Transcript: From Idea to Vision: Avner Roash on Building Startups, Positive ROI from Day 1, and Hype Index

Eyal David: [00:00] Hey friends, this is Eyal. You've reached Product Builder, where you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey began in 2012 when I learned what product is, with my startup. Since then I've worked in the industry, and since 2017 my company has been consulting for a variety of companies. My drive is to help all of us improve as product people. And before we begin, if you enjoy listening to Product Builder, please rate us five stars on Spotify. It'll give me great feedback that the podcast provides you value, and it would make me very happy. So come on, let's begin.

Avner Roash: [00:35] Hey Avner, how's it going? Hey Eyal, how are you? I'm doing fine — but how about you, all going well? What a pleasure to be here, what a beautiful studio, amazing.

Eyal David: [00:44] So great that you came. So with us is Avner, who's an entrepreneur and investor. Avner, what's your focus in life right now?

Avner Roash: [00:51] Life? Today I'm focused on our company, Hype Index. Hype Index is a company we built in 2022, just starting to operate. A system that scans the internet and looks for trending in the world of the capital market — mainly stocks, cryptocurrency. We sell subscriptions both to businesses and, of course, to retail investors.

Eyal David: [01:15] That's it, it's going great. So you'll expand on that and tell more in a moment, and I'll briefly explain how this episode is a bit different. Basically Avner came here to share his method — we'll go over how to take initiative and actually run from an idea to a product, or a business in this case. And I thought it would be very relevant both for product managers and as a great talk that we'd be happy to distill into a conversation. So Avner, go on — tell us a bit more about your background. Tell us what you do, what you've done.

Avner Roash: [01:46] So I come from the world of startups. I think since 2005, around when the first iPhone came out, that was the first business we opened — I opened an app. How old were you? I'm 42, so 15, 20-something years ago. Yeah, there was an app we sold for a dollar on the App Store, before there were a billion apps — it was called iBreak, you could prank your friends that their screen was broken. It started working excellently, every morning I'd wake up, refresh, see how many sales there were, and then one day Apple sent me an email saying I was breaking their Terms and Conditions and that the app had to come down, unless I changed the display frame to some TV screen or something like that, so it wouldn't stay the iPhone itself — of course that would lose all the point and the fun of the thing, and we stopped, but we had about 20,000 downloads. Wow, who's 'we'? Me and another partner I had back then,

Eyal David: [02:56] yeah, we were together. And what other things do you want to share to give some background?

Avner Roash: [03:02] So from there I moved on to a few more startups — we tried to make deer-recognition apps for hunting, that was also back then, and a few more startups, the startup I think was one of the most significant before our success was a startup called Rentam, basically an Airbnb for things — anyone who wanted to rent out anything, anywhere, you know, a guitar, a microphone, setups, everything — so we built a platform for that. There we had a very, very big breakdown, which my partners and I will talk about afterward — we just didn't work out, and it really fell apart, the whole story. But from there success came — really from that biggest breakdown, from the rock bottom we hit, we got to another startup afterward called WinChargeback, where we really caught the wave and built a company doing seven figures of revenue a month, really a big success, that lasted seven or eight years. And that's it — today I'm at Hype Index.

Eyal David: [04:07] Cool. So let's lay out the topics we'll talk about — basically we're talking about going from idea to business? From idea to vision. Let's start with from idea to vision. Everyone with their own vision — it can really be a business, a startup, anything, but basically what are the stages — how do we break down the stages to reach that place we want to get to? It always looks very, very big to us when we think about this vision, about how we want it to look, and in the end the goal is to understand what the small task is, what that one additional step is, and from there you continue to another task and another task, until we of course reach the place we want. So all of this of course starts with an idea. Each of us has our own idea, that comes to us while sitting or in the shower, or thinking — and lots of ideas always pop up for us, and usually it comes from our surroundings too. You talked about how, you know, each of us is in our own environment, and there are always the ideas and the thought about how I could improve and bring more value. So of course you always start there. So you're constantly picking things up, looking for ideas, hearing about problems and so on,

Avner Roash: [05:22] something hits you — okay, how do you take it from there? So first of all, what I like to do is take it and lay it out on the Lean Canvas — are you familiar with the term Lean Canvas? Sure. Yeah, so of course it's very, very simple — lots of these little boxes with all kinds of questions, where you can just start throwing all your thoughts, from the definition of the problem, to its description, and why my solution is good, and who our competitors are of course, and where money will come from, and so on and so on, so it's a great tool for throwing all your thoughts in there, to start actually examining your idea.

Eyal David: [06:04] What's the next thing you do — okay, now I've written things down, maybe I'm a bit of a bullshitter and I'm writing things, so how do you actually bring them down to earth and really validate them?

Avner Roash: [06:13] So first of all, in the world of the Lean Canvas or the Lean Startup, there's the topic of minimum viable product, the MVP, where we can start trying to think about what minimal product we can build, to really validate it, to do a certain proof of concept for our idea. It could be, you know, instead of building the crazy platform we wanted right now, to build some Facebook group, or even build a WhatsApp group, and start looking for our customers, and start seeing whether there's really some — you know, we always think our ideas are excellent and everything, but in the end we also need to find out how it sounds out there and how it's received out there — so that's basically the validation of the idea,

Eyal David: [06:59] where we get feedback. So take me back a step for a second — you can even apply this to Hype Index, or any other initiative you've done, you can share that as an example, but okay — I wrote things on the canvas, I laid it out, there's a market here in my opinion — how do you actually go and make it concrete, and understand that there really is a market, how much time do you invest,

Avner Roash: [07:18] how does this process actually look? So first of all, it's a process that's important to take time over, meaning, it's very important that you examine your idea in a detailed enough way, and sit on all the things, really on every single thing — meaning, checking that the market is big enough, you know, checking that my idea isn't just another small feature in a platform that might exist. Because those you don't do. Better not to, meaning, creating another feature in some existing platform is something our competitors can also do of course, and we won't be able to grow from that in an orderly way. So yeah, it's very important to check the idea in advance — that's with yourself, and of course with people you trust, and of course to understand the market, meaning it's very important to understand where you are, what your environment is, who your competitors are, what people who really run into the problem do today — run into the problem you want to solve, and right now, what their solutions are, what their alternatives are, yeah, and from there you start — if you don't have this list that makes sense, then don't proceed, meaning, this progress involves a lot of energy and a lot of resources, and really a lot of hardship — meaning, opening a startup and moving forward, the more you progress, the challenges too, of course — and this is also true for product managers who work inside a company and want to push something forward, and again, you'll invest the same amount of effort, so you might as well aim for something concrete and big, so take us through Hype Index — okay, you did this mapping, can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah, sure. So Hype Index really came from a personal need of mine, almost always our ideas, by the way, will come from a personal need of ours, from our understanding of the market — I've been investing since 2017 too, I have a portfolio of stocks, also a portfolio of cryptocurrency, and in the world of cryptocurrency and also the world of stocks, there's a lot of importance to hype, meaning, a lot of stocks or coins that are under the radar, that you don't even know exist, and you'd really want to know what's happening, and of course have all that data — so it started with a need of mine, I wanted to build some system that would scan basically social networks, that would scan news websites, that would scan the SEC filings now, their news feed, and update me on what's hyped now, what's currently rising or what's under the radar, and slowly bring up what's trending today — and that's basically how Hype Index came about, I started looking for alternatives — Google Trends, surely that's... again, yeah, Google Trends is something that exists, but it's not something specific and truly focused on this thing, meaning it wasn't a solution tailored personally for me,

Eyal David: [10:19] on the other hand you're not a company either, so tools that are too enterprise-y don't make sense either, right? That's exactly the problem that there wasn't one,

Avner Roash: [10:26] all the tools that existed were enterprise tools, meaning for the retail investor, for the ordinary person who's not a hedge fund or a bank, or some financial institution, there were no tools at all, and they had no way to obtain these tools, because these were tools that required a lot of money of course, and the goal was to really make this data accessible to the ordinary investor, and that's something that really didn't exist — I would search inside, you know, in Telegram, in all kinds of groups, and I'd be in Discord, and really so much information, but no one was collecting it for me, and no one was making it accessible to me in the form of, you know, insights, accurate ones, and yeah, I decided to take up the gauntlet — so if we talk for a second about Hype Index, then really, we threw everything on the Lean Canvas, and created a deck with four or five slides, and from there I went out, you know, to see what people think about this thing,

Eyal David: [11:28] we really raised money — wow, so do you always go and prepare a deck, regardless of fundraising,

Avner Roash: [11:34] or is that something purely for the sake of the fundraising? I think the deck really helps you focus all the things, meaning, in the end it helps you come and see all the things in front of your eyes now, so it's not just scribbles on a page, and all kinds of things scattered around, by the way, one of the most important things about an idea, and this is something where you learn to know yourself, is the feeling — meaning, you really need to feel, okay, you yourself are already in that place, in the experience of after the startup exists, in order to know it's the real thing — meaning, if you don't have that feeling, and by the way, 'Feeling Is the Secret,' I don't know if you're familiar, by Neville Goddard, an amazing book, I recommend it to everyone — you can put the link afterward to read, or really 40 minutes of audiobook — you have to feel it, you have to feel it, in every fiber of your being, in terms of feeling it, so that tears come out — meaning, to feel that this is the thing. Vision. Vision. When you have this thing, it's real and it can happen, if you don't have that feeling, you're not there yet. And okay,

Eyal David: [12:44] we'll definitely add the link, and then basically, at that moment, when you went with the deck,

Avner Roash: [12:50] you raised money — can you say roughly how much? Yeah, we wanted to raise $250K pre-seed, to develop it, in the end we raised $330K, because more people wanted to get in. And that's us, again. Me and my partner, Dor Kalman, he's the CTO of the company, also a startupist through and through, worked, was CTO at other companies that raised a lot of money from VCs, and so together — and is this something you always do?

Eyal David: [13:20] Okay, how do you — and then, at what moment did you actually team up with a founder?

Avner Roash: [13:26] The moment I felt it, the moment I felt that this is the thing, and I felt it, that this is what I'm going to do, this is what I truly feel I need to do, I started looking for founders — the truth is that... when you're in this state of mind, you can really rally anyone. I can, you know — that's also how we know each other, because you helped me, with product people who joined us, when I'm there with a sparkle in my eyes, really, then the rallying is really much easier, and you can bring anyone along with you, and make anything happen. And then, basically, you understand that this is probably the next checkbox, that you need a founder, have you also done things solo, or how does it look? It depends — usually I have to have a founder, because I mainly come from the business world, but you know, the tech world is a world that's not foreign to me, but it's a world where I have to have someone by my side, especially with platforms like these. I also had, I also had, not mishaps, but as we said at the start, I had some stories with founders — I assume it happens to everyone. Again, to understand, a founder is like a wife, meaning, it's marriage, it's several years ahead now, it's not,

Eyal David: [14:50] it's not just 'cool, and we're done.' So how do you find one — what are your criteria for a co-founder?

Avner Roash: [14:56] So first of all, someone you must have fun with, someone you must have amazing chemistry with, that you have shared topics with, someone you can talk to, also about things not actually related to the startup itself, he needs to share the same dream with you, and he needs to complement you professionally.

Eyal David: [15:14] On this you really must not compromise. Tell the story we had earlier,

Avner Roash: [15:20] so I really had a partner, we didn't have a founders' agreement — I'm talking about Rentam, that same venture, we even had someone who wanted to invest money, we were already ready and everything, and my partner got an offer that was better for him, apparently we didn't fully share the vision, yeah, that's really how it was, and he chose to go with the other offer, and he chose to take the code with him too, so what it left me with after 4-5 months of really hard work, days and nights, it left me with nothing, and it was really a very, very big breaking point — first of all a kind of loss of trust, and what do I do from here, and I had sunk so much, but a lesson, a real lesson — you know, one of the things we talk about, and my wife too keeps reminding me of it, is the topic of a founders' agreement, we can get into it if you want later, but it's something that's critical, critical, critical — really, it's something that protects you, so let's touch — let's touch briefly on the topic of the founders' agreement, so really, even though we haven't started anything yet, you need to think about the divorce from the very start, it's something very, very hard, but to understand how you separate, because separating too is a process, and it's important to know how to do it properly, because if you don't do it properly, it can cause harm, especially if you find, if your partner is a friend from before, we're really talking about a very painful break — so that's of course the first thing. Second thing, the whole topic of vesting, meaning, when do we receive the percentages? At Hype Index, I received my percentages, by the way, only three months ago.

Eyal David: [17:10] What do you mean — but you started the idea, you have 100%, it's your idea, you brought a founder in, 50-50, but what does this vesting mean — you started from 50-50, you start at 50-50,

Avner Roash: [17:22] but you're still not entitled to all your percentages — imagine your partner wants to leave afterward, so how do you stretch it over how long — you decide together, obviously, but what's the best practice? So you divide it, we divided it into three or four points, so the first point could be a year, the first year, okay? Full-time work, so after the first year you get 15%, for example. The next point could be a raise — after a certain raise, or the first 100 customers, you get another 15%. So you basically define milestones — exactly right, totally, the milestones lead to the vision and basically lead to the vesting, basically to your entitlement to the percentages, on both sides — even though I came with the idea, and I brought him in, it's for both sides completely, once the partner comes in, and this, by the way, is a critical point, he's your partner at fifty-fifty, you and he are equal, meaning if you bring in another three months into the venture, same-same, and it's very important not to come with your nose in the air, or from some point of view of 'I'm above you, I brought the idea' — that won't work, equals, equals, like you and your wife, and you know how it is, equals, equals, it's the same thing with your partner too, and anything you do otherwise won't work, it'll look like condescension and will look as if you still see the venture as being you, and that's maybe the most important thing in a founders' agreement at the end of the day — the most important, the most important. It's important to understand that if you there's no point in fifty percent that's worth nothing, totally. And okay,

Eyal David: [18:58] we have a founders' agreement, we already have a deck, we ran to raise money — how does it look from there? You raised the $330K, and then we started development of course — so you're bringing us

Avner Roash: [19:10] to that MVP you mentioned, exactly, so we get to the MVP, we — each one of course, every startup has its three people, the people it needs — for us it was data science, which was very, very crucial, and also of course more developers, and by the way they don't have to be in-house, you can take them, outsource, today it's much cheaper, totally — but what did you define as the MVP? What was the scope? So we wanted to create a system that knows how to produce positive ROI, okay? From day 1, from day 1, meaning we wanted to do analysis of stocks and crypto and show that the correlation basically between the price and the hype gives positive ROI, and we managed to show that really very, very fast — we scanned two years back and of course continued scanning forward, while we're checking. Just as an example, we now take a certain stock and see that on average its mentions are 3x, 4x, 5x the usual, and then we basically tell the system, go check the price, and that's basically how we do it with every stock, and we see, the more the hype and its sentiment of course is positive, the more the number of mentions rises, so of course the higher the correlation, and we got to, and we showed that really, look, at 700-800% rise in hype with positive sentiment, you really have a 70-80% correlation with a rise, so the MVP was basically that brain, the scanning, that crawler that ran, and basically some dashboard with

Eyal David: [20:52] a paywall — on Day 1 you had a paywall too? Because you said you want to be positive from the start, and how

Avner Roash: [20:58] did you bring customers to all this goodness? So that too was something very, very interesting, as an entrepreneur, you know, as a co-founder, you of course want to bring value, and only once you bring enough value do you of course want to start charging, so at the beginning you take early adopters, the system still isn't 100% built, and you of course give them use of the system for free, and only at the stage where you feel you're already giving more value than they pay, only then can you basically start charging the payment. For us it was very, very organic, meaning, we turned to hubs like Product Hunt and AppSumo and others, we published our system, and really very, very fast created very, very big exposure, and today we have over 500 customers, half of them paying, and all of this is happening in the last four months, meaning, the first customer who joined us was in mid-February 2024, we of course had, again, a setback since the war, one of our co-founders too, they're really the coders, went through a hard moment personally, so it took time until we really recovered, but all these things happened very, very fast, and with

Eyal David: [22:22] 0 shekels invested in... wow, that's amazing. When you set out with the vision you didn't take that into account, you just said I'll make sure to be ROI positive from the start, and you didn't know where the marketing would be, where you'd bring it from,

Avner Roash: [22:34] right, we — it was important to us to create some kind of customer community on the fly, there are lots of these communities of retail traders, both in WhatsApp groups, and in Telegram, and in Discords, really there are lots of these, it was important to us to create a presence and be part of these communities, and once, you know, the system was ready and we had shown we're bringing value, then we were already in the communities. What you're saying, like, is that the vision

Eyal David: [23:04] also cleared the noise for you, because you say, okay, I'll focus on these things when I get to them, and you say, and basically at the level of these communities, you started from the vision from that very initial moment, already being active there, and started ticking away

Avner Roash: [23:16] both to gather intelligence, and to be active there. Totally, it's a must, meaning, in the end also again, and we go back to the idea, and put the emphasis on where your customers are, like, where you find them, it's something you need to know even before, of course, you proceed further to building the system, to the MVP — you want to know where these customers are, and how hard it'll be to reach them. So it could be that you'll find you can reach them via marketing, meaning, you know, that if I invest a dollar now to bring in each lead, but I sell to him for three dollars, that's fine too, yeah — but for us really, the communities were very, very — it was simply easy to find them, and from day one we were

Eyal David: [23:58] part of these communities. And at no point did you probably regret it and say, hey, maybe I want to open my own Discord channel, or I want to own a channel, the channel on WhatsApp, right? Like, you said, I

Avner Roash: [24:10] relied basically on what exists. I relied on what exists, but it's not something that, you know, it's something that could, and it could happen on the fly — right now we're really not at a place where... we're there, we're on good terms, we can also advertise, so at the end of the day a lot of these advertisers, you know, they're also interested in getting our product for free, so you know, there's a kind of barter here, they get a subscription, a free subscription, and we basically get to advertise. This is also a thing, another nice thing, that once you really manage to grow your number of users, today I find, you know, lots of YouTubers making videos about us without you asking, meaning, it's a snowball, it's a snowball, so people basically do analyses on your platform

Eyal David: [24:58] and slowly the exposure rises. So basically what was the difference — take me back — what was the difference between that MVP you defined that's before the paywall, versus that moment where there's enough value, you can basically

Avner Roash: [25:10] charge money for it? On the fly you notice it with the customers, I'll tell the truth, you notice the amount of return users, you notice the bounce rate, you notice people who do refunds. At the beginning, are you talking—

Eyal David: [25:28] how was it? What's a refund? There's no refund, there's no paywall at the beginning, how was it? Yeah, no, I'm talking after February — also from February until

Avner Roash: [25:34] now, so you're constantly in some place of an improvement trend, meaning, and you see it based on the graphs of the people who come back to you, because at the beginning people pay money, you have a product that delivers, but five months later you're already delivering 2X, totally. Simply — take me back a second

Eyal David: [25:52] or before you charged money? No, you didn't charge money at the beginning, right? No, no, everything was free. That's it, there's that moment where you come and say

Avner Roash: [25:58] well, there's enough value here, I'm charging money here. How does it look? So you set it in advance, meaning, we in advance had the amount of features we want to give and are able to provide, just for example, at the beginning you scan X sites and X, you know, you tell yourself, okay, from the moment I start scanning 30 sites now here and another 20 groups here, that's enough data, okay? And I'm now also scanning over a thousand symbols, that's enough data that I can basically start charging money, and of course, the amount of features — so for example, we recently added a feature called NewsSense, where you can enter any stock or any crypto you want into the system, and it literally reads all the articles and all the texts that were about that crypto or that stock in the last 24 hours and gives you a News Report. So you know, once we said we'd have these five features and these X scrapers, we basically

Eyal David: [26:58] can start charging money. Awesome. Come on, I'm dying to know where you're taking this forward, but actually I'm pulling back again. That moment where, okay, I have a vision

Avner Roash: [27:10] and all the code, all of it, meets your vision, so far. My vision is much bigger. The goal of Hype Index is to create a Hype Index for everything, meaning we of course started with the niche of the capital market. You call it a niche, but okay. It's a very, very big niche, but think that you can create hype today — so much data is available online today. Think that you can today know what the dish is, you know, you want to build a menu, you want to build a restaurant. Which dishes are the most trending in the world today? And in which geolocations? You want to invest in real estate. Which place in the world now has the most trending for real estate? You want to read articles, I don't know, medical articles. Which one? Which of them? So basically everything has its hype, the trending one that exists, and of course there's value to the trending hype that exists, and our goal

Eyal David: [28:04] is to be Hype Index. When you basically got off the deck — I'm taking us there again because I love this — you took the deck and started to focus things, how did you do... it's a lot of guessing and a lot of following the vision basically, right? Can you check to what extent? Right? And you say that you also didn't spend money on this research. So usually that's how you work — you spend money, you research deeper,

Avner Roash: [28:35] how does this stage look? The spending of money is very minimal — if I take, just for example, let's take our previous startup, that's our previous startup, WinChargeback. Was it aimed at Israel, at the world, how did it look? At the world — it was aimed at customers abroad, we helped people harmed by financial fraud get their money back, the goal was to set up a system that would know how to talk with banks and know how to file chargebacks on financial fraud. My wife used to do this at her previous job back then, ten years ago, she used to do it for the companies, meaning, big companies have someone responsible for this thing, who basically works directly with the banks on customers, those trying to take the money back, and there was no one doing it the other way, for the customers, and that's basically how the idea started, we said come on like, let's start with some landing page, very, very small — we're just talking about an MVP again, and see if we manage to bring in customers, also in terms of lead generation we didn't use PPC or things like that, really in forums, meaning copy-paste of all kinds of 'Hi, my name is, I'm helping' to get money back and so on, and simply do copy-paste to lots of forums like these, in tons of places, and suddenly you discover there are so many people who need help, and you start getting lots of inquiries, and on a small, humble landing page — so it started getting insane traffic, of course after that it already becomes a very, very big site, and within a period of 4-5 months, we were already hiring employees,

Eyal David: [30:11] wow, crazy story? Yeah. Okay, so I already wanted to ask about this, so when you start an idea, how much time do you give it? You said you ran here 4-5 months, how much did you plan? That's really

Avner Roash: [30:23] a very, very important question — first of all, you must not fall in love with the idea, that's really, as a tip, meaning, there are so many ideas and so many options and really, you can get into so many verticals — don't fall in love with the idea and know how to let go too, okay? Our time is worth a lot of money. I know friends who didn't let go for 5 years, and it's really a waste of time, in the end it's just an idea, so it's important to see results fast, meaning, if you can't manage to see market demand for this thing, and see that you really got into some vertical that really has demand, let go of it, meaning, the ability to recognize you're not at the right timing — it could be a great idea, but you didn't get in at the good time, and there are so many, so many parameters that can really affect this thing, but if you can't manage to see people's demand for the service or product you offer, let go. If you're asking about time, how many months — meaning, don't insist, don't insist on it,

Eyal David: [31:23] so say, in the case of your wife with WinChargeback, you could actually have run faster — forums are great, I don't know if it works today, interesting, but to run faster you could really have put money on paid

Avner Roash: [31:35] and maybe seen it faster, for that matter. First of all, it's definitely important to understand that in paid the cycle of ads is related not just to the amount of money you invest, it's related to the content you offer, it's related to the site you send to, and it's related to so many things, and it's in the end

Eyal David: [31:53] about bringing a much bigger result, that's what I'm striving for basically. I notice some pattern that recurs,

Avner Roash: [31:59] that basically you like to be ROI positive from the start. It shows me that I'm on the right track, meaning, if I'm not ROI positive then I don't have the need to keep investing and wasting my time. My time is worth a lot, because here you really think less as a startup entrepreneur and more as a businessman at the end of the day, and also as an investor of course, so when I want to bring in now, you know, to do online marketing for example, and I put in money and I don't see that I have success in lead generation and I don't see there are inquiries and demands, then yeah, I can try to change the ad, I can change the landing page, but if that also doesn't work

Eyal David: [32:41] then yeah, that's a fact. Keep going and tell us — what do you think is your strongest strength among all the different stages you mentioned?

Avner Roash: [32:47] My strength is simply, I think, that my way of thinking is to come and break down this big problem into small tasks and understand what the next task is and what needs to be done now — that's some talent that accompanies me and it really helps me move forward, and this way not to fear this big thing, because if we really constantly look only at this big thing and don't really manage to progress, yeah, it's paralyzing, so what was actually the next thing at WinChargeback? The next thing was to make a landing page, and the thing after that lead generation, and the thing after that to make phone calls to those customers, and the thing after that of course to do more, and this way to grow it, and at the beginning we helped people simply get, basically, every case even people who lost 200 dollars, and slowly it rose to 1000 dollars and to 5000 dollars because really the amount of leads was insane, and at the final stage, if someone had less than a 20,000 dollar case, we wouldn't help him, so yeah, slowly it grew and grew — also by the way, our business model, this business model was 30 percent, no win no fee, and we helped return

Eyal David: [34:03] over 50 million pounds in seven years. Wow, awesome, and there's another thing here — you also stick to big promises, right, you want to expand on that because it sounds like all your startups work this way basically, there's some moment you reach and then you offer the user tons and tons of value and only then you charge money, right,

Avner Roash: [34:21] I truly believe you can start charging money only when you give more value than that money is worth, meaning, less than that there's no deal here, meaning you of course don't want to give less value than what the person, the user, pays you, and vice versa — you want to give more,

Eyal David: [34:39] and another thing, do you also place emphasis on competitors when you go in, or do you look right away for things that

Avner Roash: [34:45] have no competitors? You always look at competitors, you always want to know what alternatives exist today in the market, to know these things — actually, by the way, the fact that there are competitors doesn't mean you're out, it's great, yeah, so it doesn't mean that now, okay, there's someone doing this, I can't get in — understand the market, meaning is there room for one more person, that's usually

Eyal David: [35:09] let's do this, are there any boundaries, any rules of thumb you can give around this,

Avner Roash: [35:15] so that once you sense — and I think there's some kind of intuition here too — that the market is saturated. We for example stopped working with WinChargeback because, by the way, at WinChargeback we were first, it was really something that was unique for that period, but I think after seven years there really were — meaning lead generation became much harder and the whole thing became much more cumbersome, also of course our passion for the startup slowly faded, and that's also why our story with it ended, but once the market became saturated and everyone competes for the same lead, it already becomes a different game,

Eyal David: [35:57] that's also another thing I notice, you also don't fall in love with the idea, like even though you succeeded,

Avner Roash: [36:03] I — it's a shame, I think it's really a must, you— everyone who falls in love with these things in the end and doesn't know how to let go in time will lose money. Because it's constantly— my time is the most precious thing basically, yeah, no, but think that you now, just for example — I'll really give you the WinChargeback example too, in the end you know you have expenses of, let's say, 350 thousand shekels, 400 thousand shekels, recurring, a month, and you can't manage to understand that the market slowly, you know, that's it, it's over, because sometimes things happen and you continue even another

Eyal David: [36:39] 4 months too long, think how much money you're losing. Really. And then tell us how you closed

Avner Roash: [36:45] the company, how it ended, this story. Did you sell it, how was it? We, yeah, supposedly we didn't sell it, we sold the domain, we basically sold the credibility, we sold this whole thing. They didn't buy from us, meaning to a company that already existed and became bigger than us — they didn't like buy our whole setup, but yeah

Eyal David: [37:03] they got the leftovers, they did get everything, meaning that's what changed hands. Were you aiming for a sale?

Avner Roash: [37:09] I was aiming for a sale, yeah. At a certain stage you understand, first of all a feeling, we talked about a feeling, you don't feel like it anymore, you're pretty fed up — I for example, in my case, I don't like admin, like, it's not something I like to do — I like to come and create, that's my art, to come and build from scratch, to build, to really arrive — when I get to this place I'm already, no, bored, and there I'm already, it's not it's not my place anymore, I really always try to escape to other places, so there too we reached some place of routine, of stability — many people look for that, but for me it's not something that really pulls me, and yeah, I started to make contact with our competitors and started, you know, to make some

Eyal David: [37:51] attempt to sell this thing. Whoa, sounds great. So what are you looking for today?

Avner Roash: [37:57] Today? So today first of all we're looking to do some relocation, so we and the family — Thailand looks to us like the place we want, I today run into difficulties, for example in anything related to education systems right now, for example in Copenhagen, so here, a market, I want to build a school in Copenhagen, that's something that I'm striving for so that there'll really be a learning system, the way I want my kids to have, so it's something I'm striving for — turns out there's a lot of money in it, again a problem is created, so you already have a vision and you have everything yeah, I even have a deck, so you need to find the founder, yeah, the founder, the truth is that I'm already in ideas, I already spoke with several school principals who are really on the same vision as me, who are with the same spirit of learning, the way I would want my kids to be, coming with very, very great experience, and yeah, in the end in the end it's the person I'm looking for, so that's my founder. Awesome, and in addition to all this, we haven't even talked about the fact that you also mentor young entrepreneurs, right? Young entrepreneurs on their way, totally, so anyone who also wants — I'd be glad, gladly — put my email up, I mentor and advise anyone looking to hear a second opinion or who'd want some guidance in a certain process, so definitely. At what stage should they reach you? Early, mainly, early stage — people who want to understand maybe what MVP they need to make, or how they do a proof of concept, or what the ways are now to raise money for them, or if they want to consult about, I don't know, a partner, an idea, matters, so definitely,

Eyal David: [39:51] excellent, so we'll take this, and the question we usually ask here is where do you see yourself in another ten years — so in terms of where you'll live we've probably understood, and also what the vibe and the general state of mind will be, but where do you see yourself in ten years, how do you see yourself? Yeah, I see myself

Avner Roash: [40:09] with at least five schools in places that are trendy, again going back to the place of the hype, but yeah, one of the things we're discovering is that families that do relocation, one of the things they think about in advance is of course the educational place where their kids will study, so let's say five very, very big schools in trendy places for relocation of Israelis,

Eyal David: [40:39] and it'll grow in every aspect too. So I wish you success with that, and to wrap up, so really you'll recommend a book and we'll add it — do you have any other recommendation we can go out with?

Avner Roash: [40:51] Don't be afraid, first of all really dream as high as possible, I myself, you know, I'm constantly working on myself, it's a muscle you have to work on, what do you do? Meditations mainly, both morning and evening, working on, you know, limiting beliefs, dreaming as high as possible, setting yourself visual aspects in front of your eyes — I for example, in our bedroom, we have a board there with all our dreams, whether in pictures or in text, simply always, you wake up in front of it and you go to sleep in front of it, totally, do you bring phones into the bedroom? I'm on airplane mode, I'm never available, I try not to be available before 9 in the morning, meaning I start my morning around 7:30, let's say 7 to 7:30, and you won't find me available before 9, my phone is on airplane mode until I finish the whole morning ritual,

Eyal David: [41:45] lovely, I took something from that too. Avner, thank you so much, what a pleasure. Thank you so much, Eyal. Come on, so see you — next time we'll definitely do another one. We'd love to, gladly, come on, thanks friends, see you next time, bye bye. We'd love five stars on any platform, and for you to follow us so more listeners can be exposed to us and find the podcast — you can also find the previous episodes on any app or on the YouTube channel, we have links in the description, until next time, come on, be efficient and bye bye.