💀 Tough to get customers and investors? I know why | 200+ Startup mentor @500Startups | 2x Founder | Japan nutcase 🇯🇵

I speak to fearless founders every day.
They all struggle with the same 5 things:


ººº FUNDRAISING
Raising funds is really hard and the survival of the company often depends on it.

ººº SALES
Low email and call conversion rates make it incredibly difficult to reach any significant revenue goals.

ººº TEAM PRODUCTIVITY
Difficulty in managing and communicating with people spread across time zones and geographies.

ººº PRODUCT-MARKET FIT
Uncertainty about the market fit of the product, too many pivots and little results.

ººº FOCUS
Drowned in work, grappling with priorities and lack of focus, feeling overwhelm and stress.

As a founder you need to fix these.
For a chance at crossing the Valley of D3ath.

_____

When I mentor founders, I give them a hard time. 
I challenge them. Push them to their limit. 
It's a painful process and it’s not for everyone.
That's often the cost of resurrection.

Get in touch if you feel I can help with any of my (ob)sessions:

*One Liner: From Zero to Hero.
*KPIs: Make it to cash, dodging the crash.
*High-Tempo Testing: Fail fast. Fail forward.
*Cold Calls: 20 hacks to ‘manipulate’ any conversation
*Early Research: Validate any idea with $5 (for Post-Its).
*Fundraising: 7 slides I stole from the #1 investor in the World
*Cold Emails: Beat 99% of the World at writing emails that convert
*Remote teams: How to avoid hiring amateurs (and keeping them working for you)

Rui Bom

Serial Entrepreneur & Coach

Hi, I'm Itay 🫶🏼

We live in an AI era where output is cheap, and speed is everywhere. 

I care about staying human, finding your own pace, and coming back to the part of you that is real and present. Each of us is literally one of one. Our fingerprints and DNA do not repeat, and neither does our way of seeing, creating, and leading. My work is helping people reconnect with that, then build from it.

I'm a deliberate optimist, an entrepreneur at heart, and a coach. For the past 18+ years, I've helped people, companies, and ideas find alignment.

A while back, I co-founded a startup that grew to 400+ employees and tens of millions in revenue. We were backed by YCombinator and investors like the founders of Reddit and Gmail, as well as Joe Montana.

From the outside, it looked like a success story. Inside, I felt disconnected from myself.

What began as a mission to solve a personal problem, leaving my six-figure job in Manhattan to bootstrap a company from scratch, slowly became a machine. Eventually, I felt lost within it.

I learned how to scale a business, raise capital, build teams, and make hard decisions under pressure. The deeper work came later.

When I finally stepped back, I rediscovered my own alignment.

That shift changed everything, not just how I live, but how I support and work with others.

Now, I coach, mentor, and advise founders and high performers, helping them navigate growth without losing themselves amid pressure and tough decisions.

I help them slow down so they can gain clarity, make more confident decisions, improve resilience, and build progress they can actually live with.

I help clients with:
✔️ Product-market fit and go-to-market clarity
✔️ Returning to presence and instinct when things get chaotic
✔️ Leadership, energy, and resilience
✔️ Strategy, decision-making, and pivots
✔️ Scaling and building culture
✔️ Fundraising and investor alignment

I don't offer a generic playbook. I bring perspective, presence, and pattern recognition that comes from having lived it myself.

In addition to one-on-one work, I run small forums and group coaching for founders and high performers seeking a space to be real with others on a similar path. Each group is carefully curated through a simple application and short conversation, because the quality of the room matters. The goal is to create a circle where people can speak honestly, listen deeply, keep things confidential, and leave feeling more grounded, clearer, and less alone.

Clarity is a founder's greatest asset, and meaningful success is about who you become along the way.

Itay Forer

AI changed the rules for organic traffic in 2026.



A few years ago, Alex Prober and I were running a handful of SEO sites on the side.

We liked the game. Find a topic, publish consistently, watch traffic climb.
What we did not like was the friction between ״this keyword is worth writing״ and ״the post is live.״ SERP research, pulling the right angles, keeping structure consistent, finding visuals, publishing, scheduling, then repeating it across multiple sites.

So we built our own system.

At first, it was a private tool. A set of flows that turned a keyword into a publish-ready article with a repeatable process and a steady quality bar.
Then other companies and operators asked to use it. They had bigger portfolios, higher standards, and zero patience for generic output. Their feedback shaped the product.

Today, this little side project is running at a scale that still surprises me. Across customers, we generate tens of thousands of articles every month. Some are big companies, some are small teams, and a lot are agencies that live and die by organic growth. The common thread is simple: they want consistent publishing without turning content into a full-time job.

And the timing is perfect, because the way people search is changing in real time.

Google still matters. A growing percentage also ask inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. When the page is clear and specific, those tools grab parts of it and cite it. When it is vague, it gets ignored.

We rebuilt Content Zen around that reality. SEO plus LLM visibility, in one workflow.

The newest piece we shipped is the one I am most proud of, and it is pure Alex.
He built the ability to launch a full blog on your subdomain, like blog.yourdomain.com, hosted by us and styled to match your brand. Your main site stays untouched, and the blog publishes on schedule like a real asset under your domain.

We are already running this setup for a few brands, and the early results are strong enough that we are opening it up to more companies now.

If you are serious about organic growth in 2026 and want a system that is already working at scale, DM me "BLOG," and I will send you a demo link. 

Feel free to tag a friend who needs it :)

taplio

The Battle

Rui Bom

Itay Forer

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taplio

The Battle

Rui Bom

Itay Forer

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Itay Forer's LinkedIn Performance

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