Entrepreneurship & Startups

An idea is worth little until the market shows it wants it, so test demand before writing code. Avner Roash (Hype Index) starts with a Lean Canvas, a four-to-five-slide deck and a bare-bones MVP — even a WhatsApp group or a landing page — to validate cheaply. His rule: don't fall in love with the idea, and if clear demand doesn't show up quickly, let it go.

Dani Avitz does it with a landing page and outreach to the target audience on LinkedIn or subreddits, watching whether people leave their details and show intent to pay. He prefers strangers to friends, because friends say yes too easily. Lots of "yes, but" and few real yeses means fail fast — and that's a good outcome.

Aviad Harel of Team8 points out that building has become cheap and easy, so the real challenge is knowing what to build, for whom and why now. A good thesis has to pass through three worlds: the problem, the solution and go-to-market. And Roy Yanai, who spent about two years on a startup out of the Zell entrepreneurship program before joining AppsFlyer, sums up his lesson from it: execution is everything.

Early on, decisions about the model, partners and processes matter as much as the product itself. Dani Avitz opens with the one question that shapes everything: are you building a lean, profitable indie-hacker Cash Cow, or a company you raise money for and chase product-market fit with? The answer changes the mindset, the go-to-market and how you build.

Avner Roash compares picking a co-founder to marriage: a shared dream, complementary skills, and always a founders' agreement with milestone-based vesting. He lost a startup when a partner left and took the code, with no agreement in place. Aviad Harel adds that a founding team needs to cover technology, product and go-to-market — and above all, have founder-market fit.

Shuki Aharonovich, the first product manager at Cinch, says that at early stage the product mindset has to reach sales, customer success and onboarding, or you build up debt. Shelly Shimoni built a startup inside a startup at Verbit: spotting a vacuum of thousands of small customers, leaning on existing infrastructure, and selling the idea inside the organization all the time.

Uncertainty isn't a glitch on the founder's path — it's part of it, and what matters is what you do with it. Gali Bloch Liran, founder of The Human Founder, sees VUCA as the founder's daily reality and the entrepreneurial mindset as the most effective tool for handling it. In her two-circles model, growth happens only when the business circle and the mental circle overlap.

For failure she offers a simple matrix: internal or external, one-time or ongoing. An internal, ongoing failure needs real work; a one-time failure you can simply move on from. Aviad Harel took a lesson in the same spirit from Sisense: the thing they did well was not dying long enough.

Shevi Dagan came to SPORTYWOLF after his video-analytics startup shut down during COVID. He bought an existing store, discovered he had misread the financials and that the business was entirely loss-making, and within a year reached 10x revenue and profitability with a single full-time employee.