“5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became CEO of User1st,” With Amihai Miron

Get to the market as quickly as possible with a minimum viable product. By its nature, the market will drive you to create a better iteration of your product. Additionally, planning is important, but you need to start generating some form of revenue if you want your company to eventually take off.

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Amihai Miron, the co-founder and CEO of User1st, a provider of advanced web and mobile accessibility solutions for testing, remediation, monitoring and compliance. A user experience designer by training, Miron co-founded User1st in Israel in 2012 to find a better way for designing and maintaining websites with accessibility for people with disabilities. Miron’s desire to help people in need stemmed from being the son of a Holocaust survivor, which made him sensitive to other people’s feelings and perspectives. While in his twenties, Miron worked and volunteered for organizations that helped disadvantaged children, directly managing more than 40 students across 15 schools throughout Jerusalem. His fulfilling work with children led him to pursue a career helping people, and his Buddhist belief of giving back to his community also contributed to his decision.

User1st expanded to the U.S. in 2014. Today, the company offers a set of advanced web and mobile accessibility solutions for achieving the highest level of compliance, the international specifications of the Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA. Used by a variety of industries worldwide, User1st’s solutions have been deployed to more than six million users who have remediated more than 650 internet sites comprised of more than 700,000 webpages. In 2014, Miron was awarded Israel’s Prime Minister Prize for Entrepreneurship, which recognizes innovative thinking, imagination and creativity as a vehicle for social, environmental, scientific and technological change.

Can you tell us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?

About 25 years ago I was teaching at a school in Jerusalem. While there, I worked with deaf…