Freightos started by limiting its marketplace to ocean freight from China to the US, a narrow constraint that generated early liquidity and transaction data. The founder debated this focused approach internally, but the strategy worked: matching a specific supply and demand helped reveal what customers actually valued, letting the platform expand confidently later, much like Uber's San Francisco launch or Gett's one-block taxi start.
Chapters
Did you constrain at a certain point in time, whether it's, you know, just saying, hey, you know, shipping within, you know, this kind of category or locations or?
Sure, I mean, and it was a little bit of an argument I had with my CEO where I said to him, look, you know, in order to start getting transactions, we need to constrain our origin country, our destination country, and what types of freight, right? When you ship, you could ship by air, you can ship by ocean, you can ship a full container, you can ship, As a part of a container, you can ship trucking, you can do trains. So there are lots of different options, right? And the dream was to do everything, right? So when I came to my CEO and I said, I'm sorry, we have to start China to US, just boxes by ocean, he was like, really? You know, he's like, next you're gonna tell me that you only wanna do this zip code to this zip code. And I said, yeah, if that's what it takes, right? Because I had heard, I'd heard a great podcast by, uh, I think it was the founder of Gett, who, who said that when they started their taxi service, uh, they're certain they, they did it on one block. They basically started in one block, right? And we know that of Uber as well, right? They started, um, what was it, San Francisco? And then when they wanted to find the next location, they looked to see where else searches were happening, right? So So, you know, the example I always give is that you decide you're gonna have a flea market, right? So you tell everybody, hey everybody, there's a flea market, come sell stuff, come buy stuff. And you know, you have everybody coming to sell whatever they're selling and people and nobody's meeting, right? And then you say, oh hey, let's do a flea market for books, right? And great. And then these guys bring, you know, big Russian volumes and these guys are looking to buy, you know, kids' books. And again, they're missing, right? Yeah. And so you say, okay, it's kids' books, right? Oh, different languages, right? You have to constrain at first to start getting those transactions, right? And you start getting those transactions, that's that then, and only then do you understand what your value is gonna be, right? Because you see that it actually closes and you can think in your closed room that you know exactly what you're gonna sell and exactly who's gonna buy it. You have no idea. Right? We know that about eBay. They were sure it was gonna be all about collector's items. And then suddenly they discovered that people were buying and selling cars, right? You do not know exactly where your marketplace is gonna go, and that's what's fun, right? But you're not gonna know until you start getting transactions. And when you start getting transactions and you see if they're valuable and you see if they're gonna be profitable, that's when you can start to grow. So yes, you have to constrain.
