Opster provides full coverage across all aspects of search operations, helping companies reduce the time and cost of running Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. Its customers include Bloomberg, Coupa, BMC, LivePerson, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Cybereason.

Summary:

Most tech companies start with an idea, write the code, build the product, and then go looking for customers willing to try it for free (beta sites, design partners, call them what you will). The problem is, customers who use a product for free rarely want to pay for it once it’s ready. It’s a trap many founders fall into.

SmartUp’s methodology offers a different approach and at Opster, we put it to the test.

How to do it?

I joined Opster a few months after it was founded to drive sales, support customer success, and start generating revenue. At that point, there was no product and no customers. Just the founders, Yonatan Stern and me.

Any new company launching a product faces the same choice:

1. Build outbound channels and go looking for customers,
2. Build inbound channels so customers come to you.

Working with Yonatan and the SmartUp methodology, we quickly realized that inbound had to come first, and not just to close deals. Building inbound early lets you gather real information about potential customers and shape the product around their actual needs. It tells you where the market is and where the company should go.

As we built the company, we kept asking, “Who are our customers? What attracts them to what we’re offering? Who is willing to pay, and how much?”. In the early stages, this kind of process saves both time and capital. We moved on real information and never stopped, constantly checking, testing, and refining.

Yonatan saw it from day one, and in hindsight, we all agree it was the key to Opster’s success. Engaging with the market early and continuously improving our offering allowed us to start generating revenue sooner than most companies would expect.

It’s important to remember that this is a process of learning and drawing conclusions, not a single event. That process helped us sign contracts worth half a million dollars in our first year, because we had been talking to customers long before the product existed and we understood what they needed. That dialogue became the foundation of our inbound sales and customer success system.

This wasn’t my first time working with Yonatan. Ziv Segal, Opster’s founder, and I had previously worked together at Logz.io as early employees. That experience was completely different. Logz.io was focused on rapid growth and building sales channels, with revenue and profitability taking a back seat. With VC backing, there was plenty of capital, support, and R&D resources to go around.

Opster was built on an entirely different foundation. Revenue generation came first, not growth rate. And the results came quickly. Opster became a profitable, fast-growing company within just two years of inception.

Some of the key questions we had to work through:

1. When should you approach potential customers?
2. How do you build a long-tail revenue stream?
3. How do you price a product that doesn’t exist yet?

At Opster, pricing was a real debate. Without a large sales and customer success team, we needed a different strategy.

Yonatan was firm, we should price our service at $25,000 a year. This positioned us as a premium solution while allowing us to promise that with a focused customer base, we could deliver exceptional support and build a strong brand.

We started seeing leads two months before we had anything to demonstrate or sell. Since the product wasn’t ready, we offered customers support for any problem they had, and built a sales process around solving a real, significant pain point. That was worth paying for. Today, two and a half years later, the product is mature and generating several million dollars in annual revenue.

Result:

Companies that Yonatan builds or joins start thinking about their sales funnel long before they have a working product. Sounds strange? Having worked at companies that did it the other way, I can say without a doubt that this approach is more efficient and more effective.

When you start your marketing and sales efforts early, you don’t lose six months after launch trying to figure out who to sell to. When Opster was ready, we already knew exactly who our potential customers were and how to reach them, and revenue followed quickly.

The SmartUp approach makes complete sense. We built this business before it was possible to raise VC capital, and Yonatan was with us every step of the way. Not as an investor on the sidelines, but as a genuine co-founder who thinks like one. He brings experience, knowledge, and real value.

His constant reminder was that you can dream big, but you have to stand firm on the ground first. He always told us that when we were ready, we’d move fast. He was right.

Not only did we build a company that became profitable within two years, the founders and employees kept their equity. We still control the company we built.