#372 – How Hikari Senju built a hockey stick by preparing for the moment others missed

A story about preparation beating speed—when you know what's coming.

For SaaS founders tired of rushing features to market—and wondering if there's a smarter way to build lasting competitive advantage.

Most SaaS companies don't fail because they move too slow. They fail because they chase shortcuts instead of building what customers actually value.

Hikari Senju, CEO of Omneky, took a different path. The son of an artist with computer science training from Harvard, he focused on building real customer value while competitors rushed AI tools to market. He spent years perfecting return on ad spend and aesthetic quality that customers actually cared about. When AI quality finally improved in 2024, he was the only one delivering superior outcomes, and his signups grew 4x in one month.

And this inspired me to invite Hikari to my podcast. We explore how understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features. Hikari shares insights about why focusing on outcomes customers pay for eliminates vanity metrics, how "grow slow, grow real" keeps you from blowing it later, and why most founders optimize for what impresses other founders instead of what drives customer results. You'll discover the difference between building systems that work versus building features that sound clever.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

• They focus on the essence
• They acknowledge they can't please everyone

Hikari's story is proof that traction often starts by doing what most others avoid.

Here's one of Hikari's quotes that captures his build-real philosophy:

"You can hustle and you can fake it till you make it only so far, but it's going to catch up to you. If you want to build a generation-defining company, then you have to focus on the basics. It's usually not just one hack or one thing. It's usually a million small things that you've assembled together in a way that works perfectly as a system and that is hard to replicate by a competitor, because it's built off all these teeny differentiations you've done because you've just thought way more deeply about this problem for a longer period of time."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

• Why understanding what customers actually value beats building impressive features
• What "grow slow, grow real" means for founders chasing quick wins
• When building complete systems creates unbeatable advantages over feature builders

Guest Info

Guest: Hikari Senju, CEO at Omneky

Website: https://www.omneky.com/