In this episode of Product Unplugged, host Mike Belsito sits down with Ilai Szpiezak, Founder and CEO of Dolphin AI, to trace the remarkable journey from running dance events and theatre shows to building a voice-of-customer analytics tool powered by AI. Ilai Szpiezak shares how the pandemic wiped out his events business overnight, forcing him to reinvent his approach to product management.
We dig into his transition from physical experiences to digital products, his unexpected introduction to product-market fit through live-streamed dance classes, and the early stumbles and lessons in building a modern SaaS tool.
Key takeaways
- The more companies grow, the further they drift from the customer. Your job is to close that gap.
- Delight doesn’t scale – and that’s exactly why it works. Especially early on, being hands-on beats perfect dashboards.
- You can’t just plug-and-play insight. Every company has its own definitions, language, and pain points.
- Treat your customer conversations like product gold. Not just what they say, but how they say it.
- Marketplace ≠ SaaS. Two-sided models are brutally hard – pick your hard side and start there.
Chapters
- 00:00 – Intro & Meet Ilai Szpiezak
- 01:45 – From events and dance to product management
- 03:30 – The pandemic pivot: from in-person to livestreamed dance startup
- 05:00 – How Ilai accidentally discovered product-market fit
- 07:00 – Paul Graham’s 7% rule & the PMF gut feeling
- 09:00 – Why early-stage product building should stay simple and scrappy
- 11:00 – Bootstrapping, doing things that don’t scale, and customer obsession
- 13:00 – The transition from live events to building Dolphin AI
- 15:00 – The messy challenge of interpreting all customer feedback
- 17:00 – Oh-no moment: assumptions that didn’t scale across feedback sources
- 19:00 – Marketplace vs SaaS: choosing the right business model
- 21:00 – How to identify the hard side of a two-sided platform
- 22:00 – Realising feedback systems must adapt to each team’s language
- 24:00 – What product managers can learn from event producers
- 26:30 – Final takeaway: Stay close to the customer – always
