Freightos launched with a broad digital-marketing campaign targeting China-to-US shippers, but discovered their real market was half a million small e-commerce sellers on Etsy and Amazon with no direct access to freight providers. After six months of iteration, they narrowed focus to these mom-and-pop importers and later found their SaaS users became the core marketplace buyers.
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So, how did you think about, you know, demand and attracting that initial demand? You know, like, who was that? Who was it for on the demand side?
Interesting thing is always, right, you think you're going to be everything for everyone, right? And then you realize very quickly that you can't be everything for everyone and you have to find the people who you can bring particular value to, right? What we found at step 1 was we blitzed the market, we blitzed digitally. We have probably the best CMO in the world who does amazing digital marketing, and he just blitzed the world saying, you know, looking to ship from China to US, right? So it turned out that most people in the logistics business would never even think to look online because there's nothing online. Okay, so the people who are actually looking online were the very, very, very small Etsy buyers, and that turned out to be great for us at the beginning. So our demand turned out to be people who were entering the industry, had no idea how to do this, had no access to the logistics providers. You're talking about Amazon sellers, so people who were selling on Amazon, Amazon, Shopify, all these great platforms had made it really easy to create online stores. And then people were saying, okay, great, I'm going to source a product from China and sell it on one of these, right? The way they were doing that is they were using local US importers who were taking a big chunk of money, and those people were handling the import. And we suddenly made it possible For what, you know, is probably close to— before Corona and during Corona was probably close to half a million or a million even small businesses, mom-and-pop shops make it possible to actually import goods on their own without using an importer, right? We didn't know that on day one. We thought we were going to big businesses. We thought We were doing anything to anything. It took us trial and error of over the first, I would say, 6 months of really identifying the persona we really give value to. The second marketplace, it turned out that all of our SaaS users were our buyers, are our buyers right now. And that is golden, right? Because we've got these guys who are using our SaaS tools every day. To do something with their customers, and suddenly we're allowing them to extend that by back to their suppliers. And so that's really golden and that's super lucky. And it never would have occurred to us when we started the business that that would happen.
