Customers don’t want to hear your vision
They want to believe your logic
Photo by Carrie Johnson
Here’s something that I’d like to bring to you.
Wrapped all in cellophane,
Designed for you.
– Nat King Cole
Intro
At the end of 2023, I sold my last startup.
This pleasant sunny Mediterranean winter morning in Tel Aviv, I sat down to write.
I took stock of how I spent the last two years.
What I learned is simple, uncomfortable, and expensive:
Vision is not the same as profitable.
Year 1: Vision without logic
I wanted to help people over 50 burnt out in tech turn their expertise into an independent business. I wrote 3 books, built 3 offers and started posting on X and LinkedIn about the challenges and opportunities for people over 50 in tech in an AI era.
You can free download “Escape Burnout” - 18 weeks to a one-person venture and “Stuff to avoid” - 22 anti-design patterns
My novel - Bob and Alice - an anti-love story is available on Amazon.
I cared deeply about helping people 50+ in tech pivot their expertise to entrepreneurship.
I learned that coaching burned-out professionals over 50 is not a great business:
Someone with a mortgage, kids in college, and health insurance tied to a job has massive downside risk.
If they do have capital, they have safer options than betting on themselves — buying a small, boring business, for example.
The sales cycle is long, the close rate is low, and the emotional load is high.
The math works against you.
If your target ARR is $300K and your ACV is $15K, you need 20 paying customers.
At a 1% close rate, you need 2,000 qualified leads.
That’s not coaching.
That’s lead farming.
After a year, I closed one client.
The signal was clear. I needed higher ticket offers and a smaller deal flow.
Year 2: Better logic, wrong buyer
I created an offer for MedTech executives doing $1–10M in revenue — companies stuck in the valley of death.
In the valley of death, you don’t have enough cash flow to build a proper sales organization and scale to an acquisition.
And you don’t have enough revenue for a PE deal.
I built a framework based on anti-design patterns — recurring failures that kill credibility, stall sales, and destroy companies from the inside. I identified 23 of them from years of combat experience across software, marketing, and operations in the US, Europe, Israel, and the Far East. I spent four months curating and pressure-testing them.
The logic was solid:
If you want to cross the valley of death, stop repeating the mistakes that other people make.
The problem wasn’t the framework.
It was the audience.
Founders at this stage are exhausted.
Many aren’t natural salespeople.
Their advisors often don’t know how to sell either.
By the time FDA clearance arrives — often five years in — the market has shifted, clinical workflows have changed, and positioning is outdated. What they need is capital and time, not another framework.
Again, the math told the story.
If your target ARR is $300K and your ACV is $30K, you need 10 clients.
At a 1% close rate, you need 1,000 leads.
The lesson
After two years, I’d done about $50K in revenue.
The vision was strong.
My writing resonated.
But the logic didn’t converge to a profitable business.
That’s when it finally clicked:
Customers don’t want to hear your vision.
They want to understand your logic.
I decided to stop selling coaching — and start building a product in a domain that I know well - cybersecurity and privacy for MedTech. After 20 risk assessment projects with customers including the Fortune 1 company, 70+ clinical trials and 5 FDA approvals I was ready to return to a place where business logic already rules decision-making.
Next week, I’ll write about the only thing that matters more than vision or logic:
Paying customers.
This week on Life Sciences Today
My guest was Dr. Walt Pebley, Chief Scientific Officer of Oregon Freeze Dry Life Sciences.
Veteran freeze-drying innovator Walt has spent 43 years turning lyophilization into a quiet engine of healthcare. After losing his wife to cancer, he combined cell biology, chemistry, and engineering to build Oregon Freeze Dry into North America’s leading stabilizer of probiotics and other sensitive biological materials—serving pharma, nutraceutical, and veterinary customers. Operating as a CDMO, OFD runs from discovery-scale through commercial manufacturing, with proprietary freeze-drying algorithms that competitors trust as the “gold standard” for retaining efficacy.
In our conversation, Walt lays out where he’s taking the company next: novel oral “lip pastel” dosage forms for sublingual and buccal delivery that can bypass the gut and liver, new permeation strategies for drugs in pain, diabetes, and neurology, and a deeper focus on mentoring engineers and customers to design smarter processes from molecule to market—all while insisting that real innovation also requires rebalancing work and family to think more clearly and creatively.
You can see the episode with Walt Pebley from OFD here.
About me
I’m a writer, ex-pharmatech founder, father of 4.
I’ve been building in tech, cyber, privacy, and clinical data for 25+ years across Israeli medical device startups, Verily, Amgen, and the Fortune 1 company. I work at the intersection of engineering, regulatory risk and clinical data — helping teams drive revenue with cost-effective, prioritized security.
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