Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

#374 - How Chad Rubin helps Amazon brands escape the pricing race to the bottom#374 - How Chad Rubin helps Amazon brands escape the pricing race to the bottom A story about moving from being a cost center to becoming the profit engine—by challenging assumptions no one else dared to question. This Episode is for SaaS founders who are tired of customers seeing their solution as just another expense—and those questioning whether there's a smarter way to build something customers actually want to pay more for. Most SaaS companies position themselves as efficiency tools. They help you do things faster, cheaper, better. Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee, took a different path. After selling his previous inventory management company in 2021, he had a realization: he was always building solutions that lived on the expense side of his customers' businesses. He wanted to be on the revenue side. So he started questioning assumptions in his own struggling Amazon business. Why doesn't anyone change price dynamically? Why do sellers copy pricing from competitors who might be broke? This led him to build Profasee—dynamic pricing software that uses AI to help Amazon brands optimize pricing and ad spend together, creating a flywheel that drives profit growth. And this inspired me to invite Chad to my podcast. We explore how questioning fundamental assumptions creates breakthrough opportunities. Chad shares insights about turning your founder story into sales leverage, the shift from efficiency to effectiveness in SaaS, and why data-driven pricing decisions compound over time. You'll discover how he's building a lean organization while investing heavily in AI and quant teams to create competitive moats. We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They sell the idea, not the product Chad's story proves that the biggest levers are hiding in plain sight. Here's one of Chad's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy: "You have to always be a dot, a dot collector. Constantly collecting dots. Most brands are not looking at their whole system. They're not zooming out to understand the process, understand with clear thinking, how you can have some self-awareness and look at, okay, price and PPC, how do these things interconnect?" By listening to this episode, you'll learn: • Why questioning belief systems creates challenger advantages • What happens when you connect isolated business levers • What happens when you refuse to compete on other people's terms • Why founder stories become leverage in sales conversations For more information about the guest from this week: Guest: Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee Website: profasee.com

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#372 – How Hikari Senju built a hockey stick by preparing for the moment others missedA story about preparation beating speed—when you know what's coming. For SaaS founders tired of rushing features to market—and wondering if there's a smarter way to build lasting competitive advantage. Most SaaS companies don't fail because they move too slow. They fail because they chase shortcuts instead of building what customers actually value. Hikari Senju, CEO of Omneky, took a different path. The son of an artist with computer science training from Harvard, he focused on building real customer value while competitors rushed AI tools to market. He spent years perfecting return on ad spend and aesthetic quality that customers actually cared about. When AI quality finally improved in 2024, he was the only one delivering superior outcomes, and his signups grew 4x in one month. And this inspired me to invite Hikari to my podcast. We explore how understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features. Hikari shares insights about why focusing on outcomes customers pay for eliminates vanity metrics, how "grow slow, grow real" keeps you from blowing it later, and why most founders optimize for what impresses other founders instead of what drives customer results. You'll discover the difference between building systems that work versus building features that sound clever. We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: • They focus on the essence • They acknowledge they can't please everyone Hikari's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid. Here's one of Hikari's quotes that captures his build-real philosophy: "You can hustle and you can fake it till you make it only so far, but it's going to catch up to you. If you want to build a generation-defining company, then you have to focus on the basics. It's usually not just one hack or one thing. It's usually a million small things that you've assembled together in a way that works perfectly as a system and that is hard to replicate by a competitor, because it's built off all these teeny differentiations you've done because you've just thought way more deeply about this problem for a longer period of time." By listening to this episode, you'll learn: • Why understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features • What "grow slow, grow real" means for founders chasing quick wins • When building complete systems creates unbeatable advantages over feature builders Guest Info Guest: Hikari Senju, CEO at Omneky Website: https://www.omneky.com/

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