Liron Shapira

Liron is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He’s the founder of Relationship Hero, a relationship coaching service with over 100,000 clients. His skeptical takes about crypto and other bloated startups on BloatedMVP.com have been read over a million times.

Where did the idea for Relationship Hero come from?

The idea started when I was single, and needed dating coaching, and wasn’t satisfied with the available services. My friend and I spent countless hours finding our own resources to understand the nuances of dating. That’s how we got the idea to make a business helping others with their dating and relationships.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

Wake up, exercise, help get kids ready for school, work from home, eat dinner with family. It’s simple and not especially productive on average. The most productivity just comes from being passionate about something I’m working on.

How do you bring ideas to life?

My biggest trick is what I call “the Lean MVP flowchart”, where I strip an idea down to the “value transaction”, which is a moment where a specific person gets value for a specific reason. I just go find one person and give them some value. Then repeat with two people, then four, and so on.

What’s one trend that excites you?

The AI trend is absolutely wild compared to what I thought I’d see in my lifetime if you’d asked me a few years ago. I’m more scared than excited since I think AI is likely to become irreversibly uncontrollable in my lifetime, and it’s likely the initial conditions of that handoff won’t be sufficiently calibrated for humanity’s needs.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

Don’t work on anything for a long time without proving that it’s creating value for someone.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Only work on ideas that give me satisfaction to work on for years even without external signs of success. I think that’s the key to having the persistence to see a startup to success.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

The AI extinction scenario is MASSIVELY underrated. It’s something that has a 2-digit % chance of slaughtering us and our loved ones in the next few years and no one has any idea there’s even a threat here, and the few people who see a threat have a million ways to laugh it off and convince themselves it’s not an existential threat, when it absolutely is.\

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Work on stuff that’s live in the market, stuff that people use.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

Find a marketing channel and scale it profitably as far as you can. For us that’s just been paid ads.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

My previous company was a massive failure. Afterwards I was fortunate to be able to just start over with another one. That’s America!

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Automatically send businesses a weekly security audit to tell them their biggest technical vulnerabilities. Most businesses suck at security practices so you’ll probably find a lot of issues to advise them on. You can send the embarrassing audit to their customers and investors until they sign up for your service. That seems like an effective marketing strategy.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

Bought a $100 Yeti microphone for my computer so I finally sound legit on conference calls and podcasts.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Superhuman makes it faster to go through emails.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

The Lean Startup is a must-read since most people are still screwing it up. My blog BloatedMVP.com is based on the same ideas.

What is your favorite quote?

“Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”
-Eliezer Yudkowsky

Key Learnings:

• Solving your own problem can be a good startup idea
• Avoid the Bloated MVP trap by focusing on giving value to one person at a time
• AI is a massively underrated existential risk coming for us in our own lifetime