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.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-vetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we are joined by Ohad Jaquette. He’s an entrepreneur and startup builder known for helping founders turn early ideas into real companies. Ohad is a co-founder and CEO of ThinkApp, a digital accelerator and platform designed to guide
entrepreneurs through validation, structure and fundraising preparation. He also brings deep experience from building and scaling high growth technology businesses and working closely with founders and investors across many stages. Ohad, welcome to the show.
Ohad Shaked (00:47) Thank you, Federico. Happy to be here.
Federico Ramallo (00:50) I am honored to have you here today. So for people meeting you for the first time, can you tell us more about what do you do today?
Ohad Shaked (00:59) Today, as you said, I’m mainly the founder and CEO of ThinkUp, where we help early stage founders, first time founders to turn their ideas into startups, successful startups. I’m also the chairman and the owner of another startup in the IoT domain.
And occasionally I invest in other VCs and sometimes other startups. So that’s in general my, I wear a few hats.
Federico Ramallo (01:32) Great. So what problem or frustration push you to start ThinkUp?
Ohad Shaked (01:39) When I started my first startup 10 years ago in the IoT domain, we’ve had a lot of back and forth with research. We knew the vision, we wanted to connect billions of smart things, but we didn’t know where to start, with which vertical, who’s gonna be the customers, what’s gonna be the use case. And we’ve done a lot of market research, each time picking a different vertical.
researching the market, the problems there, trying to find people to speak to, domain experts and potential customers, you know, to validate our way forward. And it took us lot of time. Even though we were a few people with vast experience and resources, it took us a lot of time and the process was quite frustrating.
So I thought maybe we can do it better, faster, easier for other founders and provide them something useful. That’s what brought me here.
Federico Ramallo (02:39) Right, interesting. And who is ThinkCap built for?
Ohad Shaked (02:45) think it’s founders or people with an idea want to be founders and they’re not really familiar with the startup journey. Okay, it’s a journey, it’s a complex journey. There are best practices and methodologies on how to do it. It’s a journey, a very tough journey with hundreds of tasks that are connected to each other.
And people that are not familiar with the entire process and how to do it right, those are the people we can help the most.
Federico Ramallo (03:20) Right.
I think what you’re doing is amazing because there’s so many startups that fail. Most of them, they don’t have the experience, so they don’t know what they don’t know on terms of the journey, right? So… ⁓
Ohad Shaked (03:36) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (03:37) And sometimes they have some of the more difficult things to have, the stamina, the energy, the commitment, and the dream, right? ⁓ And going from being able to increase those probabilities to success, I think that becomes an important mission.
Ohad Shaked (03:45) Yeah.
Exactly,
exactly. We all have a dream, but we don’t know the exact journey, how long it is, what do we need to do, lots of blind spots. We don’t know what we don’t know when we’re first timers. And sometimes we learn it the hard way.
Federico Ramallo (04:10) Right.
Right.
Ohad Shaked (04:15) People struggle, you know, for six months, a year, two years, just to realize all the mistakes that they’ve done and they could have done better.
Federico Ramallo (04:23) So what is the experience of the digital accelerator for founders?
Ohad Shaked (04:29) We’re focused on the ideation phase, which is pre-revenue, pre-MVP, pre-funding. And people should log into the platform, they type in their idea, and then we’ll break it down to the problem that they are trying to solve. That’s very important. You’re trying to solve a problem. You have to be focused on the problem.
We also break it down to the solution and the industry. This provides us the building blocks to provide a customized experience for users. And then they are presented with a map and modules and tasks. And they progress, they move forward task by task.
And at each time they’re focused on different steps on different topics.
The first topic is customer research, where there are personas, their potential customers, the decision makers, the buyers, what are the pain points, what are the needs? know, as Jeff Bezos said, on your customer, be obsessed with your customer. Or as YC Accelerator likes to say, build something people want. So we start with focus on the customer.
Then we help them, the users, to create the surveys, the interviews, to find potential customers to interview, prepare the interview, and then once they’ve done the interview, upload it, analyze it, validate the assumptions.
And furthermore, there are the market analysis, competitive analysis, when you need to find your unique value proposition and your competitive advantages. You define your product concept, high level capabilities of your product that address the pains of your potential customers.
So, know, on high level, this is the process and then there’s more interviews, go to market strategy, business model, building your pitch deck, your financial model. Now there lots of stuff and we’re trying to cover most of them.
Federico Ramallo (06:39) Right.
Where do you see founders wasting most of their time and what could they do to avoid it?
Ohad Shaked (06:49) I think they’re rushing a bit. They’re rushing a bit too much to build, to get ahead with the product, whether it’s vibe coding or just simply software. And it’s too fast.
They don’t have respect for the process, let’s say that. And they have to think, not just to run and build stuff. They have to stop, think, understand and build what matters. Otherwise, we see like teams building all in one, shops, products that are both…
marketing and a CRM and an operational tool, but they haven’t validated exactly the problem and what their potential customers need. They don’t have a focus. So people rush ahead with building stuff. They think they are prepared for funding, but they’re just wasting time because they’re not really prepared. They have to do more of the three P’s, prepare, prepare, prepare.
This is why they should be more focused.
Federico Ramallo (08:01) Right, right, that’s very interesting. And how do you help someone validate demand without overbuilding a product?
Ohad Shaked (08:11) Yeah, right. So we try and help them, you know, provide recommendations about groups where they can find potential customers. We sometimes even point them to specific customers and we help them through the interview process, what to ask, how to analyze it objectively.
and lay out the assumptions. What are the most important assumptions that they have to prove before they move on? Assumptions like, will people pay for it? Will people like to use it? Is the technology feasible?
There are all sorts of assumptions that they have to prove. So we guide them through laying out their assumptions and then building the right interview to validate or invalidate those assumptions. This is the process of validating the problem, validating your mockup. It’s very easy to build a prototype. People do it in minutes.
But then the iterations when people don’t like it, when people don’t use it, when people don’t pay it, pay for it. You know, it causes a lot of frustration, depression. You know, you feel the stress, things are moving in the right direction. So try and do more research. Talk to more people before you rush into building it, before you rush to speak with investors.
That’s the right process.
Federico Ramallo (09:45) Right.
Yeah, because it’s easy. mean, I’m a software engineer, so for me, it’s easier to build than validate. And then I built a lot, and I’ve been with this idea of if you build it, they will come, and that’s not necessarily the case, right?
Ohad Shaked (10:00) Yeah.
Yeah.
We all like to build. Building is creation. Technology is creation. It’s like a kind of art. It’s like almost having a kid. That’s the nice part. That’s the great part of seeing something new being created. We’re not interested in other people’s problems and researching them and stuff like that. I know that. We all like to do what we like to do with what we build or focus there. So being an entrepreneur,
is one of the most less selfish things. You always have to think about your customers. And that’s the hard part. And finding them and making them talk to you and then hearing things that you don’t want to hear. It’s not easy to hear that your product is not good enough, that they don’t have the problem, they’re not willing to buy.
You know, and your solution is not that great. It’s hard to hear those things. It will never work. There’s not gonna be any demand. You know, we’ve all been through that. I’ve heard that myself. But you have to get out of your comfort zone and do these things. Otherwise, you’re just gonna have the same pains and issues further down the road.
you know, six months later and 10, $20,000 less. Try and do it as soon as possible.
Federico Ramallo (11:28) Right, right. I remember the video that Dropbox launched when they first started to validate the demand. And it was just a simple, I don’t know, I think it was a minute video, something like that. ⁓ And I always recall that because they were able to build what Dropbox is now.
Ohad Shaked (11:36) Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (11:49) because they were able to validate their demand with one video that they did very quickly.
Ohad Shaked (11:51) Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it
was very viral, extremely popular. Yeah, that’s easy.
Federico Ramallo (11:59) Right, ⁓
So, you know, probably they hit, you know, were lucky in a lot of things, but for that video to become viral, but that proved that there was a huge demand for the product.
Ohad Shaked (12:11) Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s a great way, you know, to for validating things. It’s like showing your concept, your demo, see if it resonates with anyone. That’s a great way to validate, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (12:24) Right. So how can startups find these early signals that that idea is worth pursuing?
Ohad Shaked (12:31) Yeah. Well, you know, I can tell you I’ve been in a conference in Vienna of startups and innovation a couple of months ago. I spoke to someone who was counting for technology for the automotive business. And I was asking him about, you know, autonomous vehicles and data.
because I was researching for the other startup that I’m involved with and I wanted to see if I can get a signal of validation. And I asked him about, they need data from outside the vehicle, not from their own sensors and cameras? And he wasn’t interested in that. Now we just switched to another topic. So I saw that clearly that was a strong signal.
a signal. So there was no point of not trying to sell him the solution. That’s a strong signal of no interest. When you see people that are very interested in the problem, when you talk about that problem, they’re very interested.
They are very engaged and they say, yeah, we’ve experienced that. We’ve been trying to fix it. We’ve been trying to find solution. We’ve done some workarounds. We spent some money. We’ve got some budget allocated for that specific problem. That’s bingo. That’s the best you can do. And then obviously, know, where can we sign up?
Give me a call, I want to add someone else from our team to that call. Do you have any marketing material? Can I sign up for the waiting list? And obviously if someone provides their credit card for future payment, future purchase, that’s the strongest signal.
Federico Ramallo (14:20) Right.
Right, because they’re willing to put their money towards that product or service. ⁓
Ohad Shaked (14:29) Yeah,
yeah, that’s the ultimate validation, you know.
Federico Ramallo (14:36) What signals do you use to see founders, if they are worth to invest in them? Are founders born or are they made?
Ohad Shaked (14:46) Yeah, yeah. I hope that founders are not only born, they can be made. know, lots of people that are executives in all sorts of companies, they’re not born entrepreneurs, they didn’t start their career as entrepreneurs.
But at some point, once you get some more experience as a manager, as a salesman, as a marketing manager, as a product manager, you wanna join forces with someone else and start your own business. And that’s great. You just have to know the journey, you have to be prepared, you have to be more focused on the methodologies. And I like to see people that…
are into a structured journey. They’re not just playing around, they’re not just improvising or just running fast. We’re running very fast, we’re not sleeping, we’re working all day. I want to meet founders that have a clear path, that they know how to do things, they are willing to learn, they are humble, they know that they don’t know everything.
They’re willing to get an advice, maybe make some changes. If they hear other things, they are focused on their customers, they are focused on validation. And if they’re not focused on their customers, then there’s not gonna be any business. You know, that’s the most important thing. At least at the beginning, you to reach product market fit. That’s what you need. That’s what I want.
Federico Ramallo (16:19) Right, right.
So first is validation of the idea, then product market fit. Then what we kind of talk about is this idea of the willingness of the founder to learn how to run the process properly.
Ohad Shaked (16:36) Yeah, exactly. Because you know, as a founder, you’re running the company. Now running a company has a few dimensions, legal, financial, partnership, sales, product, tech, marketing, lot of aspects and HR. You can be an expert in everything, especially if you’re a bit younger, if you’re a first timer. So that’s why you join forces with other co-founders.
And still, you probably don’t have all of the skills necessary. So you need to learn, you need some guidance, you need some help, that’s okay. Just be willing to learn and just be aware that you don’t know everything.
Federico Ramallo (17:22) Right.
Yes, and the one way that I’ve been phrasing this is the success of the company has higher priority than the founder’s ego, right?
Ohad Shaked (17:32) Yeah.
Yeah, but ego is what drives us forward, know, that’s what keeps us alive and gives us the motivation and we want to change the world. Well, we want to be on the Forbes top list. We want to be known. We want to be respected.
Federico Ramallo (17:39) Bye.
Ohad Shaked (17:55) But sometimes, as you said, sometimes maybe we can start the business, but we can’t go all the way. We’re not good managers. Maybe we have strong tech people, but we’re not good in financials or commercial aspects. So sometimes you have to step down and make way for someone which is a better fit. Yeah, absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (18:20) Right,
right. It’s about having a balance between the understanding what’s going on with the world, right? Having a lot of sensitivity, but also at the same time having the…
Ohad Shaked (18:30) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (18:34) I call it stubbornness, this is probably not the right word, but the stubbornness to keep pushing towards your vision, And prove to yourself and the world that that idea is worth pursuing, right?
Ohad Shaked (18:45) Yeah,
The fine line between, you know, what you just mentioned, you know, stamina and just being stubborn. You know, we never know exactly when you have a stamina and you’re pushing forward at one point, it’s gonna happen. You’re gonna break out and be successful or you’re just stubborn and it’s never gonna work.
It’s up to you and your colleagues, your co-founders, maybe your investors to make that decision together or sometimes for you. I’ve been in a lot of situation when I was the investor and many times the founders were not the right person to lead the company. And…
It leads to a very unpleasant situation where you have to make the founder live. But that’s for the benefit of the company. And sometimes founders don’t see it that way. That’s a shame. But it’s a very emotional process. You know, it’s not just an investment. This is our life’s work as entrepreneurs. People have to understand it. Very emotional.
Federico Ramallo (19:36) Right.
Ohad Shaked (19:56) Very important.
Federico Ramallo (19:56) Right, yes.
It’s very close to our own image reflection, Because if we’re a founder, it kind of defines who we are in a very deep significance, right? And it took me a lot of time to learn how to detach myself from…
You know, me as an individual to the company, right? So that way I can reduce my emotions on situations that happens, right? Being able to sit with a cooler head and being able to see, you know, am I the right person to, you know, to manage the situation or do I have somebody on my team that can do that better, right?
Ohad Shaked (20:27) Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Usually, you know, in routine, I think the best way is to delegate everything that can be delegated. Whatever your employees can do, whatever your team can do, try to delegate it to them. It empowers them. It gives them purpose, independence.
And you can focus on other stuff, you can help them, you should be there for them if they are stuck. But don’t try to do most of the things or all of the things by yourself, don’t try to make all the decisions. It’s bad for you, for your stress, for your team. Try to delegate as much as possible. It’s going to create also more commitment.
Federico Ramallo (21:25) So I wanted to ask you little bit about AI in the world that we’re living now. AI is becoming this big thing between there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of harsh realities with AI. How should founders think about AI today as a tool, as a teammate, as a strategy? What are your thoughts on that?
Ohad Shaked (21:48) All of them, all of them. First of all, on your journey, you have many more tools to make much more, to go through a deep research, validate your assumption, research your market, research signals from social networks, from the web, about your personas.
You can do better market research, better competitive analysis. You can do much more thorough work today than before. You can even run a few ideas in parallel. Today, I think each and every one of us uses AI on a day-to-day basis, almost in every email, every question that we have.
You know, it’s just like a Google search a few years ago. So it’s a teammate and you need to bounce ideas with it. And also as a strategy, you know, I see people moving a bit towards deep tech more because standard software has a big question whether it has a mode or not. Can you defense?
your SaaS against the LLMs, the foundation models. It’s harder and harder. Do you have an IP? Do you have proprietary data? If you think you do, if you think you have a process, something that’s very unique to you, if you’re in the niche, that’s great.
Otherwise people go to deep tech, hardware, agri tech, food tech, space tech, life science, where the foundation models are probably not there yet. So you always try and find your path forward. That’s I think the general view of AI at the moment.
Federico Ramallo (23:36) Right.
Right, right. Yeah, I’ve seen that the buy versus rent, the equation has been going down for a cost of, sorry, buy or build. So it was.
Ohad Shaked (23:50) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (23:52) It’s been going down for the build because now the coding agents allow you to build much faster at a lower cost. And that is killing a lot of SaaS companies, but not all of them. There are a lot of companies where the product’s still worth while to use.
Ohad Shaked (24:00) Yeah.
Yeah, I’m a bit sceptic about it. I don’t see too many people in a food company, in a corporate, in a bank.
starting to build their own, you know, CRM, project management, marketing automation tool, things like that. Maybe at the beginning it’s nice, but on an ongoing basis, you know, when you have lots of users within your corporate, you have to maintain it. You have to make sure it doesn’t break their bugs, their requests from the team. I’m not sure if it can’t be, if it can be done properly.
And you know, the other companies out there on the market will keep improving. They’re going to offer better and better user experience and better and better value proposition. So I’m a bit skeptic if corporates will decide, you know, to build significant systems on their own. That’s my view. Maybe I’m biased.
Federico Ramallo (25:18) Right, right. Yeah, I I think that there’s a lot of hype towards this topic. And I think it’s interesting to hear your perspective because you are working directly with founders and you can see what’s hype and what’s real, right?
Ohad Shaked (25:26) Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:36) So when founders are preparing for fundraising, what do investors actually want to see first?
Ohad Shaked (25:45) first.
think the first and most important thing is who did you talk to? How many interviews did you conducted? How can you validate that the problem is real? What’s the basis for your assumptions? And then what have you built in terms of just the prototype and again,
does it really resonate with potential customers? How many potential customers did you talk to? What exactly did you hear signals? I think this is the most important thing. Building is less important in the early stage that we are referring to. And then I think…
Investors want to see entrepreneurs that know the methodology and the structure. They want to see unique value proposition, which is focused, which is correct. They want to see competitive advantage, whether it’s IP, whether it’s the team, whether it’s proprietary data.
and they want to see market analysis which is correct, not too big. Don’t just throw a $500 billion market size at them. We want to understand to see that the user know how to analyze the market properly and come up with figures that are specific to their domain as much as possible.
They want to see that they have realistic, that founders have realistic financial plans.
not too big, not too modest. They understand the amount of money that they have to put in, in order to build the team, to build the product and then build initial distribution channels and bring in the first customers. So a robust financial model. Let’s say, I wouldn’t say a solid roadmap because it’s still in the early phase.
but they do want to see founders that can see and vision the next two years, roughly, what are the milestones, where do they wanna go? I think that’s, and other than that, founders have to see the side, the other side of the investor. How does the investor see them, this opportunity? If the investor invest X, what?
would their return be within a few years or at least up until the next round. Founders have to understand and see things also from the perspective of an investor, not just their own founder perspective. How many stop here? It’s complicated.
Federico Ramallo (28:38) Right.
and being realistic on the cost, the effort to build it, and basically be pulled by demand rather than their dreams, right?
Interesting. So can you share us a story where a founder used your system and got a surprising breakthrough?
Ohad Shaked (28:58) Yeah, I think there was one company that comes to mind that they were trying to build AI mentors to build like a digital twin for a coach, know, personal development coach. And they weren’t sure what’s their
go to market strategy, are they going to be B2C, B2B? And then they started making some interviews with their industry. And they then found out that partnerships with personal development gurus themselves would be the right approach. It’s gonna be both cheap and…
No better returns and with the great mass market adoption, brand adoption, and that fits their team skills best. So through the process, they got into that B2B partnership playbook.
Federico Ramallo (29:56) Interesting, interesting. And were they able to get funding or are they still in that process?
Ohad Shaked (30:01) Yeah, they raised the pre-seed funding with some well-known angels and I think they’re on the right track for product market. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (30:10) Amazing.
Amazing. So what did you learn about from scaling previous companies that you can now teach founders, early founders?
Ohad Shaked (30:14) Yeah.
Okay, so it’s building the entire business framework, the initial business framework. As we discussed over and over again, it’s first of all the validation of the problem and the solution in order to get the product market fit and to have a more realistic financial model because it’s hard for us to understand how much would acquiring new customer would cost.
the headquarter, the R &D, what are the milestones that we need to achieve and how long is it gonna take? How much money is it gonna take? What’s the right roadmap for us?
and how to build your capital strategy because that means you know funding round after funding round after funding round you always have to be prepared for your next funding round you always need more funds you always have to plan ahead even the funding strategy
just your company strategy, not just your customer development, how you’re gonna bring in more and more customers, you have to fund it. And all the time, you know, your startup needs increase the overhead, the ad counts, the marketing spend, everything increases, the stress increases as well. And you always have to raise more and more funds. That’s even in the case where everything goes right. So
We have to build that as a coherent plan. You know, the funding, the validation, bringing the traction, building the MVP, the financial plan. It’s a big picture with lots of details in it. So I think that’s the experience that me and my team bring into the process. And that’s the value that we provide for founders.
Federico Ramallo (32:12) Right, right. And a proven track record because you’ve already scaled your companies and you can provide that experience to them, right?
Ohad Shaked (32:15) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly,
exactly. Yeah, you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes myself. The people that I worked with, know, the companies that I invested and we improved all the time. You you make mistakes, you make changes, you make experiments, you fail, you pivot, you try other playbooks until you succeed.
Every day, every week, you have to ask yourself, what can I do better? How can I do better? Until eventually, hopefully, you reach success.
Federico Ramallo (32:56) Bye.
What advice would you give to, know, when somebody’s trying to promote a product or a service and between, you know, figuring out do they need to pivot or do they need to keep pushing because they haven’t found the ADL customers yet and didn’t have the response they were looking for, How can you help them navigate that decision?
Ohad Shaked (33:22) Yeah. So it’s also when you have a product, when you have customers, it’s an ongoing process, never ending of speaking to your customers, conducting user interviews, usability tests. And we always try to understand what goes in the mind of our users and customers. Do they like the product?
What are the pros, the cons, the difficulties? What’s not working in the product? Is it the user experience? Is it the features? What changes do we need to make? Sometimes you look at videos of user sessions, you’re trying to understand what went wrong, what they didn’t understand, why did they not press that button? What were they trying to do? And…
If you don’t find a product market fit, you have to ask yourself, does the problem really exist? Do we answer a true pain? That’s the first question, you know, and then if it is, the second thing is, is the traffic that you bring in, the people, the users, are their product qualified? Do they have, do they experience that pain?
If they do, and if they want an answer to that pain, is your product good enough? Okay? If the users are a good fit, if they have that problem, if the problem exists, maybe your product is not good enough. So you have to ask yourself and understand, where’s the problem? Is it your product? Is the traffic you’re bringing? Is it the problem that doesn’t exist?
You have to understand which one is it.
Federico Ramallo (35:03) what is your advice about pricing? How can you help founders figure out pricing? It’s pricing, it’s a multiple variable problem, right? You have the packages, the actual number, and then how do you present it?
Ohad Shaked (35:22) Yeah, yeah. You know, you have the standard playbook of three or four different tiers. It depends if you’re selling to SMBs, to large corporates. Your base, assumption, your base point is look at your competitors. What are your customers using for that specific problems to solve?
How are your competitors price? How do they price their products? And what do you offer in comparison to your competitors? Are you offering sort of the same or maybe diminished value proposition, but you want to do it with a…
price advantage, so you would offer it at a 50 % discount, or do you offer something superior with much better value proposition? So maybe you can price it at the same price or even at a higher price. And obviously when you start your business, there are kind of introductory offers.
you special offers at the beginning, but it depends on your go-to-market strategy and the value proposition. Is it better than your competitors or is it the pricing that is the advantage that you want to introduce?
Federico Ramallo (36:44) Right,
Ohad Shaked (36:44) also for consumers applications, think Chia GPT kind of serves as a benchmark. You know, if that is a competitor for many different consumer apps, and then you have cloud for the enterprise. So those are the generic competitors for almost everything, and they could serve as a benchmark.
Maybe you wanna offer something that is less expensive than they are until you can show that you have a better value proposition. That’s situation today, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:19) Right.
Interesting. What advice would you give to your younger self?
Ohad Shaked (37:27) to my younger self, yeah, I keep asking myself the same question. Don’t rush your career. Take it slowly, there are no shortcuts. Build yourself up in the process. Learn all the dimensions of a company. Learn how to manage a product. Learn the sales process. Learn the marketing aspects. Learn the financial and legal aspects.
and obviously you know the tech, manage teams, know, trying and full sales before you building your own business. I think sales is one of the most difficult aspect to convince someone else to pay you and
You have to make sure that you have some experience in all of those dimensions. Hire people, build a team, try to define your culture, your DNA. All of those things are important before you start a business. ⁓
think that’s the advice.
Federico Ramallo (38:34) Amazing, It’s hard because we are who we are based on our experience, right? So if we, even the positive and the painful ones, right? So even if we remove the painful ones, then we’re not going to be who we are now, right?
Ohad Shaked (38:48) Yeah, someone said that experience is the name that we give our mistakes.
Federico Ramallo (38:53) Right, yes. It’s the accumulation of our mistakes and all the decisions that we made that got us here.
Ohad Shaked (38:54) Yeah.
Exactly. I
Federico Ramallo (39:03) Amazing, we’re running out of time, but I truly appreciated you being here today. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Ohad Shaked (39:13) ⁓ You know, I just, I suggest, you know, founders prepare yourselves, learn as much as you can before ⁓ taking this big step. You know, maybe you have a job before you quit your job, try and be prepared as much as possible so you don’t have too many surprises, too much stress, too many blind spots, ⁓ too much pain, know, and in the process later on.
So try to prepare as much as possible and build a team that helps you throughout the process. Don’t be alone at it.
Federico Ramallo (39:54) Amazing, Ohad, thank you very much for joining us today.