Built from Frustration with Moran Mizrahi
When Moran Mizrahi joined us on the Predictable Revenue Podcast, the conversation started with something every founder can relate to: the moment you hit a wall using a tool that clearly wasn’t designed for people like you.
For Moran and her co-founders, that moment came in the subscription billing space. After years running retail and eCommerce businesses, they were spending heavily to acquire customers, only to watch them churn after one or two purchases. Subscriptions felt like the solution. But the tools were rigid, hard to use, and far from customer-centric.
“You ever use something and wonder if anyone actually tried it from start to finish?” she said. “It felt like no one had walked the full path before shipping.”
The Idea Didn’t Come From Brainstorming. It Came From Pain.
Rebillia didn’t start as a calculated opportunity. It started as a reaction. A shared frustration. A clear sense that what was out there didn’t work for the kind of business they were running. Or the kind of customer they were serving.
And because they’d lived that pain themselves, they skipped straight past the usual validation cycle. Initially, there were no customer interviews, panels, or market testing. They were the market.
That gave them an unfair advantage early on. But experience can’t replace iteration.
What You Know Will Help You Start. But It Can Also Get In Your Way
Over time, the team realized that building from instinct had a downside: it can trap you in the problems you already understand. Customers evolve. Markets shift. Use cases emerge that no one, including the founders, saw coming.
So they opened up tighter feedback loops. Not just “What features do you want?” but “What’s slowing you down today?” They started recognizing recurring needs across customers and building around those patterns, especially when the asks didn’t align with their original assumptions.
The Product Didn’t Just Get Better. It Got Different.
What started as a better billing system became something else entirely: a platform built around flexibility. Not just automation for automation’s sake, but a tool that adapts to how businesses operate and what their customers expect. That evolution wasn’t luck. It was a direct result of doing two things well:
- Starting with a problem they knew inside out.
- Staying humble enough to adapt once the market started talking back.
Takeaway for Founders: Experience Isn’t a Substitute for Listening
You can build faster when you’ve lived the problem. But don’t let that experience lock you into a fixed perspective. What makes a product great in the early days often isn’t what makes it scalable. That’s where real product-market fit shows up, not in solving your pain, but in solving your customers in a way you couldn’t see until they told you.
Your First Customers Don’t Need a Feature List. They Need Confidence.
Getting early traction as a startup isn’t about competing on features. When you’re unknown, new, and going up against giants, your biggest challenge isn’t the product. It’s trust.
For Rebillia, closing their first customers wasn’t about undercutting the market or giving the product away for free. It was about conviction. Moran and her team sold the product as if it already worked, because they knew it would. They didn’t frame themselves as a scrappy beta. They showed up like they were solving a problem no one else had dared to do properly.
That positioning worked. So well, in fact, that customers paid in advance to join a waiting list.
Don’t Rely on Cold Starts. Plug Into an Ecosystem
One of the smartest moves Rebillia made early on was partnering with platforms that already had traction. Instead of trying to generate traffic from scratch, they integrated with BigCommerce and other marketplaces. That gave them a steady stream of exposure and credibility by association.
If you’re building something new, consider this: distribution is easier when you stand next to companies your customers already trust.
Direct Access and Real Conversation
Another early advantage? Founders selling directly. Customers weren’t dealing with a sales rep. They were speaking to the builders. That created trust fast. It also gave the Rebillia team priceless early feedback that helped shape the product and go-to-market strategy in real time.
As Moran put it: “We walked where they walked.” That founder’s empathy became a sales asset.
Takeaways for Founders
- Sell confidence, not features: Your product doesn’t need to be perfect. Your belief in it does.
- Don’t default to freemium: If you truly understand the problem, your early customers will pay for the solution.
- Use ecosystems: Partnerships and platforms give you distribution leverage you can’t build alone.
- Founders should sell the first deals: No one understands the problem or the urgency better than you.
Product-Market Fit Isn’t a Line You Cross. It’s a Signal You Feel.
Most founders talk about product-market fit like it’s a checkbox. But for Moran, the signal was emotional, not technical: customers started getting more excited about the product than the team did.
At first, it was the usual founder dance. Explaining, pitching, hoping it landed. Then something shifted. Prospects came to calls already engaged, asking smart questions, seeing possibilities the team hadn’t even pitched yet. That’s when you know you’re onto something real. It was more than obvious validation.
Real PMF Might Show Up in Places You Didn’t Expect
Rebillia had built the product with a few clear use cases in mind. But when they started talking to the market, customers and investors alike reframed the value: “Wait, I can use this across multiple businesses… Why isn’t this being sold as a portfolio-level tool?”
Another PMF signal founders often miss is when the market pulls your product in new directions. Ones you hadn’t even considered. You’re not just solving a problem anymore. You’re unlocking potential.
A Good Problem (That’s Still a Problem)
With strong product traction in hand, Rebillia began attracting interest from mid-market and enterprise buyers. But moving upmarket doesn’t just mean bigger deals. It means longer cycles, more stakeholders, deeper integrations, and a different kind of rigor.
As Moran put it: “Seems like a rich people problem to have… but it’s still a problem.”
Now, their focus is scaling up without losing the flexibility that made the product stand out in the first place. That includes a major feature push into partnership-driven subscriptions. Letting merchants bundle, resell, and collaborate directly within their own platforms. It’s a smart bet on where the market’s going: ecosystems over silos.
Takeaways for Founders
- PMF doesn’t show up all at once: It builds in moments: reactions, unprompted excitement, and unexpected use cases.
- Watch what the market sees. Not just what you planned: Sometimes your best vertical finds you.
- Moving upmarket isn’t just a growth goal. It’s a strategic shift: Be ready for a different game.
- Innovation often comes from your customers: The best features aren’t dreamed up in brainstorms. They’re pulled from patterns.
Conclusion
Rebillia’s story is a playbook for what happens when founders stay close to the problem, trust their instincts early on, and stay flexible enough to let customers reshape the path forward.
If you’re building something new, this is your reminder: product-market fit isn’t a milestone. It’s a moving target. But when you hit it, your customers will feel it. And they’ll let you know.
Want to connect with Moran Mizrahi or explore Rebillia? Check out their website or message Moran on LinkedIn.
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