Etgar Shpivak

What Etgar Shpivak does

Etgar Shpivak is a marketing and go-to-market advisor to founders at seed and Series A. He works on what their company sells and how it goes to market. The work is a standing session every week with the founder: the offer, how it is said, where the budget goes, and what happens on Monday.

Most of the companies are in fintech, insurtech, B2B SaaS, AI or eCommerce, and most of them are selling into the United States and Europe from somewhere else. He works from Yakum, Israel, in Hebrew and in English.

How he works

Since 2024 he has worked with founders from outside the company rather than as an employee: one standing session a week, for as long as it is useful. He works with the founder directly rather than through a marketing department.

The work starts with the offering rather than with channels or budget, and where the finding is that the product is not ready, that is the finding. He has sat in every seat the work describes: agency side, client side, a VP seat and a founder seat.

How he got here

He started as a software developer. From 2000 to 2003 he wrote software and led a development team in an Israeli Air Force intelligence unit. He took a BBA at Ono Academic College in 2008 and an MBA there in 2010, the second one in technological entrepreneurship.

In 2009 and 2010 he ran digital marketing at D-Say Interactive, an agency, where he built two service lines the firm had not had before.

From 2015 to 2017 he was VP Marketing at Neema, a fintech selling accounts and cross-border transfers to migrant workers in Israel, in a category where the alternative was a bank the customer already trusted. He rebuilt the marketing from the offer up: what Neema was selling, who it was for, and why anyone would move.

He co-founded Fixel in 2018 and ran it as CEO. Fixel scored the visitors to a website by how they behaved on it, so an advertiser could target the engaged ones without third-party cookies. Its customers included AutoTrader, Purple and Globo. The company went through Techstars Atlanta in 2018 and Plug and Play after that.

Logiq acquired Fixel in 2020. He stayed until 2023, three years after the deal, and ran the integration into the acquirer.

Teaching, writing and the podcast

He has taught at Ono Academic College since 2011 and is head of specialization there. Over the same fifteen years he has been the college's own consultant on strategy, marketing activity and new technology. Ono is the largest college in Israel. He has also lectured at Tel Aviv University, Reichman University and Sapir College.

With Yaron Aher he co-wrote Marketing in the Digital Era, a Hebrew book on digital marketing published in 2016, a bestseller now in its third edition. He has written five articles for PPC Hero. He mentors for Techstars, which Fixel went through in 2018, and for the Israel Export Institute.

In 2024 he started Founders' Marketing Compass, a podcast where founders and investors describe how they worked with their own marketing people: what they hired for, what they got, and where it went wrong. 31 conversations so far. The arguments written out of them are on the writing shelf, also grouped by topic, and everything published about him elsewhere has its own page.