This June, Oribi completed its first investment round. I’m very excited to update you that I’ve raised $5.4 million from an investor ‘dream team’: Haim Sadger from Sequoia Capital (the world’s leading venture capital fund, with whom I’ve already had the privilege of working with once), Rona Segev from TLV Partners and Zohar Gilon. I’m extremely grateful that this great team believes in me and in our product.

Every day, a few articles are published in the press about some startup’s financing round, with all the ‘usual’ details – how much money was raised, who the investors are, what does the company do, and who’s on the team. In this post, I chose to share the events behind the scenes – the investor deck I used, why the product has changed since the last time I wrote about it, how I chose which investors to contact, why did I choose to work with several investors and how I felt during the financing round.

So, what are we developing?

A few months back, I talked about a Facebook-ads analytics oriented product. This has changed a lot since then, although in retrospect, I only went back to my roots.  Advice I often give entrepreneurs who make their first steps, is that the most important thing is simply to start, rather than wait months or years for the perfect idea or the right partner; Just start building a product, and while being ‘hand on’ you’ll learn the market much better, being able to improve (or pivot) it in the right direction. This advice was also helpful for me.

When I founded a new startup, it was clear to me that I wanted to build a B2B company, but with a simple and approachable product that will completely change the way companies work. In the past, I mentioned being inspired by companies such as Zenpayroll, Zendesk, Stripe, and Slack, which started out in highly competitive markets but managed to become market leaders by creating a simple product. The primary reason why they’ve been such a source of inspiration is that they’ve managed to make a solution accessible to the entire market, rather than only enterprise companies. I think that the current world of BI/analytics presents an amazing opportunity – think of the effort required to monitor basic data about product/website usage. There are currently dozens of successful, enterprise-oriented companies, with highly complex solutions requiring integrations and code annotations. Simpler tools, such as MixPanel or Google Analytics require ongoing support from developers to add events and develop scenarios you would like to monitor. I’ve started working on Facebook analytics, rather than general analytics, because it was important for me to build a profitable company as quickly as possible, and I felt that the combination of a real need in this field and a major budget could make the company profitable fast. We launched a beta version in early February, and quickly reached a few hundred companies who used the product, and then several thousands. By working with customers, I came to understand that I’m capable of creating a tool that would change the way people work with data. The customers gave me the confidence to chase my major dream: a real industry game-changer.

So, this is the product we’ve been developing:

Here are two important principles in managing a startup company:

• Building a high-quality product with value in the shortest time possible, in order to bring it to the market ASAP.
• Prioritizing the use of existing tools rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

These two principles seem to contradict our decision at Oribi to develop quite a few internal tools.

So why did we decide to invest in developing tools that are not an integral part of our main product?

One topic I plan to address extensively in this blog is the work-life balance. I believe that startups which part of their culture is to work into the night on a daily basis, do not necessarily progress any faster than ‘calm’ startups (on the contrary – they almost never do). I believe that a constant pressure in startups is mainly indicative of a lack of focus and suggests that working methods are not effective enough. This is one of the main issues I’ve been focusing on recently – how to work smarter and more efficient.

A choice I’ve made, which has already been proven successful, is that any project which requires less than a week to develop, and which ‘compensates’ for the time invested after two-three months, is launched.

This is a list of five tools developed in the past few weeks, which required between two days and one week (of one developer) and immediately saved hours of cumbersome manual work.   

Kob – Slack Integration with our DB

Handling many DB queries doesn’t only take too much time but is also a barrier for the non-R&D team members (product, marketing, CS) for accessing important data easily. For example, when processing questions from users or trying to understand a problem reported by a user, we had to run various queries in order to understand how many times the user has signed in to Oribi, how many accounts they have, etc. We did make a list of repeating queries, but the process of logging in to the DB and synchronizing the queries between team members was time-consuming. Another thing that had made this process so unproductive was the DB’s inaccessibility from a mobile phone, which in some cases delayed replies to users or finding bugs. Kob (all Oribi’s internal projects are named after antelope species) is a Slack channel querying the DB. The first, most basic question we set for Kob was:

Who is [user name]?

This enables us to immediately access all the information required to provide support from any device. Other planned questions relate to events on a certain day (what happened on 1.7.16), user lists according to different parameters, etc. We are ‘talking’ with Kob dozens of times each day, and it also makes life much easier for less tech-oriented team members, who can easily access the information without having to learn how to work with the DB.

Development time: two days.

Building a great product relies on two fundamental principles. The first one is analytical: measuring any significant action in detail and thoroughly understanding what users do (or don’t). The analytical aspect must be balanced by an equal degree of an emotional aspect: how to make users relate to your product and love it, how to get them excited and even laugh.

In the case of most ‘real world’ products, unlike programs and applications, this was already understood decades ago. Take cars for example. On the one hand, they should obviously function mechanically and drive well, but it is equally important for a car to have an emotional effect, whether it is making the owner feel like the perfect dad who takes the utmost care to secure his family’s safety, or like a young rebel embarking on an adventure. For some reason, while almost every conceivable product has an emotional experience, it remains rare to find software products which, besides being functional, also make us feel something.