When You Lose Sight of the Customer
Eli Portnoy has built and scaled multiple companies. He’s raised money, led teams, exited to giants like Walmart, and played the part of the high-growth startup CEO. But with each success came something less glamorous — a slow drift away from the people he was building for.
The more the company scaled, the more distance grew between him and the customer. One day he realised he was managing reports, not relationships. It bothered him enough that it became the spark for his next company.
That company is BackEngine.
And this episode is all about how losing proximity to your users can quietly erode your product, your decisions and eventually, your edge.
From distance to design
BackEngine didn’t begin with a roadmap or market analysis. It began with discomfort.
Eli missed being close to the problem. He missed overhearing frustration on support calls, listening to feedback live, and catching what users weren’t saying. That raw, messy, often overlooked layer of product insight had slowly been replaced with filtered summaries and third-hand anecdotes.
So he built the tool he wished he had — something that helps founders, product teams and developers stay in touch with their users, even as the business grows around them.
Tools that close the loop
BackEngine is a developer-first platform that simplifies backend workflows. But its real superpower is how it reconnects people with the voices that matter.
Eli didn’t want another dashboard. He wanted something that made insight feel obvious again. The product allows teams to hear directly from users, close the feedback loop, and turn signals into action — before those signals get lost in scale.
It’s about design that reinforces customer proximity, not process that gets in the way of it.
Customer obsession as the constraint
One of the more powerful themes in this episode is that customer obsession is not a vibe. It’s a constraint. It forces you to build with focus, communicate with clarity, and ship with purpose.
Eli speaks honestly about the way startups can accidentally lose this as they grow. He shares how product decisions become diluted, how leadership drifts from the frontlines, and how well-meaning systems can separate teams from the people they serve.
BackEngine is his answer to that. A quiet, focused tool that brings the user’s voice back into the room.
What you’ll learn in this episode
If you’re building in public, growing a team, or trying to stay close to your users while the company grows around you, this one is worth a listen.
You’ll learn:
Why scaling often creates invisible distance between teams and customers
How to design products and processes that protect proximity
The trade-offs of speed, structure and signal clarity
What it means to build empathy into developer tools
Why your product should feel like a helpful sidekick, not a burden
BackEngine is a reminder that speed without signal is just noise. And building for users you no longer hear is a risk no startup can afford.
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