When Itai Sadan and his co-founder Amir Glatt looked at their customer base in 2014, they saw a problem that would make most CEOs uncomfortable: They were trying to serve two completely different audiences, and it was tearing the company apart. Small businesses wanted dead-simple website builders they could launch in two minutes. Web professionals building sites for clients demanded flexibility and sophistication. As Duda grew, the tension became impossible to ignore—the R&D team was being pulled in opposite directions, unable to satisfy either group well.

So Sadan made a decision that seemed counterintuitive: He stopped investing in half his customers.

“We really felt that we needed to make a call between them,” Sadan explains. “So we are at least something for someone, and not everything for everyone. That’s not a winning proposition.” The data pointed toward web professionals—they were growing faster and bringing multiple clients to the platform. The company’s Israeli engineering DNA was better suited to building sophisticated tools. And crucially, Sadan saw an opportunity: While competitors like Wix and Squarespace battled over small businesses, web professionals were underserved.

That focus transformed Duda from a mobile website builder into a powerhouse serving 22,000 digital agencies and powering over 1 million websites. But the journey from startup to scale taught Sadan lessons about leadership that go far beyond customer selection—lessons about when to trust your gut over data, how to maintain startup culture while adding necessary processes and why feeling pressure as a CEO often means you’re not applying enough of it yourself. 

Walk me through that moment where you and Amir decided to walk away from half your customers. What made it clear you needed to do this?

When we started Duda in 2010, it was a mobile website builder—a slightly different product than where we are today. It was geared to help small businesses engage with the growing amount of mobile traffic they were getting to their websites. Think of 2008—the first Android came out, and suddenly small businesses were inundated with mobile traffic, although their websites were really built for desktop. We built a dead simple solution: Just enter the URL of your desktop site, we do the magic behind the scenes and it generates a mobile-optimized website for you.

We had a lot of traction in the early days. But what happened a few years in was this proliferation of devices—aside from mobile, there were tablets and desktops, and people had started having browsers in their cars and on their watches. People didn’t want to build a website for every single device. This new paradigm arose called responsive web design, which means you just build a site and it runs on all devices. Today everybody’s used to that, but back then, that wasn’t the case.

We understood as a mobile-only player that we really needed to jump on that responsive web design bandwagon. That’s the second solution we built, which is the core product today. As we were building this solution, it was kind of a race. We were a mobile site builder adding these other screens, and some of the better-known solutions in the market at that time—like Wix and Squarespace and WordPress—were all desktop first and racing the other direction. We kind of all met in the middle with responsive design solutions.

Then, for the first time in the history of the company, the word “differentiation” came into our vernacular. In mobile, we were the absolute leader and if you would have asked me who our customer is, my answer probably would have been anybody who wants to use the product. But suddenly we were not a leader anymore. We had a responsive web design builder, and Wix and Squarespace and WordPress and others had the same. So the question of differentiation, uniqueness, crept in.

Our user base had small businesses and also web professionals. These were two very different customer types that were tearing the company in two. Small businesses just cared about simplicity to build a website that can go live in two minutes. On the other hand, web professionals who are building websites for small businesses value flexibility, sophistication and have more complex needs.

As a small company, it was difficult  for the R&D team to juggle these two types of customers. We really felt that we needed to make a call between them, so we are at least something for someone, and not everything for everyone. That’s not a winning proposition.

We looked at both user bases. First of all, the data pointed out that web professionals were growing faster. Every professional brings their clients, building multiple sites. Secondly, for an Israeli engineering team that likes to build sophisticated tools, catering to non-web professionals and small businesses was less exciting and less part of our DNA. And thirdly, we saw an opportunity. While the other platforms were targeting SMBs, we felt web professionals were underserved. There were a couple of tools, but nothing built specifically for them, deeply understanding their challenges and needs.

For those three reasons, we decided to stop investing in tools for SMBs. Over time, Duda became more and more geared towards web professionals, including the marketing and messaging

So by dropping your focus on these less lucrative customers, you freed yourselves up in various ways to scale or progress?

Absolutely. That focus helped in all layers of the company, from the engineering team which was able to  prioritize the roadmap and focus on what mattered for web professionals, to the marketing team where it became easier to determine who their customer was, all the way to the sales team.

I don’t think we would have achieved this level of scale without being focused, without solving something, building a really great platform that addresses the pain points and understanding in a very deep and profound way what agencies need.

When you’re scaling up to 22,000 clients, what are some things that can get broken that you have to fix, or things you didn’t expect would be hurdles?

Great question. At every stage of the company, there are different challenges of scale, like steps in revenue. To get to the first million in revenue, it’s mostly a product-market fit and making sure you’re building the right product for the customer. Crossing that threshold is somewhat of a validation that there are enough folks that actually care about what you’re building and there’s a viable company building that.

Once you start to get to 10 million, you start building a bigger team. Especially in the initial years, it was much more focused on building the engineering team because we just needed to build the product. Later on, you started to build and scale sales and marketing.

Past $10 million, and towards $50 million, is a different order of scale. It’s not just about hiring people to do the job, but hiring talented managers and executives that can manage people. Throughout the journey, at any point, you need to ask yourself: Do I have the right people with me that have seen this order of scale?

Amir and I were first-time founders, so every step was something we were doing for the first time and it helped to bring in people who have seen an order of magnitude of scale more than you have. We were able to start layering in processes, especially at that later stage. As you have more people, there’s a need to increase the amount of processes and automation within the company. We set up a more formulaic and structural way of doing things, such as sales, and understanding that not every customer and deal is totally different. It also helped us be much more thoughtful about communications within the organization. We’re 200 people now, very different from when we were 20 people in a room where everybody knew everything. You didn’t have to do an all-hands meeting, a town hall or a CEO newsletter. But with a bigger team, you hear things pop up like, “Oh, there’s no alignment” or “There’s no visibility.” And you understand that it’s much tougher to communicate the vision and the strategy and make sure everybody’s rowing in the same direction. For example, OKRs and setting goals so that the whole company is involved.

Obviously through these stages, we added more and more of these processes. And again, having some of the talent that has seen it and been there before, especially for first-time founders, was key.

There must have been some growing pains for you personally, moving from entrepreneurial to operational. How was that transition?

I always saw that as my own personal growth—moving into areas where you’re less comfortable. You can see it as a challenge or you can see it as an opportunity to personally learn and grow while the company is growing. So I welcomed it.

Despite the company growing, I always felt that it was important for us to still maintain the startup culture. The culture of creativity moving fast and not becoming rigid. That’s always the trade-off with processes: Things do tend to slow down and more people are involved. So you want to make sure that you’re still able to be nimble and arrive at quick decisions and move fast when it’s needed. But balance that with some structure where not every deal, not every customer, not everything we do is totally different. Because that really creates a mess.

You’ve talked about how “time kills deals” and you’ve seen this multiple times. What’s an example of where that happened and how you managed it?

It happens many times throughout the journey of the company. I always try to make sure that we are never the ones that are going to be delaying something, especially when it’s a customer deal. There are times where you don’t have control. As much as you try to raise urgency on the customer side, they have their own things happening. It’s a different company. So you can’t always influence it. You can be ready, but many times it’s about them being ready and about them moving forward.

If we didn’t manage to convince them to move forward, it means that we didn’t necessarily create enough value for them to prioritize an integration with Duda versus the other priorities that they have in the organization. So it’s always about creating enough value, showing them enough of a revenue opportunity  to prioritize it above anything else they’re doing.

What’s the balance between moving very decisively and doing enough analysis?

Over the years, we’ve invested a lot in data infrastructure to be able to base our decisions on data.

However if  there isn’t the exact data that you want and need to make a decision, in most cases I would err on making a decision anyway. There are very few situations where you make decisions that could end up being disastrous for the company. I put a lot of faith in myself and the executive team understanding the space. Sometimes you make a gut decision because one needs to be made and people must be able to move forward.

Even with lack of data, you are still getting seven out of 10 decisions right. And even the three decisions that you got wrong—they’re not going to kill the company. Maybe they’re not going to pan out the way you want.

You’re an SEO performance leader. SEO is very confusing for a lot of CEOs not in technology. Any advice on the best way forward?

There’s a lot of opportunity now around SEO and beyond with AI’s impact on SEO. Duda has a lot of AI functionality that our users have heavily adopted. Fifty-five percent of every new site is built using AI on our platform.

I think about SEO and AIO as one. Traditional SEO is more keyword-based and about being found on Google, which is still very important. Though many folks are talking about it in the past tense, saying SEO is dead, I don’t subscribe to that. I have a million sites of our customers and I see where they’re getting traffic. Google is still the predominant referrer of traffic to websites on the web.

However, on the other hand, we are seeing the rise of ChatGPT and other AI platforms like Gemini, Perplexity and Grok. We’re seeing that more and more traffic is being sent by these platforms. So businesses need to definitely educate themselves, learn and start to optimize their websites for these AI platforms.

Duda does that out of the box—there’s a lot of functionality we’ve embedded into the platform that optimizes your site for AI. But there’s also a lot of things that business owners, executives can do themselves. There’s an opportunity now that they should be talking to their head of marketing about: How do we grab that attention? How do we make sure that our brand visibility is prominent on these AI platforms? These AI platforms are still nascent, and there’s a lot of potential to optimize your site and do different things to appear in the responses to consumers’ prompts. Some of these opportunities might not be available later on as these platforms become more sophisticated.

Just an example from the past: If you remember Zynga in the early Facebook days with their games like Farmville—they got a really good understanding of Facebook algorithms and everything around likes and sharing. They became hugely successful by leveraging the interactions on Facebook to help their own growth. Those opportunities closed down later on as Facebook decided to monetize those and created an ad platform.

This concept of “if you’re feeling pressure, you’re not applying enough”—that’s provocative. Tell me more about that.

This concept was written by Ben Horowitz from the Andreessen Horowitz VC. He wrote: if you’re feeling pressure, it means you’re not applying enough pressure.

Many times in the history of the company, I felt like I was being pushed to a corner and I was maybe trying to appease too many people at the same time. Without giving any specific example, if you’re feeling that pressure and you are cornered, then look inwards and think: Am I also applying enough pressure back? The pressure doesn’t need to be on me. Maybe I need to put the pressure on someone else.

That someone else might be an employee or someone delegating their decision-making to you. It might feel like you’re drowning in meetings and you’re not as effective. So pushing back is your decision to be made. If you need my help, I’m here. But the executives in your company should not be creating more work for you—they should be taking work from you.

If you have an executive where you’re very much involved in their department constantly, maybe it means they might not be performing their role as expected. This comes back to the size of the company and the complexity. Every individual needs to be measured along the way at every stage to see if they’re cut for the role. The complexity and the skills that are needed at $1 million are very different than at $10 million, let alone at $50 million. Not everybody grows with the company at the same pace.

Does figuring out who’s growing with the company and who’s not take up a lot of your time?

I think about it a lot. Candidly, I’ve made mistakes in the past of hiring executives that were not the right fit for the time, for the role and where the company was. You constantly need to think: Do I have the right team? Maybe one of the most important things is to analyze and assess—is the executive team the right team?

As you grow, you become a target for poaching. How do you make sure you’re sticky for the essential talent?

I think it’s important to be very deliberate and know who your key people are. My retention plan for these people is to keep them close to me, to the other executives and ensure that they’re happy and compensated adequately.

And most importantly: Usually folks that are very successful care a lot about their growth and their career. So ensure that they have a growth path within the company so they don’t have to go somewhere else.