Transcript: No More Moats: How Harmony Reached 50 Customers Without a Single Salesperson | Ran Ribenzaft (Harmony)

Eyal David: [0:00] Did you guys close them?

Ran Ribenzaft: [0:01] 50 customers with no salespeople? The startup sold for 500 million dollars to Cisco. What's a moat, in your eyes, today? There are no moats anymore, the story's over. Because I want to build something big in this country, I want to create Israeli pride here for the next big thing. If I erase literally every piece of AI that's in my pitch, can I still sell the product? The era of mockups is over, the era of wireframes is over, the era of the spec document is over. A spaceship product.

Eyal David: [0:33] Hi Ran, how's it going? Excellent, what's up? Excellent, wonderful, glad you're here. I wanted this to be an evergreen episode, but — happy new year. Happy new year. You want to... Yeah. Come on, introduce yourself in a few words.

Who Ran is: from Epsagon (→ Cisco) to Harmony

Ran Ribenzaft: [0:46] Let's go. I'm Ran, the Co-Founder and CTO of Harmony. 35 years old, married to Nati, father of three young kids. They wake me up at night, the little one like a rooster at four thirty. So it's a lot of fun. In my past I spent eight years in the IDF, in various technological roles. Right after that I founded Epsagon with my partner, Nitzan. There too I was the CTO and he was the CEO. Epsagon was a relatively fast success story. The startup sold for 500 million dollars to Cisco. I spent a few years at Cisco. It was both a bit interesting and a bit not, at times. And a little over a year ago we set out on another round with Harmony, this time aiming to build a truly big, truly successful company. In between, I really love the Israeli industry, the Israeli entrepreneurial scene. I love helping entrepreneurs, I record HaMeyasdim (The Founders). Very active in the community, and it's a lot of fun to do it.

Eyal David: [1:41] So let's just say that HaMeyasdim (The Founders) is a podcast — we'll add a link too if you want, in the show notes. And another thing I thought about, for those who follow your content: it's what my agent called your unique combination. You want to talk about that a little?

The unusual combo: a CTO doing Go-To-Market, 90% of the time on GTM

Ran Ribenzaft: [1:58] What, that I'm a non-technical CTO?

Eyal David: [2:00] A CTO who sells.

Ran Ribenzaft: [2:02] Who does Go-To-Market. Yeah, I'll say briefly that the CTO role is a very varied one. Its basic form is being the first developer, or the first team lead, or the architect, or the DevOps, dealing with those things. And that's already become completely un-differentiating, because in our country we have a lot of brilliant minds who know how to do that. In the age of Claude it's become even more un-differentiating, because literally anyone can do it. And a CTO, over the life of the company, has to think about what he does next. Because okay, one day there'll be a VP R&D, one day a VP Product, one day an architect. All those roles will exist, and then the question is what's left for the CTO. There are lots of roles you can stay in, but personally the most fun for me is customers. I get excited about customers, I'm thrilled when a customer gives good feedback, I'm deeply sad when a customer doesn't like something in the product — I take it and do a post-mortem with myself, what's not good, what's not right. I love giving support and service, I love it when there's good feedback. So I'd say maybe 90% of my time is invested in Go-To-Market, at all its layers, from pricing the product to what's written on the website, to — I don't know, positioning against competition, and accompanying a deal end to end, from the account executive side to the sales engineering side, the more technical one. That's what's fun for me. In the remaining 10% I do a bit of technology, because Claude and AI and all that is fun, but not because it's the essence of a startup.

GTM and first customers — 50 customers with no salesperson

Eyal David: [3:35] Wow, this is so lacking, I'm so glad you came and that we'll talk about it. So the big topic of this conversation is going to be around — and this is also the question in our community survey — GTM and bringing in first customers. Yeah. Maybe also customers who aren't the first ones. Let me put a headline on it: so, you closed 50 customers with no salespeople, which is impressive and insane. Right. You want to add some precision to that?

Ran Ribenzaft: [3:58] 50, yeah — we've existed a year and a month, we're already over 50 customers, we already have salespeople, we're at a point where the sooner the better, because it became a bottleneck.

Eyal David: [4:09] Yeah, the machine is basically working.

Ran Ribenzaft: [4:10] The machine is working. The bottleneck was that Ran didn't have enough time to get to signing a contract, or preparing the contract, or dealing with legal comments, routing it to our lawyer and so on — that was the bottleneck. So we've already hired, we have 4 salespeople as of last quarter, but yeah, it was fun to close the first deals by hand, and I think that's an important part of Go-To-Market — closing the first deals by hand, from the phone call that goes out to the customer, or a conference where you met them, to the moment the signature is signed.

Eyal David: [4:44] Right, so in our pre-call you told me how much you like podcasts to be practical, like yours — we'll make this practical, but we'll also try to go deeper than fifteen minutes, as much as we can. Yeah. But one second before that, let's be un-practical: why did you go with the name Harmony? I mean, it's embroidered very nicely on the shirt, you can see, but why Harmony?

Why the name Harmony: a memorable brand and the race for a domain

Ran Ribenzaft: [5:08] Something we learned from the last round, the previous startup called Epsagon — that word means nothing, it's a mashup of epsilon and Epsagon, completely random. What we learned, or at least what I learned, is that a brand needs to be memorable. You need to remember it — that's the best thing a brand can have. And one of the ways to be memorable is a name that's easy to remember, a name that's fun to say, or a name that's harmonious — how fun is it to say Harmony. It's a good word, a word with a good connotation. Someone once told me: United — why is it called United? What a good name, United, an airline called United. So same thing here. It comes of course with a logo — good thing we have the logo of the command line, which is very oriented toward IT people and programmers. And that's the main thing. The big challenge with names like these is finding a free domain. So we started with .so, Harmony dot SO, we managed to get Harmony dot IO — Harmony dot COM costs over a million dollars, so one day maybe we'll get to buy it.

Why the IT market, and Mac vs PC in the enterprise

Eyal David: [6:14] Awesome. Okay, it really interests me that you went specifically to the IT market — and in my head I had PC and all that, but you actually went to Mac, that's interesting. Yeah, you've got it here on the keyboard. Again, I don't know, you know the IT world, I don't — just a fun fact, how does it split more, PC, Mac, or Ubuntu, right?

Ran Ribenzaft: [6:34] Look, in IT, Linux is very much developers, super-technical people. The mainstream is Windows, there's nothing to do about it, Microsoft crushes that competition so far. In more modern businesses, Mac wins, and a fun fact we learned — if IT people happen to be listening, they already know this — when you have Mac in the organization, you have fewer tickets. Crushing. Like, it won.

Eyal David: [6:58] Okay, I don't... So from here, where are we now? Yeah, we're moving along, and really, let's go inside — tell us how you actually started, you started the company, started the idea, you actually started from discovery, because that was a broader stage you did. You want to talk about that a little? How did you even start moving in the space?

How they started: setting expectations as second-timers

Ran Ribenzaft: [7:15] Yeah, so the first stage was really expectation-setting about what we want to have, what the guiding principles are. As a startup, the first time, you kind of fall into some domain and say, come on, let's explore. It was serverless — serverless was hot, we explored, but then the whole question: is serverless right? Is there a big future here? All kinds of questions like, what company do we want to build? Is it another half-billion-dollar exit? Is it a five-billion-dollar company? There are challenges here that are different, and expectation-setting that's different. Another point we had in the expectation-setting: if you want to build a big company, in my opinion many of the AI-orchestration companies, or a nice API with a token markup — it's very hard to grow with that. So it was clear to us from the start that our product needs to be sellable even without AI. If I erase literally every piece of AI that's in my pitch, can I still sell the product? And we concluded that yes, we need to reach that state. To say that we also — at the data layer, at the organization's core layer — we do more than just AI, because, again, a good friend told me this: it used to be once a year, the big event of Amazon, of Facebook, they'd wipe out a few startups because they released some feature. Now it's no longer once a year, and it's not just the big ones. Every three months — Astra is coming out now, GPT-6 — it might wipe out a few startups just because it's too good. It wipes out a productivity startup, wipes out an image-generation startup, you don't want to be there. And the way to survive is to anchor yourself in the organization, with data and integrations.

The thesis: if I erase every piece of AI — can I still sell?

Driving a wedge with data and integrations; the competition = ServiceNow

Eyal David: [8:54] So wait a second, actually yes — data, integrations, and what else? And you started thinking about this already when you did that expectation-setting at the beginning?

Ran Ribenzaft: [9:02] Right, to latch onto the organizational processes. Our biggest competitor is ServiceNow. Technologically, of course there's depth, it's a 20-year-old company, but technologically you don't look at the product and say, wow, this is science fiction — on the contrary, it's tables, it's forms, it's the most basic thing, you say, how can it be, and yet organizations can't get it out. There are organizations that tell us it'll take three years to get something like this out of the organization. And it's processes, it's getting into the DNA, being the very substance of the company. Similar to this is the whole world of NetSuite, and the whole world of Salesforce, and the whole world of Zendesk and SAP — the technologies are old, but they've planted themselves so well in the company, in the DNA, in the processes, in the data they hold, that getting them out isn't building a parallel product, it's uprooting a tree with one more root and another root. And you go, you discover you want to replace an IT product, and you end up going to the finance department and the HR department, and you say, what are you connected to it for? And they are connected, because they're used to working with the system.

Eyal David: [10:03] That's a good lesson, I think, regardless of the whole business you're building — don't move the cheese, because you want to enter with as much ease as possible. Right.

Ran Ribenzaft: [10:10] So by the way, what we tell ourselves is: we want the ability to replace them, we want the ability to play the same play, and in the same breath, the ability to also enter on top of. You have ServiceNow, great. I'm going to sit on top of your ServiceNow, I'm going to do everything you ever dreamed of on your instance. Not to enter, not to handle tickets — everything you ever wanted, now it happens. One day you'll say, wait, so why both this and that? I can get rid of one of them, let's dump ServiceNow, because all the data goes through here anyway, you handle all the data here anyway. So that's the play we want to run. On one hand, fast entry, on the other hand, the option to take over the whole organization.

Eyal David: [10:49] That's a bit of a Trojan-horse play. A Trojan-horse play. Right. Right? Exactly. Okay, so you started from expectation-setting — what came out of it, actually? How amazing that you did that.

Culture: what they kept and changed from Epsagon — accountability

Ran Ribenzaft: [10:58] You know, as second-timers we really had the privilege to do expectation-setting about who the first people are that we want to bring with us, from which funds we want to raise, how much we want to raise. The things that, as a first-timer, or someone just sitting for a moment — or if it's a product person, even inside a company that now wants to go — you don't necessarily have the privilege to engineer the game the way you want. Of course, that's what we want, not necessarily that everything happened, but it was for everything, even at the culture level — what do we want from our organization, what did we learn from the last round, do we hire a CRO on Day 1 or not, do we hire a VP R&D on Day 1 or not, really building the...

Eyal David: [11:38] Interesting that you mentioned that — what bothered you most about Epsagon's culture, that you wanted to be different now?

Ran Ribenzaft: [11:44] I'll say first of all that we had an amazing culture, I really mean it. We had a culture that was two things — a culture mash, by the way: "Yes first," an approach that everything can be done, and the second, to be very obsessive about customers. And that stayed for years, even at Cisco, when it was no longer Epsagon, and new developers joined, and it stayed — it was amazing. One of the things that was important to us was accountability — I'm not sure what the equivalent word is in Hebrew — the responsibility, or the will to own what you do. And we noticed it was lacking, it was lacking in people. It was like — I want everyone to treat it as if it's theirs, like they care, they care. It doesn't go away after a call with a customer, and it's fine that whoever's supposed to take notes takes them — like, to raise the bar on this: the head of the dev team who gets off a call with a customer sends me notes on what's important to do, opens tasks, and nags me about making it happen. He's a team lead — he's actually supposed to be managing a sprint.

Eyal David: [12:46] So how did you approach it? Just to close this — but how did you approach it? You said, we want to preserve this thing. Today, how did you do it? Maybe today it's easier because now there's already the previous round, so that within three and a half years we can get there.

Ran Ribenzaft: [13:03] It comes with people you chose in advance, people who match this. It comes with presenting it, declaring what we're looking at. And it comes with showing the wins around these topics. When someone cares like that — we have Channel Wins, note, this is like what we care about day to day.

Eyal David: [13:27] A bit like the gong there used to be.

Ran Ribenzaft: [13:28] We want the sales gong too, of course, but yeah, the everyday cultural things matter to us too.

Eyal David: [13:36] It's like communicate, communicate, communicate and measure, a bit like a BI where you put the metric in the dashboard right in your face. Right?

Ran Ribenzaft: [13:41] Very precise.

Eyal David: [13:42] Awesome. What other things did you think about at this early stage?

Exploration then Validation; Top-down vs Bottom-up

Ran Ribenzaft: [13:47] Look, roughly here the expectation-setting stage ends, because you also don't want to dig in, right? In the end we have some document — I'll go back one day, after a few years, and look: yeah, this happened, this didn't. But from here the point was, let's start doing — I call it Exploration; there's, in my view, Exploration, then Validation, in the Ideation stage. So basically it was, okay, who are we talking to? This is maybe the last expectation-setting there was, because at Epsagon we talked to developers, the very last developers, and one of the challenges was building a big company, because in the end bottom-up is hard. The obstacle of go-to-market: doing bottom-up is very long-term, the ability for it to grow is very very hard, and we understood we want to do top-down this time. We want to go to a persona with a budget in the organization, to talk from the start about deals of at least 50 thousand dollars, but also to show how we know how to do million-dollar deals and up. At Epsagon we never saw a million-dollar deal — the biggest deal was 600 thousand dollars after three and a half years, and even that was very hard. Here we closed two deals of a quarter million dollars each after half a year.

Eyal David: [15:00] Insane. Sorry that I'm stopping, but — by definition these are also deals that will be much more customized, right, or conditional?

Big deals and ICP: two quarter-million-dollar deals

Ran Ribenzaft: [15:07] Right, right. At Epsagon we were mid-market SMB, at 50 to 100, 200, 500 thousand was the big one, or there were also bigger ones. Here the ICP, Ideal Customer Profile, is 5,000 employees, a thousand employees — we also have the 500-employee deals, we also have the 100-employee deals, randomly, because they know us and all that, but our interesting money is in the big customers.

Eyal David: [15:32] Interesting. So a second before the calls — and we also haven't gotten to ICP yet — but you're basically saying you already laid all this out, this already created for you some kind of map, a playing field, or the boundaries of what we need to start doing. How long did the discovery calls and everything take you, and how long did it take you to produce this whole process? Really over a beer, or was it...?

Ran Ribenzaft: [15:53] No, it was a bit more.

Eyal David: [15:54] On purpose?

Ran Ribenzaft: [15:55] Yeah, it took probably two months gross. Two months in which we said, okay, we're not continuing at Cisco, we understand it, finally. At that stage there was also traveling — it was October 2024 — I flew for Nitzan, I flew to New York too, unrelated to all that, with the whole family, but also with Nitzan, to start assembling this, to seal it finally, and then somewhere later we left, we left Cisco, we set out and started the work.

Eyal David: [16:24] And you didn't yet know it was IT at this stage?

Ran Ribenzaft: [16:26] No, it was clear to us it was IT slash cloud, worlds we know. It was clear to us it wasn't fintech, by the way, not cyber. It was clear to us which domains it is, because we wanted to bring to bear what we know and our uniqueness, our domain expertise — so I wouldn't talk to a CFO, because I have no clue about that. So CIO, CTO, VP Cloud, those areas.

100 discovery calls in three-to-four months

Eyal David: [16:52] And then basically you started — one second, jumping ahead — you started to say, okay, we're generating these calls. Right. And then I asked you — you told me earlier, and I'll just drop in some context here — you told me you did 100 calls. Right. Which, in my eyes, is psychotic by any measure, insane.

Ran Ribenzaft: [17:07] In something like three, four months, right? It was very much a blitz. Generally, I have to say, it surprised me, because at Epsagon we couldn't get calls, at the start it was really really hard — we understood — and we got to 50 calls, but it took nine months. And also, it wasn't with CIOs, big shots, it was rank-and-file developers, and also a lot more Israelis. Surprisingly.

Why not start with Israeli customers

Eyal David: [17:33] Which you also have — you'll show me some asterisk from earlier — so before the "surprisingly," maybe just say something about the matter of talking to Israelis versus talking broadly.

Ran Ribenzaft: [17:43] Yeah, the big downside of talking to Israelis: one, it's a local bubble, and everyone talks — all the founders in the industry here talk to the same people you talk to, whether it's the same CISO, or the same CTO, or the same head of dev. So from the start you're generating competition for yourself over every little domain there is. And second, it doesn't come across well — funds look at and evaluate a startup, and even though you talked to the — I won't name company names — this hot startup, and that hot startup, and this company everyone knows, everyone works with — it doesn't show Execution ability, it doesn't show Go-To-Market ability. It basically says, okay, you know how to reach your friends, and you don't know how to do anything else. Now, I ask too — I help entrepreneurs a lot, and I try to challenge them, I'm not easy, I won't just say "cool, great startup." To people who tell me, yeah, we talked to three companies, it was great — I then ask them, okay, what about the United States? "We'll get to the US after we succeed here in Israel, or after we raise money." I say, okay, you just raised five million dollars, how do you get to the US? And then they start stammering to me — "yeah, we'll sponsor a conference, we'll do paid campaigns" — no, that's not how you reach your persona. The fact that you have no clue how to reach your persona is an even bigger concern for me as an investor, it's a red flag, and from the VCs' side too, it says you have no clue.

Eyal David: [19:12] Really. Okay, so I took two comments for us to come back to later — very interesting, Israeli customers specifically, where that's heading — and then we stopped at "surprisingly," you started to say...?

Ran Ribenzaft: [19:23] Surprisingly, ah, right. In Ideation I was afraid there'd be no one to talk to, because I said, now we're also leveling up, it's a CIO, not someone who has time — CIO and VP IT and so on, these aren't people who have time. And I always go out on a limb and say, the idea doesn't matter, you'll find an idea. Many tell me, yeah, but I already thought of an idea, should I bring a partner, is he worth it, or the opposite, I don't have an idea, should I go work, how do I search for an idea. And I got the complete opposite: 100 calls in three-four months, and the idea was very hard to crack. Now, three-four months, I'll say, is fast — it's fast to find an idea. In the first startup, Nitzan and I initially worked on the HR domain, and then Epsagon took us nine, ten months of full-time until the raise. And here it's four months where it was really challenging to find an idea, because every stone you throw, there are already 200 startups, every direction has tons of options, everything can be built yourself — it's much harder to think of an idea that's, again, per our expectation-setting, something big, something that can be significant, and not — we have no desire to do another two-year round and sell for, like, 300 million dollars.

Eyal David: [20:36] So, uh, I don't know — but it's a thing that really, doing expectation-setting like this, or even listening to an episode like this, you can think about whether your personality structure even suits going on a journey like this.

Ran Ribenzaft: [20:46] Unequivocally — and by the way this is true not just as a second-timer, it's true also the first time: am I suited for something like this? It's a lot of "no," it's a lot of hard, it's a lot outside the comfort zone.

Eyal David: [20:58] And for three-four months you ran like this — how did you generate calls beyond your own circle?

Manual outbound on LinkedIn

Ran Ribenzaft: [21:03] LinkedIn. Not much was from our circle, by the way — out of 110, maybe 20, and the rest just LinkedIn. Outbound on LinkedIn. It makes you think, what do I say, how do I say it, what will sell. You can also talk about the day after, when you really start selling. But it makes you put yourself in the shoes of — not "oh how nice, my friend made me an intro by email, someone will listen to me no matter what" — but I need to convince a person to invest half an hour of their time for something they'll probably get nothing out of.

Eyal David: [21:35] So wait, the boundary here — you say half an hour, and in the call itself — wow, interesting, there's no such tool, but let's set that aside. Interesting, I saw that actually — asterisk — there is such a tool for VCs, to find connections and generate meetings. But it doesn't exist for this, I didn't see something like that. But let's set it aside, we can come back to it. But basically you did it by hand, I understand.

Ran Ribenzaft: [21:58] Totally.

Eyal David: [21:59] And then you generated a half-hour meeting, and the person comes on with what expectations?

How to run a discovery call: 'what's on your plate?'

Ran Ribenzaft: [22:04] We told him, look — we played a lot on the card that we're second-timers, not that I think that made the big conversion, but we really talked about domains that interest him: ITSM, ticketing, risk management and so on, cloud migration, all kinds of domains we were exploring at the time. And we told him, look, we're second-timers, we're entering this domain, and we'd be happy to learn from you. At some stage we also added, via Claude — it said, if you've already done a lot of calls, then write to him that you're willing to share info about what you've learned, what you've done so far — so there were also people who asked, how do my peers do this, how do they cope with it. And it started with calls where — my first call, you come on with a person, you have no direction in your head; a heading like ITSM, IT Service Management, or risk management, is such a big heading — where, what do I start talking to him about, what's up, okay, I need to get to the point, what questions do I ask? And there it started at a stage that's proper Exploration, I call it. I want to know, what's on your plate? You're a CIO, there's a board behind you, what's written on that board? What projects are you dealing with? What does your budget look like, what are you measured on, what do you measure your people on? Questions that help me understand, usually, what's the tool you pay the most for, or the three tools you pay the most for. To understand what's going through this person's head. Where can I fit into this person's day-to-day, because in the end I'll need to convince him to give me half a million dollars.

Eyal David: [23:33] Yeah, I'm thinking of another thing — in the pre-call you also told me, and it's an interesting point I thought about, which tools you use the most. Right. That also gives another angle.

Ran Ribenzaft: [23:43] I want to know what he connects to. By the way, when I say CIO for a moment, let's call it IT leader — it could also be a VP IT, could be a director, no problem with that. But what do you connect to? What do you do day to day? Now, I know IT people, so I knew roughly how to answer. But there's a difference between being a friend of, having done a bit of IT work, versus — okay, now I need to distill 100 such calls and understand what, right now in 2025, their top concern is, because I want to be there, I don't want to be nice-to-have, I want to be something they're working on right now.

Eyal David: [24:17] Which — yeah, it's '26 now, this was in '25?

Ran Ribenzaft: [24:19] Right.

Eyal David: [24:20] But it's a bit like doing research in an AI tool versus going in and summarizing.

Ran Ribenzaft: [24:25] Right, you can't do this research in an AI tool. Of course I always tried to ask AI, what's in ServiceNow, and it answers answers that — building a startup on them is hard, because the answers are correct, but it's late. You want to see the thing that'll be there a year, two, three years ahead, and not what's already been talked about on Reddit over the last decade.

Eyal David: [24:47] Right, Reddit and all that. But it's really the muscle I think you most need. And how did it look between you two, you and Nitzan — every few calls you'd think, summarize, as you said — how did it look?

Summarizing calls in the transcript era: product people as data researchers

Ran Ribenzaft: [25:00] There were calls we tried to get on together, that were some flashy logo, or someone very senior — so we did maybe 20 such calls that were together, most were summarizing calls separately. I have to say, in the age of the transcriber it's amazing, the addiction to it — because at the start I started writing, and then Nitzan told me, use, I think, Fathom or Granola, I don't remember, and then I said, wow, this is how a call summary should be. And then it became a game of data: let's gather data, let's learn. Today in hindsight when I look at it — we do fifty, a hundred calls a week, from prospects and opportunities to paying customers — product people became data researchers. Every week it's new research based on the calls we did in the last two months, about which concern comes up most, what's the thing that hurts customers most, what comes up most in competition — so suddenly you have a mountain of data. A hundred calls is a lot.

Eyal David: [26:01] Yeah, no, it became a fixture. This — when you said "data researchers" to me, it jarred me a bit; they're people-researchers, they're researching — it's not the data, I think.

Ran Ribenzaft: [26:09] It's not a data engineer or data analyst, but — because it became — you still need to be a data analyst to be a data analyst, but this is really playing with the information. You have tons of information, what do you do with it? Suddenly it's really easy — you used to have to listen to two hundred calls, and suddenly, what question do I ask? What's interesting? What could be interesting? What's the thing that comes up? What segmentation should I do? Suddenly it's all like one more prompt, one more prompt and one more prompt, and you can reach amazing conclusions.

Eyal David: [26:39] So I'll bring myself back to your process. I understand basically that every so often you'd dig in together into the things you found, and then presumably they improve the flow of the calls you generate, and also your thesis — presumably there's a thesis somewhere that exists.

Ran Ribenzaft: [26:57] There was the general ITSM thesis, after that there was the risk thesis, risk management of an organization, and then there was a cloud-migration thesis, and then we came back to the ITSM thesis because...

Converging on the ICP: tech companies, 500–5,000 employees, US

Eyal David: [27:07] With your permission, we didn't go through all of it. So basically, if I understand correctly, you started from: okay, there's a problem, there's a lot of money moving through the IT areas. Right. It's an area that's presumably also not handled well enough, or not innovative enough, I'm guessing, if that's the word. Right. And then you started to refine it toward what?

Ran Ribenzaft: [27:25] Toward understanding more what we can do there. I want to turn it from understanding what his day-to-day looks like, to where I fit into his day-to-day. What's the challenge?

Eyal David: [27:35] Cool, so how is it, basically — evolution — how was it?

Ran Ribenzaft: [27:38] Questions that are more... If I asked, say, how much you pay for ServiceNow, then now: how many people manage ServiceNow? What do you build on top of ServiceNow? What were you missing that you'd want? Hey, tell me, we're working on something like this, does it seem interesting to you? How much would you pay for something like this? Did you try to build something like this in-house? Did you succeed, not succeed? What were the challenges? Questions that are already more — here I am, here's what I want to do, where does it fit with you? So you get reactions of "I'd never install something like this externally, because it's AI and our organization forbids it," versus "we tried to build something like this and didn't succeed," versus "we tried to use the built-in of the existing tool we have, but it's not good enough," "I'd never pay for something like this." You know, some CIOs also told us, "I don't care how much you save me, I employ people in far-off countries who cost me 5,000 dollars a year, it doesn't move me." Like, you hear all the nuance — and the goal in all this nuance is to see if there's a common denominator. And the common denominator was, at least then, technology companies, not necessarily startups, but companies that are tech-minded, in years 5 to 10 of their life, not 20-30-year-old companies, in the range of 500 to 5,000 employees, in the United States — specifically the US was a strategic focus — where this solution hits them right on the nose. They can build, but they don't want to build, they're more buy vs. build, they understand the need, these are companies that are technological and have a lot of pressure to be more AI, more efficient, they have budgets — something compiled well there. And then suddenly you see that the validation, really in the last 20 calls or so, it was no longer validation, it was sales calls, where you really get, yes, I want it, or, when can we start with this product. Now, when I say "this product," for me it's to already show them a product — the era of mockups is over, the era of wireframes is over, the era of the spec document is over, I really go over a product with them. I start, by the way, without a product, because my premise isn't a sales call. But if he asks, wait, but how do you do the ticket that does such-and-such? How do we do it? Here, look, I click here, do this — and you see the person on the other side who's like, you got him.

From validation to selling: the era of mockups is over

Eyal David: [30:05] So a few things. Okay, I'm really curious about that place where the switch happens, but one second before that — basically when you got on such a call, you started designing the product behind the scenes, around the things?

Demo-Market-Fit and a 'spaceship product'

Ran Ribenzaft: [30:19] Right.

Eyal David: [30:20] And were there situations where they asked, when you'd send it to them afterward — you say, I'm only presenting it in calls, how does it look?

Ran Ribenzaft: [30:27] I'm only presenting it in calls. There were a few who asked for access to a demo of our product — for them this is the product, they didn't understand it's not a product. I called it demo-market-fit: there's the stage where you want product-market-fit, but before that, here, I have a demo, it's really Play-Doh of a spaceship product, that I can do whatever I want with, and from call to call it improves, because then he tells me, wait, but on my side there are versions that aren't supported, so on the next call I already add growth in my demo for that use case, so the next one who asks — here, it exists. They don't know how to nitpick, what happens in this use case and what happens in that use case, but day to day they just work with the product. It happens to me a lot — we tell them we solve between 50 and 70 percent of the tickets, and then there's always the call about, what happens with the guy who doesn't know how to connect the adapter with the USB to his computer — you'll keep solving that for him, I'm not trying to fight there, I'm not looking for the 10 percent you'll nitpick with me, "why can't Harmony." Let's talk about the 70 percent that Harmony will solve for you. So there are always the nitpicks, and my goal in demo-market-fit is to draw out the nitpicks — ah, you want this? Here, I added it. And then I come back to him two weeks later: remember the feature you wanted? Here, we added it, let's do a follow-up, now it's interesting.

Eyal David: [31:46] What, this happened already within the hundred calls?

Ran Ribenzaft: [31:49] Yes.

Eyal David: [31:49] I think the dissonance I'm always in in these places is: when do you make that gear-shift? When do you actually switch, when do you tell yourself, okay, I got it.

Ran Ribenzaft: [31:59] Yeah, I don't have an answer, it's not zero or one, but it's in the mind — there's no parameter that if you did this, then it's worth doing that.

Eyal David: [32:07] But if you do it too early, then you might...

Ran Ribenzaft: [32:09] Right, you might enter the wrong place. It's really true, because a lot of times startups are sure they hit on something, and then you run and raise money and do it, and then you discover it's not good enough. It's an estimate, in the end.

Eyal David: [32:24] And what else is charming about what you did is that you really got on calls and saw and picked up on the person, and how he reacts to the product — so there's added value in the recordings, I think.

Ran Ribenzaft: [32:33] Absolutely.

When to raise money and on what promise

Eyal David: [32:34] Tell me, and at what moment did you actually go and raise money, and on what promise, on what pledge?

Ran Ribenzaft: [32:42] In the end, I'd say that already from the last 20 calls the conviction became very high; 15 in the domain, it was "bring me this now." With budget and everything, some of them really became customers too. We came with this, came with a story that we understand what we want to build, that we have a team to bring, that we have the patience to build a big company, that there's a story here that's very big — and you know, with that you come and say, I want a lot of money to conquer the world.

Eyal David: [33:10] And you, as an investor, if someone comes to you in such a state — where does that put me on the scale, as someone raising?

Ran Ribenzaft: [33:19] I think the best state is that there's very very strong validation. That's the thing I most look for as an investor. I don't care how much you dug into the technology and whether it's feasible or not, because it is — and I don't care how technological you are or what the background is, it's excellent that you came from unit XYZ. What interests me is who you talked to, what insights you reached, how it compares to competition, how you reach your customers. That's what matters.

Eyal David: [33:45] Makes sense, right?

Ran Ribenzaft: [33:46] Exactly.

Eyal David: [33:46] And tell me — since you talked about a moat, if we talk for a second about moats, right? What's a moat, in your eyes, today?

No more moats: what's left as an advantage

Ran Ribenzaft: [33:52] There are no moats anymore, the story's over. We used to be able to tell that we know how to bring our guys from 8200, who know how to hack such-and-such, and we'll build this defense system. Technology is over. Technology and also product are over as a moat. No — again, I built a demo product that's, in theory, tomorrow, and there's no more challenge here. The last thing that remains as a sort of moat is founders slash brand slash execution. You managed to do amazing and fast execution, excellent. So if you raise money, that becomes your brand — that you raised from the good fund, a lot of money, that becomes part of your brand. But we see a lot of times that the publicity around a company's founders, or which founders invested in the company, or which fund invested and how much it raised, and who did the biggest raise in this domain — that's the story of succeeding, it's momentum that gives significant tailwind. And to say we built the best product — that, even in 2010, was a cliché.

Eyal David: [34:57] So if we compare for a second to a market, for the sake of it — a fruit market. When everyone's selling apples — we just talked about cyber, or...

Ran Ribenzaft: [35:03] Right.

Eyal David: [35:04] ...earlier. So it's who shouts louder, who gets noticed?

Ran Ribenzaft: [35:08] Exactly, who's in prime time, who shouts the loudest. A lot of times you'll also buy the most expensive apple, because you say, I want the best apple — if you want a good apple, and you want to be there, in that position. The apples are probably the same apples.

Eyal David: [35:20] And did you see how we kept it in Hebrew? Yeah.

Ran Ribenzaft: [35:22] Apples to apples.

A founder's brand and networking in the right dose

Eyal David: [35:24] Tell me, and if we talk for a second really about a brand, an entrepreneur's brand — how would you suggest approaching it?

Ran Ribenzaft: [35:32] Start building it slowly. Networking is a word that's a bit crude for us Israelis, but it's important. Be at events, talk to people, help. Some of the most amazing people in my professional life are the people I met for coffee — who today are founders of successful companies, who today are really amazing people. Be out there, in a relevant place, right? Also don't burn time for nothing, don't go to an event that's not relevant. At Epsagon I treated this as real work — our audience was developers, I was at developer meetups, I went, until one day I spoke at a meetup, one day I organized a meetup, and then they invited me to speak at a meetup, and then I became an AWS Hero, and then here. It's long, by the way. I invest a lot in it, and it takes time. So don't expect, come on, now I become an internet personality — it's long, but I'll say in the end it pays off and it's significant, and it needs to come in the right dosage, not too aggressive.

The 'HaMeyasdim' podcast and PMF for niche content

Eyal David: [36:40] Let's hear — also for the podcast, I think it's interesting, because your podcast actually went in a different direction, right? To a different audience.

Ran Ribenzaft: [36:46] Our podcast is very niche, right? It's for entrepreneurs, or people who want to be entrepreneurs, or people interested in entrepreneurship — in the end that's not the majority of the Israeli audience, and it's also only in Hebrew. We went for what I call PMF — Podcast Market Fit. We have no problem with it being a small market; we have, I don't know, maybe ten thousand subscribers total across all platforms, it's not a big market, but we enjoy it, because it's our market, and there's no place I go to where they don't tell me how fun, I listen to HaMeyasdim, or thanks for that episode, can you record this episode — and that's what I enjoy from it.

Eyal David: [37:21] No, sure, definitely. I'm saying, one, it's possible your audience is about to grow fast following all the content pivots, and it could be that it...

Ran Ribenzaft: [37:28] It's totally growing, yeah, but again, it's not Channel 12, it's not mass-market, it's not like...

Eyal David: [37:34] No, definitely, I'm saying, still it could be that... it seems there's a very big wave of entrepreneurship right now, but that'll also pass. The second thing that made me curious is that throughout our conversation, I feel nothing is by accident with you. Right, we said I won't bang on the table. Nothing is by accident, but on the other hand, you actually went to this kind of marketing-ish angle, you could call it, that addresses a completely different audience unrelated to your product — so why did you do it?

Ran Ribenzaft: [37:59] Unrelated to the product — look, we started it right after Epsagon, we wanted to start it at Epsagon by the way, but there was never time, and also in hindsight it's smart, because we didn't really know at the start of the road what to do. And after Epsagon, which was sold to Cisco, we worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, and we'd hear the same questions again and again and again. What's go-to-market? What's ICP? How do I do ideation? How do I raise money? What people do I hire? And after you answer it 50 times, you say, I hit on something here, there's no content for this in Hebrew — I mean, there is content in Hebrew, but it always comes accompanied by a lot of other stuff, there's nothing that's like a fifteen-minute episode that's on-point about what go-to-market is, without a host telling the story of why he loves to cook or whatever. What's go-to-market? What's the CTO's role? What does the CEO need to do? Fifteen, twenty minutes that answer something practical. Now again, we did it more for the soul, but also to help and be more active in the ecosystem. In the end I'm an entrepreneur, before I'm a CTO, before I'm anything else, and this is my ecosystem, I'm glad it's fun for me that people know me, it's fun that I can also channel it toward better impact.

Eyal David: [39:08] There's also another thing here, now that I think about it — you're actually also an investor.

Ran Ribenzaft: [39:11] I'm also an investor, right.

Eyal David: [39:12] So maybe it's also...

Ran Ribenzaft: [39:13] People reach out to me — I'll say that mostly it's not the main channel where I see the best deals.

Eyal David: [39:21] Yeah, but...

Ran Ribenzaft: [39:22] It builds up, exactly.

Eyal David: [39:23] It positions you — if I just think about that seller in the market, it positions you as a seller in the market who sells. Right. Without the awkwardness of the thing. Okay, I'll set it aside for a second, we'll come back to talk for a minute about how you do outreach today, I'm really interested. You wrote a post about it, right? Right. Automations and things — I'm sure things have also improved since then, so we'll talk about it. But one second before that: you described how you run a call, you described roughly how you run a Discovery call, and after that we basically moved to validation. Yeah. How different is that from a sales call you run today? To the way you come in and run it?

Ran Ribenzaft: [40:01] The technique isn't different, only now I'm much smarter and I control the call. I open the call — okay, hi, how's it going and all. First I ask questions that today I already know how to understand very fast: how am I going to talk to my person? How many employees do you have? Roughly how many tickets a month? Do you use JSM or the other tool? I know how to ask a few questions to do a very fast qualification of what the chance of closing the deal is and what its size will be, and then to do the personalization. And then, whereas I used to need to understand what hurts the person, today I know how to nail it very fast. I start the call with — you're a technological organization (remember, our ICP is technological organizations, not only anymore, we grew way beyond that, but a technological organization) — tell me, do people use Claude Code day to day, right? "Sure, everyone's going wild, sure, what a question." And Gemini, in markets, sure, and ChatGPT at today's level, what a question, we use everything. So how can it be that you need to submit a ticket to IT in a form that's existed for 20 years? Really connect to a portal, look for some form, fill in all the fields — how can it be? And then the person is like... we talked about how I see the person — do you see the person? Right, it's not supposed to be like this. And then a stage comes: wait, we built it ourselves — so I already have the point of, ah, you built it yourself, I know it's not good enough — or "we have an external company that does it," or "we used the built-in AI of what we have," of the product itself. And I already know how to control the call, I steer the call, first call to second call to a POC — our percentages are excellent. I can't leave a dry eye that looks at Harmony and isn't excited to start. Very rare.

Eyal David: [41:47] So basically you drew a very good map in Discovery, and now, according to this map, you know how to divide, to navigate. Navigate, exactly. Yeah, to navigate, exactly. You said to divide into buckets, buckets, so it's...

Ran Ribenzaft: [42:00] I know what the pain point is, and I know — like someone who calls you to sell, and he has, like — if he said, reading a playbook, if he said this, then tell him this, if he said this, there's...

Eyal David: [42:09] I love the simplicity we keep coming back to — the sellers in the market, the guy who calls to sell. Without — to sell me insurance.

Ran Ribenzaft: [42:16] Ah, you have such insurance, but do you know there's such-and-such, ah, do you know there's such-and-such — I love finding the gaps in these areas. [Eyal: And then he says?] Say someone calls an insurance agent: hi, Ran, do you want a quote, Mr. Insurance, and all that. So this is mine — my dad is an insurance agent; he's not really an insurance agent. Dad, I love you. My dad is an insurance agent, that's what I say. Sometimes I have those few minutes where, come on, let's have a bit of fun. So usually they tell me, ah, your dad is an insurance agent? Like, it's not in the playbook, so they're like, okay, we'll give up on him, because his dad is an insurance agent. And one time I had someone cheeky who said, ah, your dad's an insurance agent, but I'm sure we can get you better terms. I'm like, but it's my dad, he looks out for me. "Yeah, but look, I'm sure we can find something better than what your dad does for you." I'm like, really, are you serious? He didn't get it — again, very mischievous. It's like, a man born to sell... Totally.

Eyal David: [43:15] Tell me — I hear you and I'm curious, did you go study sales, or is it something that comes to you naturally?

Ran Ribenzaft: [43:22] Naturally.

Eyal David: [43:23] Really, yeah. And you kept the title of CTO basically mainly because... it opens doors for you in calls, why exactly?

Ran Ribenzaft: [43:30] One, in the end I'm the technological figure in the company, with everything I say, I have a lot of involvement in where the company goes product-wise at the technological level. And two, it doesn't really matter. I could have called myself Chief Product, I could have called myself CTO — I'm definitely not a CRO, by the way. The fact that I love to sell and love working with people and love the product, I'm not a CRO, I'm not a CMO. The fact that I love building the website, thinking about the messaging on the site, doesn't put me in that position.

Eyal David: [43:58] I'm asking actually from the angle of — does it matter when you get on a call and they see on Zoom the...

Ran Ribenzaft: [44:03] Ah, yes, there is. The fact that I'm a CTO and not in a sales title, that helps.

Eyal David: [44:08] There's something to it.

Ran Ribenzaft: [44:08] There's something to it. It worked even better at Epsagon, because I was CTO, I was like the company's evangelist — because if a CEO gets on, the CEO is a sale, that's that. If the CTO gets on, ah, that's cool, let's ask him how they do this and that. So same thing here too, it's a more neutral figure.

Eyal David: [44:25] Bernardo from Epsagon was here, a story, I told you. Yeah. And he said that the best sales in the business actually come from the system, because you don't expect it to recommend selling. Tell me, so how do you today — tell me a bit about automations in one go, a bit about automations and the things you do to bring in more leads, more prospects to the company. How does it look?

Outbound automations: scanning competitors' tenants and engagement

Ran Ribenzaft: [44:47] A few of the most practical tricks we got into really recently. One, competition. We all have competition — I'm not talking about the big competition, but the close competition. We built a few agents, one of them just looks at traffic on their site, and at tenants they create. A lot of times, when you open an account for an enterprise, it's the enterprise name dot my product name dot com — so we look at the competition like that and regularly see new tenants being created, which is a lead in super-high intent, because it means it's a lead that's starting POCs with your competitor. To attack, really attack as fast as possible. The second is engagement on LinkedIn of IT people, in our case, of our ICP, with the competition. An IT person who liked our competitor, liked the competitor's founder — it works. We run it, it generates a really really amazing pipeline. Along with that, all kinds of things like scraping Reddit and being active there, scraping LinkedIn for people who are talking about the topic. Automatic prospecting — there are already tools that do it too, Apollo and so on, but it's never good enough, you want another layer of your own on top of it. Day-level things that just generate more pipeline for you and help you with go-to-market. By the way, also the website — what content to put on the site, what's interesting on social, what comes up from our calls. Again, there's tons of data, it's just playing with it: what's the next blog I'll write, I ask from our call summaries, what's the theme that came up the most that people complained about. Writes a post about it.

Eyal David: [46:32] How complicated this used to be.

Ran Ribenzaft: [46:33] What, we brought in outsourced companies that helped us write blogs. Today, the content itself — I have to say we do put the emphasis, on our side, on what the content will be. The content itself is created with AI and goes through our editing, but we want to find the gems that are interesting, and what the data within the content is that'll be interesting. And again, with AI you scrape mountains of data.

Eyal David: [47:00] Yeah, and also a story, as you say. So who in your company is actually in charge of this part?

Ran Ribenzaft: [47:07] No one. It falls between a few people, it's a lot of initiatives. Say the story of scraping the competition's tenants — I have Guy in the CTO office, who said, wait, we do this too, the competition does this too, let's do a quick script, scan, and only when it scraped did we see it works, and it worked. Today it's a factory, a factory that generates leads. So a lot of times it comes from initiatives like these, and you just build it.

Eyal David: [47:35] Do you think this area will start to become institutionalized, because it sounds like there are a lot of opportunities, people do it, it's not the first time I hear it.

A new role: AI Engineer under the CTO/CEO

Ran Ribenzaft: [47:43] Yeah, the answer is yes, it's called AI Engineer. It's starting to be a figure that enters under the CTO, under the CEO, someone who's an all-around player, comes with a technological background, someone who's an entrepreneur by nature, who can look at some big problem and say, okay, I understand this is to connect from here — and not like a developer who's, I know how to build on a Kubernetes cluster, but rather I understand business problems better. And it's starting to happen, I see a lot more founder friends hiring an AI Engineer, and not necessarily just in go-to-market. For us, the first things we dealt with — to maintain the site and the documentation. We added a new integration, you want it to immediately be on the site, you want it to immediately be in the documentation, the agent that does it automatically.

How to get out of a pilot: POC discipline

Eyal David: [48:26] Okay, I'll go back for a second to your sales process — there's also another interesting event that came up in the community, and you also wrote about it, basically in that place of, okay, we're now entering a pilot, how do you get out of it?

Ran Ribenzaft: [48:40] What do you mean?

Eyal David: [48:41] A lot of folks get stuck in that place of a pilot with someone who does — when you also do something very custom, we touched on it at the start of the conversation — how do you keep a bar here that's clear to everyone?

Ran Ribenzaft: [48:53] It's hard, it's very hard, especially the first ones who are also design partners, especially if they're Israelis, they know how to make you sweat blood until it comes out to here, or until they pay. And I have no — in the end I want to say something simple: you define a POC. A POC has a time, has goals, has who's responsible for this POC, what's going to happen in it, meaning what its goals are, did it happen? Great. Now the problem is that it's good on paper, literally, but when you enter and understand, for a moment let's return this integration, and this needs developing, and he doesn't really understand well, he wants this and he wants that and he's on vacation, and suddenly something that you tell yourself in your head should be a month stretches to half a year, a year. So I'll say, it's fine that this happens with the first ones, because there's nothing to do — the unknown is much bigger than the known in this case. But over time you need to simply be aggressive, and say, okay, like we said a month, it'll take a month and a half, two months max, just say, folks, the POC is over, let's disconnect. I've had a few times where I told customers, I suggest it, but the CEO asks me why the tenant is still open, and we're paying for it and it costs money, and we're investing — that's what I know. Exactly, it's not me, it's the CEO. Customers also ask me, but... and you want to tell them, no. Now, why are Israeli founders afraid of this? Because "no, just don't leave, I'll do what's needed." But it's better to be honest and disconnect because — a lot of times it also comes down to the customer's lack of attention. Lack of attention expresses itself in "it's nice to have." And you want to cut it. If it's nice-to-have for him, if it's not his most painful problem that he needs to solve now and he has budget, then move to the next one. And if there's no next one, then your idea isn't good enough. It comes back to the start — when is it "nice"? How scary this is at this stage. It's scary, you say, what, I work with two, what, I'll bet on one? So there's a balance here. Of course it's sad to bet on one, and maybe another month, but in the end you need to put a cut to it.

Eyal David: [50:54] Okay. Interesting, I'll continue on because we're short on time and have a lot of questions, I want to fit things in. You mentioned Israeli customers. Tell me, generally, about Israeli customers and working with Israeli customers. First, I see that starting with Israeli customers isn't smart when you're setting out to build something very big. Right. As you also noted at the start. On the other hand, how do I say this — as a Zionist, or a person who lives here, I really want to see working with Israeli customers. Where do you think — and by the way, I'll complete this with AI — I think there's maybe also a place of very good margins today in working with the Israeli market, but how do you see it?

Israeli customers and Dual Motion; SDRs from Day 1

Ran Ribenzaft: [51:37] It's fine to start with Israelis, as long as you know you have a plan for the Americans. We did dual motion — Nitzan and I split into two: I'm focused on the Israeli market, based here, to generate traction here, to generate something that brings volume to the product, helps us start building a product that has customer context, and not what we think it should be. And Nitzan builds go-to-market in the US on Day 1. First hire is an Operations Manager, second hire is a mountain of developers, third hire in the same month — all these people in the same month — is two SDRs. In the first month two SDRs sit and start building go-to-market, really classic. Entrepreneurs are afraid of this — what, approach Americans? Those same entrepreneurs who told me yes, there'll be money, and they don't know what to do — and suddenly you have an SDR who needs to phone someone, and in thirty seconds get him to get on a half-hour call with you. Think how hard it is to think about this at the start of the road. So it's fine, it's of course fine with Israelis, and of course I'm the most patriotic there is, I really love the country — and it's fine to work with Israeli customers, even though they're hard, we're very very hard, I say it about myself too, but as long as you know you're doing it also in the market you're aiming at. By the way, it doesn't have to be the United States. Europe, any market you're able to enable — where you are in your pitch, that's my taste — make sure you work on your taste on Day 1, and not "I'll work a year on Israelis," because then you'll be stuck five years with Israelis and won't get out of here.

Eyal David: [53:13] Wow, that's also interesting, I remember from our earlier conversation too that you mentioned SDR — it's really surprising to do it at the start, and then I said, but once I'm invested in this area, once I put people there, then I also need to generate work for them, and I need to push them to results.

Ran Ribenzaft: [53:27] You need to set them up, you need to — that's why Nitzan, and me too, again, because it's important to think about this. What does an SDR say? Hi, this is Oren from Harmony. And? Am I an AI? You, you, you, you, I — like, what do you do, what do you say?

Eyal David: [53:44] The first thing is to call yourself Oren, that's what they always say.

Ran Ribenzaft: [53:47] No, I know.

Eyal David: [53:47] I'm joking, but — probably starting this muscle from the beginning, I really connect to what you're describing. Yeah. Tell me, and in terms of attention and money, how much did this drain you at the start, this whole process?

Ran Ribenzaft: [54:01] Drain — again, maybe I'll say, as a Second Time privilege, there's a lot of money, and there's the knowledge of what to do. But in my opinion, this is the difference between a startup — also for first-timers — a successful one versus a startup that flounders. If I see a startup that after a year — not a year from the start of sales, not a year from the day they hired the developer, a year from the day the money arrived. The moment the money arrived, the clock started, and now you need to run. After a year there's no significant revenue — significant revenue is no longer two, three paying customers, like a hundred thousand, no. It's being close to a million dollars after a year. You didn't reach it — what are you doing? You don't know how to sell a product, you don't know how to generate pipeline, it's lost.

Advice for a small business and why you must approach $1M

Eyal David: [54:46] So you basically don't reject the company. Okay, toward the end, let's try for a minute to take our whole conversation and all your knowledge from experience, and actually look at a business that's smaller. If you now had to advise, or had to go and start one of your own, let's say even here in Israel, or even outward — how would you approach it? How would you actually start to find, to do a discovery like that? How does it look for you? Probably from expectation-setting, I'm hearing.

Ran Ribenzaft: [55:16] Exactly. I come to say, first of all, something close to me, something I understand, something I want to do differently, and I understand and know why I want to do it. But more on the practical level — the dream, I love food a lot. My dream is to have something like a stall that sells one thing. That's it, it's this or a variation of it. And I'd try to understand what this one thing is, with people. A completely anecdotal example — there's, in the market, the fish sandwich, he only makes a fish sandwich and...

Eyal David: [55:53] You're talking about the Carmel, right? Exactly, the Carmel market.

Ran Ribenzaft: [55:56] And it's so tasty, and that's what he does. You say, wow, he cracked it, he cracked it, I want to crack that thing — and the way to crack it is, well, food is maybe a bit different, because you can't scale/measure with food, but let's say it's an idea that's more software, or something you don't build in a day — I mean, that you can build in a day. To ask people, tell me, what... I'm trying now, how can I do this, just — what food is there in the market? So you'd say, what do you love most? What are you missing in food in the market? Listen, there are tons of fish, but there's no fish to eat. You can buy fish to prepare, but I want a fish dish. Okay, and would you now sit in a restaurant to eat fish, sit-down style? No, here, I want to pass through, grab it, keep going, because that's my vibe. Okay, so what, in a sandwich, something to grab in hand, you want it to have this on it? To start defining who your customer is, what he wants, what hurts him, what would make him happiest — then you can start preparing for them and doing some, again, from exploration to validation: I'll take a fish sandwich, is it tasty to you, maybe in a pretzel, maybe it was actually a salmon bagel, right? Think of all the variations there could be for serving fish in the Carmel, because there's no fish to eat, fresh fish, in the Carmel.

Eyal David: [57:10] So like that. There's also the matter of not moving the cheese that we talked about, so here too — you talked about a drink or all kinds of delicacies and such, so I also thought while — just, maybe they tend to pay more in cash there, I don't know, so all kinds of things like that.

Ran Ribenzaft: [57:23] By the way, it can also be something that exists, but making it accessible in a different way. Really in the Carmel a lot is cash. I bring the same service, but a premium service with credit. I love the berries stall there — on Fridays there's a stall in season, a stall that's a mountain of berries, we just talked about it, it's exactly in the position of the target — a mountain of berries, you look and you can't not buy berries, everything looks great there, it looks like a berries stall was created there.

Eyal David: [57:49] Probably worth opening next to it something to wash the berries down with, apparently.

Ran Ribenzaft: [57:52] Either to wash the berries down or, I don't know, I don't know what you do with berries.

Eyal David: [57:57] Coach, tell me and... there are folks who open businesses like these and you want to advise them — are there questions you hear that recur, or challenges?

The builders' challenge: business thinking vs startup thinking

Ran Ribenzaft: [58:09] Today everyone's become a builder, also good friends of mine from home, building amazing things, things that a decade ago none of them would have dreamed they could do. And the challenges are maybe a bit of business thinking, for a model that's software startup-ish. Like, thinking of okay, I'll bring another customer, I'll manage to sell to him and then I'll bring another service provider and then I'll do this — and not thinking in growth of "let's bring 100 customers, let's be in a burn of a lot of money and I need to absorb it or raise money and grow big." Or even naivety of, it's easy to build software, so if I have 100 customers then in a second I'll support a lot because it's software and it's easy — supporting a hundred customers is hard, it's very very hard, especially if it's Israeli customers, right? So a kind of thinking of business versus startup, and naivety of a business that works in a certain model versus — change your thinking completely.

Eyal David: [59:13] Do you imagine more companies will rise around these pains you just mentioned, for example?

The dream: Israeli pride in the next big thing

Ran Ribenzaft: [59:17] Small companies — I'd be happy, in a parallel universe, to just be a conglomerate of micro-SaaS, to have like a hundred micro-SaaS products that each brings in between a thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars a month, and each time it's cool, two close, a new one opens now, this isn't relevant now, this will come in — it'd be amazing, it's like a one-man conglomerate.

Eyal David: [59:41] That's it, it really interests me, since it's a very big dissonance from what you...

Ran Ribenzaft: [59:44] Between what I do day to day — I build the big megacorp, but there's always some dream in my heart of being that independent builder, who builds something that succeeds. I do it, but these aren't things I sell, my GitHub is full of creations for the drawer that I'd be happy to do something more interesting with. Why do I love building myself? Because it's fun, because it's fast, because there are no strings attached to anything. But why do I do the big thing? Because I want to build something big in the country, I want to create Israeli pride here for the next big thing. Not a lot of people have the opportunity and the ability to succeed in doing this.

Eyal David: [1:00:31] We'll wish you lots of success. I know you do help entrepreneurs and questions like these, so we'll put the LinkedIn.

Ran Ribenzaft: [1:00:39] LinkedIn — send me a message with pleasure, I love talking with entrepreneurs in the morning, it's the time I also relax in, and I'd be happy to give back to the community.

Eyal David: [1:00:48] Women entrepreneurs too, I pay — women entrepreneurs too. Awesome, Ran, what a pleasure that you came, it was really interesting, such fun, thanks. Come on, bye bye.