Yoni Elbaz and Moran Benisty met in 2012 at a Sears R&D innovation center in Israel. In 2015, they noticed small merchants drifting from Amazon to Shopify and saw an opportunity.

The Visual Reviews Insight

"Reviews at the time were pretty much stuck in the 90s with non-attractive lists of text or 5 stars," said Yoni. They anticipated a need for visual, photo-based reviews as Instagram and Pinterest were rising.

The Failed B2C Model

Loox started as B2C - providing free reviews for merchants and monetizing through an aggregated consumer site. Their Excel assumptions collapsed: user acquisition cost was higher, conversion rates lower, and order sizes smaller than predicted. They realized B2C would require raising much more money.

The Bootstrap Decision

After a $50K pre-seed from ZEP Fund, they chose to bootstrap rather than raise. "Our DNA is more hackers and analysts than salespeople," said Yoni. Neither founder paid themselves a salary for 15 months until Loox became profitable. They shared a coworking desk for 300 shekels/month.

Cost Discipline

They avoided AWS and Azure, choosing Digital Ocean for a fraction of the price. By mid-2016, they'd only spent $10K of their $50K investment and were turning profitable.

• Time to profitability: 15 months
• Current merchants: 110,000+
• Revenue: $15M+ ARR
• First employee: Hired in 2017 (customer support)