. We went out asking for advice, not money, and people kept telling us to take their money instead. It came with one condition: drop the consultancy work and focus entirely on generating revenue from the product. Our consulting income had already stopped overnight because of COVID, so in some ways the decision made itself.

But going from steady consultancy revenue to a fraction of that in TheyDo’s first year was a real risk, and I won’t pretend it wasn’t scary. COVID hadn’t left us many other options, so it became the natural path forward. The following year, we picked up our first international customers and realized competitors were chasing the same idea, which only motivated us to push ahead even harder and faster.

TheyDo is remote-first across more than two dozen countries. What does that actually require of a founder?

Having lived in six countries myself, remote-first comes naturally to me. Honestly, I can’t imagine going back to office work; it feels inefficient by comparison. But I’m clear-eyed about the fact that it’s not for everyone. It requires people with real drive who can move without constant confirmation. As a co-founder you can’t be a controlling person who needs everything checked before acting.

There’s a funny contradiction in me, though: I genuinely love our in-person off-sites and meeting customers face-to-face. I get a real kick out of it. But after four or five days together in a physical space, I'm fueled with so much energy and ideas for what to do next, so I can't wait to go back to remote work.

The honest truth is that we couldn’t have hired the incredible team we have today if we’d been limited to one location. I’m proud of that. But again, it’s not for everyone.

What's a belief in your industry that you think most people haven't caught up to yet?

CX is struggling more than ever to earn a real seat at the table on both the strategic and tactical decisions that shape the business, and I think that comes down to a mindset problem. The industry has trained CX teams to treat the end customer as the hero of every conversation, which sounds noble but misses the point. In a healthy business, customer-first thinking is already everyone's job, so leading with it doesn't make CX indispensable; it makes CX redundant with everyone else in the room.

What makes CX indispensable is treating internal stakeholders as its actual customers, especially the executive who is personally accountable for the number the business is bleeding on, and going to solve that problem inside their current way of working rather than asking them to adopt a new one first. If CX lands a resolved business issue on that executive's P&L, the impact on the end customer follows as a consequence of the work, and the authority to formalize governance, ownership, and scale gets handed to CX by the business rather than requested from it. Until CX makes that shift, it will keep getting left out of the decisions that actually move the number.

What do you find yourself unlearning as the company grows?

Anything and everything. Constantly. You have to. The company barely resembles itself from one year to the next. Selling into enterprise took a completely different skill set from running a consultancy, and scaling a digital product meant learning things I had no idea existed when we started.

I've come to see leadership less as telling people exactly what to do and more as leading from the front, staying visible, staying engaged, showing up for the stuff that's easy to delegate away. No customer is too small for me to jump on a call, no topic is too small for me to get into the details. The moment something feels beneath you, that's a signal you've started thinking about yourself instead of the people you're supposed to be serving. That's the wrong mindset for running a startup.

What actually energizes you day to day, not the highlight reel?

The light-bulb moment. Taking someone from “quick send mode” to a genuine “aha” moment in five or 10 minutes. I still get a kick out of watching that happen in someone’s eyes, even over a video call. It doesn’t matter if it’s an end customer, a teammate or, honestly, one of my own kids. That instinct to help someone see something more clearly never really switches off.

Where do you see TheyDo a couple of years from now?

I’ll be honest, I don’t think that question has a satisfying, polished answer. One thing is constant, and that’s change. We’re building a company designed to thrive amid that change rather than one built around a single, fixed future. It’s the same thinking we bring to journey management itself: the map isn’t static, and neither is the business behind it.

Any advice for someone starting a company today?

Never give up. It requires grit. It requires being a little bit crazy and focus.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself to celebrate the milestones more. I was always looking at what was coming next instead of appreciating what was right in front of me. And find talented people who share our beliefs and convictions. That’s what makes or breaks a business.

TheyDo was built to solve the exact problem Martin describes: teams struggling to align priorities without a shared view of the customer journey. Today, TheyDo helps organizations connect journeys, insights, opportunities, and solutions in one place, giving teams the context they need to align their work and make better decisions.