Hard Truths About Co-Founders, Capital, and Competition

On a frigid December morning during Slush 2025 in Helsinki, I sat down with Maor Sason and Roei Barassi , the co-founders of AppCharge , over breakfast before our podcast recording. The first question the founders asked me was "What are we not doing right? " That’s not the type of question you’d expect founders steering their company into explosive growth would be asking first.

  The "Overnight Success" That Took Three Years AppCharge's funding story looks like a fantasy: consecutive rounds raised seven months apart, top-tier investors, unstoppable momentum. Reality? Three years of grinding before anything caught fire.

Their first attempt at raising Series A? Complete failure. Nothing but nos..

Instead of pushing forward, they paused, rebuilt their numbers, strengthened their team, and came back prepared. The formula that worked: Team, TAM, velocity, and timing. But Maor cut deeper: "Top-tier VCs are smart people.

You're opening the kimono. " Their proof? One major client had built an in-house solution with 35+ people over several years.

AppCharge begged for a POC opportunity, then delivered a web store that was 2x more successful at a lower cost. Within a year: 3x the results. The contrarian advice: Close your lead investor before starting the round.

Mark your targets, identify your dream investor, then build specifically for them. And critically, don't raise too early. Overcoming an initial rejection is brutally hard.

Payments in a Commodity. What’s Your Moat? New webshop providers emerge monthly.

" So what's AppCharge's moat? "People think web stores are just landing pages," Maor explained. "Industry professionals know better; it's almost like building another game on the web.

" The real competitive advantage isn't technology alone; it's e-commerce expertise combined with engineering and product power delivered with exceptional service quality. AppCharge has top-tier engineers working full-time on this as their core business. For companies where it's not the core?

The gap becomes insurmountable. "Many teams don't account for what they could have done instead," Maor noted. What could those 15+ engineers have built for the games and core tech rather than maintaining the web store infrastructure?

When it comes to competition against other vendors, it comes down to being a long-term partner they can trust. When Appcharge delivers on promises and shows better performance at lower cost, the decision becomes obvious. A strategy is simple in theory but hard in practice.