Here’s a better way to build something customers want: start from what they already ordered and work backward.

Most product ideas start in a meeting. Someone has a hunch, the team falls in love with it and the customer gets a vote only after the money is spent.

That sequence is expensive. When CB Insights studied 431 venture-backed startups that have shut down since 2023, poor product-market fit was cited in 43% of failures it could trace. Plenty of companies already hold a better source of truth than any brainstorm: their own order history.

At Scento, the Paris-based company I founded in 2024, we hand-pour perfume decants, small vials filled from original bottles, and sell more than 3 million of them a year, one every 10 seconds. Every one of those decants is a vote somebody paid to cast. I call building from those votes Bestseller-Backwards: start from what customers already ordered, not from what you wish they would buy.

We put it to work on this year’s perfume advent calendars, two 24-door editions called For Her and For Him, whose doors we chose on Oct. 4. We let our order data fill the doors. Here is how that worked, rule by rule, including where I overruled the data.

Bestseller-Backwards begins with a ranked list. For the calendars, we sorted our perfumes by sales over the previous 12 months, then checked each name against the last 90 days so a seasonal spike or a fading favorite couldn’t decide a door.

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