#214 - Tobias Konitzer, Ph.D., CEO of Ocurate - on using LTV to solve profitability issues

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help B2C business spend their money right - to increase profitability. My guest is Tobias Konitzer, Ph.D., CEO of OcurateTobias Konitzer is an academically trained entrepreneur who has a proven track record of turning research into technology and into a product that addresses ubiquitous pain points. He worked for Facebook Research and completed a Ph.D. in computational social science at Stanford University. In 2017, he co-founded PredictWise, where he initially acted as Chief Scientist and became their CEO in 2020. PredictWise processed a large array of public opinion data collected from 260M+ Americans on hundreds of data points. During his tenure at PredictWise, Tobias started to understand the value of this database in conjunction with modern machine learning for consumer-facing companies: Companies have a hard time optimizing over and understanding margins (LTV:CAC ratio) that is crucial for both profitability and accurate financial forecasting. On this premise, Tobias founded Ocurate, empowering brands to focus on the right customer by predicting lifetime value, churn, conversion and growth at the individual level, with unprecedented accuracy.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tobias to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the ability of many B2C companies to grow profitably. Tobias shares his big lessons learned in starting a revolution, and what it took to create solid traction. He touches upon the importance of investing in getting positioning right. Last but not least, he shares his advice on what it takes to build a SaaS business that cannot be ignored, and what mindset and habits to develop to not burn out from the many failures you'll have to deal with on your way.Here are some of his quotes:"I used to tell my investors, the vision is making a new way to thinking about efficient spending, the organizing principle of b2c companies. And this new way of of efficient spending, we call, folks call, lifetime value. And I want to say one more word here. The idea behind lifetime value is using AI to predict exactly how much profit, not revenue, but profit, every customer will bring to you as a company. And now, the big idea here is, if I would know that with 100% accuracy, all these other things all of a sudden are very, very easy."During this interview, you will learn four things:How to win more customers by getting on the same wavelengthWhy valuing slowness can be the key to rapid growthWhy too many SaaS businesses don't have a product-market fit issue, but a positioning issueWhy you shouldn't found your SaaS business before you deeply understand the real pain pointFor more information about the guest from this week:Tobias Konitzer, PhdWebsite Ocurate