A story about choosing what others avoid—and creating competitive advantage no one can copy.

This episode is for sales-led SaaS founders wondering why their AI product investments are not creating the competitive edge they expected.

Most SaaS companies race to add AI features and wonder why nothing changes.

Tal Peretz, CEO of Onfire, took the opposite path. Before writing a single line of code, he interviewed 275 revenue leaders. Then he spent months building a proprietary data layer from the public web—Reddit, Stack Overflow, Discord—tracking 50 million engineers. Only after that foundation was solid did he add AI on top.

The result: customers generating 4x more pipeline with the same headcount, $50 million in closed deals since beta launch, and a $20 million funding round.

And this inspired me to i ...