#371 – How Eli Portnoy turned a frustrating pattern into his biggest opportunity

A story about staying connected to customers while everyone else scales away from them.

For SaaS founders who feel increasingly disconnected from their customers as they scale—and anyone questioning whether growth has to mean losing touch with what made you successful in the first place.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because of bad product decisions. They fail because founders lose their superpower as they scale.

Eli Portnoy, CEO and co-founder of Backengine, experienced this visceral pain twice before. In his garage days, he was everything—salesperson, customer success manager, product manager. He had an incredible view into customer pain and could align his entire company around solving it. But as he grew and hired specialists, layers formed between him and customers. He started making decisions based on anecdotes instead of insight.

In 2023, he decided to found Backengine and solve the problem that had haunted him: How do you preserve that founder superpower at any scale?

And this inspired me to invite Eli to my podcast. We explore how customer obsession creates sustainable competitive advantage when it's embedded everywhere, not siloed in one team. Eli shares insights about building 20-year customer relationships, category creation through unique points of view, and why focusing solely on customer value makes everything else—funding, team happiness, growth—fall into place. You'll discover why the voice of the customer needs to be a living organism that works inside every tool your teams already use.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They create fans, not just customers

Eli's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Eli's quotes that captures his contrarian approach to customers:

"Every customer interaction is important. Every customer interaction is thoughtful. Every customer opinion is thoughtful and insightful, but it's not always right, and so you have to make sure you're hearing it from multiple people in multiple places, and then you have to put your own internal, sort of like translation layer on top of it, because the customer isn't always right."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why customer obsession beats investor optics every time • What building 20-year relationships means for daily decisions • When you know you've created a category • Why solving myopic problems can lead to bigger opportunities

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Eli Portnoy, CEO and co-founder of Backengine

Website: backengine.ai