SmartUp Academy Wants Your First Customer Before Your Finished Product

The software was not ready. The customers were already arriving. In SmartUp Academy’s account of Opster’s early days, the search-operations startup began attracting leads two months before it had anything to demonstrate. Yonatan Stern’s answer was to sell help: offer support for a painful technical problem while the product caught up. The proposed annual price was $25,000. A founder could spend a long afternoon arguing about the audacity of that number. Stern wanted a business that could afford to serve its customers.

That episode gets closer to SmartUp’s purpose than the word “academy” does. This Ra’anana company teaches entrepreneurs the operating work around a product: finding buyers, deciding what to charge, managing money and choosing what to build. Its offerings run from classroom instruction to a residency in which the academy becomes a co-founder. The recurring question is wonderfully inconvenient for anyone happily polishing a prototype: where will the paying customer come from?

The price tag came before the product

The Opster case, published by SmartUp in August 2022, reports contracts worth $500,000 in the company’s first year and profitability within two years. Those are the company-building account’s figures. They describe one venture, with its own circumstances. The useful detail is the sequence: customer dialogue shaped an offer that the small team could deliver, and that offer produced revenue before mature software was available.

There is an external milestone, too. In November 2023, Elastic announced an agreement to acquire Opster. Elastic described a collection of search-management products used daily by thousands of engineering and DevOps teams, including AutoOps. That announcement establishes a substantial destination for the business. It cannot isolate which lesson, adviser or product decision caused the outcome. SmartUp’s case is most useful when read as a set of decisions to examine.

A sales lesson hidden in an error message

One of those decisions started with an unglamorous discovery. Engineers copy error messages into search engines. SmartUp’s November 2022 account describes how Opster identified roughly 1,200 Elasticsearch errors and created an individual page for each. The first pages were mechanically produced and basic. Traffic revealed that about 70 messages accounted for roughly 80 percent of visits. The team concentrated better writing on those subjects.

The initial weakness was content quality; the evidence that changed the allocation of effort was the traffic distribution. This was a method of learning where expertise would be useful. The published account reported about 100,000 monthly visitors at that point in Opster’s history. It is a historical claim, not a current traffic estimate. The particularly copyable move is the feedback loop: publish around a specific audience’s problems, observe which problems bring people in, then improve the answers.

SmartUp’s broader branding argument is that audience building takes time. Its teaching encourages founders to become useful around a problem while a product is still taking shape. A database of relevant questions, objects or situations can supply many specific pages. For a reader considering that approach, the test is practical: do prospective buyers search for these things, and can the company give them an answer worth returning to? A pile of pages is only an input.

Learn the profession, then practice it

Stern came to teaching after building companies including ZoomInfo and CardScan. His academy biography describes a career spanning software, data and commercial execution; it dates an entrepreneurial internship program to 2021. SmartUp’s current About page places the organization’s founding in 2019. The model reflects his view that founders need sustained practice in the work of running a business.

“Building a successful company is a career that requires mastery”Yonatan Stern / SmartUp founder

The founding team supplies several kinds of operating experience. Co-founder and COO Libby Molad works on strategy, commercial feasibility and business development. Co-founder and CFO Ayala Dinur Turgeman oversees financial operations. Their presence helps explain the academy’s practical scope: a founder’s priorities and financial reports belong in the same conversation as the product. Mentor Eyal Lewinsohn brings experience from founding Iridize.

The next advertised Foundations Course begins on October 11, 2026, with six Sunday sessions ending November 15. Classes run from 14:30 to 17:00 in Ra’anana. SmartUp advertises the course as free, with admission subject to review. That makes the scheduled classroom commitment 15 hours, before travel or work between sessions. The syllabus includes pricing, customer motivations, business models, sales and ways a company can generate growth.

Participants do not need an incorporated startup to have a reason to attend. SmartUp welcomes people considering entrepreneurship, alongside founders and existing company leaders. Its learner route allows interested people to attend educational activities; its program overview also describes opportunities to gain experience inside resident companies. The audience extends beyond the familiar image of a full-time founder arriving with a polished investor presentation.

The mentor stays for the management meeting

The Companies Workshop is the bridge between hearing an idea and testing it. Leaders bring real problems, receive feedback from Stern and their peers, and revisit the decisions in later sessions. The workshop page describes a biweekly mentoring format and a 2026 offering of nine three-hour sessions. Its emphasis is on application: whether a pricing decision, marketing plan or operating assumption survives contact with the business.

Residency changes the relationship more substantially. SmartUp says it joins selected companies as co-founders, participates in management meetings and provides access to its professional staff and resources. Meeting frequency varies with the company’s stage. The academy describes the partnership as lasting, which makes it materially different from attending a course and keeping the slides.

For applicants, that means judging whether they want this team involved in recurring decisions. The existing-company application asks about the market, prospects, product development, sales, largest customers, pricing, fundraising and cash flow. This is an operating conversation with numbers attached. A founder looking for occasional encouragement should read those questions carefully: SmartUp is asking to understand how the company actually works.

The business model combines education with these selective company-building relationships. SmartUp says it brings resources and capital when working as a co-founder. The free introductory course is therefore one part of the offer. Residency should be evaluated as a partnership, including the responsibilities and ownership arrangement agreed between the parties. Tuition is a straightforward price; a continuing place at the management table is a different commitment.

A smaller market, examined more closely

SmartUp argues that founders can choose an initial market for its accessibility and economics. Its market-segmentation teaching uses payroll software to show how one apparent category separates into very different customers. Hospitals, retailers and businesses with commissioned sales teams do not necessarily buy for the same reasons or through the same channels. Understanding those differences changes the sales job even when some underlying software is similar.

Its financial teaching likewise treats cash as an operating constraint. Customer receipts must cover the costs of running the company if growth is to support itself. In SmartUp’s terminology, profitability centers on positive cash flow. That focus pulls attention toward the costs of acquisition and delivery, as well as salaries and other expenses. A busy sales pipeline is encouraging; a business still has to pay for the work behind it.

Investors have a separate entry point through Angels Circle. The program covers company selection, funding decisions and guidance for portfolio businesses. SmartUp explicitly describes it as education, rather than an investment vehicle, while offering introductions to entrepreneurs. Its market position sits among founder courses, accelerators, business advisers and venture studios: teaching is available, and deeper operational involvement is selective.

There is a useful distinction for prospective participants: learning a method and delegating a decision are separate things. A course can provide vocabulary and examples; the founder still has to decide whether a buyer’s objection calls for a different price, a narrower promise or less development. Group discussion makes those choices available for scrutiny. The value depends partly on what the participant brings back from the market between meetings. Without that evidence, even a detailed business conversation can remain comfortably hypothetical.

The next customer is the real assignment

The academy is continuing to put its approach in public view. TEDx Talks published Stern’s Technion talk in February 2026. An August entry in SmartUp’s press archive describes SCE, the Sami Shamoon College of Engineering, exploring an entrepreneurship collaboration, with a possible Ashdod pilot. Exploration matters here: this is a proposal under consideration, not an announced rollout. It points toward bringing commercial thinking into engineering education.

For a founder borrowing the method, the sensible starting point is a bounded experiment. Identify a customer group, describe the job it needs done, and test an offer small enough to deliver. Record what prospects reject. Distinguish interest from willingness to pay. Those are interpretations of SmartUp’s teaching that can become next week’s work, without assuming that another company’s price or traffic figures will travel intact.

The Opster example also suggests its own limits. Selling support early depends on having expertise customers value and a problem they will pay to resolve. Search-led audience building depends on relevant demand and useful material. A company whose product cannot deliver value until lengthy development is complete cannot simply copy the sequence. The lesson deserves that specificity. SmartUp’s appeal is strongest when the founder leaves with a sharper commercial question, then goes out to ask a buyer.