What we talked about
Ohad Shaked, co founder and CEO of ThinkUp, explains how his early IoT startup spent months chasing the right vertical and customer, and how that frustration led him to build a digital accelerator for first time founders. ThinkUp focuses on the pre revenue phase and guides founders step by step through customer research, interviews, assumption testing, market and competitor analysis, value proposition, go to market strategy, pitch deck, and a realistic financial model.
Show notes
Ohad Shaked spent months with his IoT startup doing market research, picking a vertical, abandoning it, picking another, struggling to find domain experts willing to talk, and eventually realized the process itself was the product he should build. ThinkUp exists to compress that painful, time-consuming discovery into a guided, structured experience for first-time founders who don’t yet know what they don’t know.
What we covered
- ThinkUp guides founders through the pre-revenue, pre-MVP, pre-funding phase. A founder types in their idea, and the platform breaks it into the problem they’re solving, the proposed solution, and the industry, then presents a map of modules and tasks to work through sequentially, starting with customer personas and pain points.
- The biggest mistake Ohad sees is founders rushing to build before validating. Teams spend months coding a product combining marketing, CRM, and operational features without ever confirming whether anyone has the problem they’re solving or would pay for the answer.
- Early validation signals that actually mean something: when a potential customer says they’ve already tried to fix the problem, allocated budget to it, asks for marketing materials, or wants to bring a colleague into the next call. The strongest signal of all is handing over a credit card for a future purchase.
- Ohad shared a case where one of his founders, building AI mentors for personal development coaching, used ThinkUp’s interview process to discover that B2B partnerships with coaching gurus, not direct-to-consumer, was the right go-to-market. That pivot led to a pre-seed raise from well-known angels and put them on track for product-market fit.
- On what investors want to see first at the early stage: not a polished product, but proof that the founder talked to real potential customers, heard real pain, and can explain their assumptions. Investors also want a financial model that’s realistic, not a $500 billion market size estimate, and a clear view of the next two years in milestones.
- His advice to his younger self: don’t rush. Learn every function of a business, sales, marketing, finance, legal, product, HR, before starting your own. He cited sales in particular as “one of the most difficult aspects” and something every founder should have direct experience with before leading a company.
About Ohad
Ohad Shaked is the co-founder and CEO of ThinkUp, a digital accelerator that helps first-time founders turn ideas into structured, fundable startups. He is also the chairman and owner of an IoT startup and invests in other ventures and VCs.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ohad-shaked111
- Website: https://thinkup.global
Episode 132 of the PreVetted Podcast.