#389 – How Tal Peretz questioned the AI playbook and created results competitors can't match

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 invite Tal to my podcast. We explore how mastering curiosity—reading signals competitors ignore—creates competitive moats that compound over time. Tal shares how 275 customer interviews revealed one critical pattern everyone else missed, and why choosing the hardest buyers simplified everything else. You'll discover why he spent months building invisible infrastructure before writing features, and how that decision alone separated Onfire from hundreds of AI tools fighting for attention.

We also zoom in on three of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• Master the art of curiosity
• Aim to be different, not just better
• Sell the idea, not the product

Tal's journey proves that remarkable companies don't chase the obvious path—they build the hard thing first, creating advantages no competitor can copy.

Here's one of Tal's quotes that captures his contrarian thesis:

"AI basically makes sales much harder, not easier, because the noise-to-ratio right now goes up. When we started the company, we said the main advantage is to find the needle in the haystack in your context. Building what we call our Knowledge Graph—this is probably the main IP of the company."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why building infrastructure before features creates advantages competitors cannot replicate
• What customer discovery reveals when you interview hundreds before building anything
• Why focusing on the hardest segment often creates easier sales than targeting everyone
• Why adding intelligence to strong foundations beats bolting features onto weak data

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Tal Peretz, Co-founder and CEO at Onfire

Website: onfire.ai