In this short interview, Speaker B reflects on the pivotal growth moments for Freightos’ SMB‑focused B2B marketplace. He explains how the team first aligned everyone around a simple, concrete transaction target (buying ice‑cream for three deals in a week) to surface bottlenecks and create urgency. He then describes the deliberate elimination of “cowboy” high‑touch deals—large, messy transactions that required intensive manual effort—while acknowledging that an early, massive high‑touch deal with a toy manufacturer gave the platform credibility and a breakthrough customer base. After two years of aggressive, sales‑driven customer acquisition, the company shifted to a year of unit‑economics optimization, questioning the necessity of constant sales calls and automating key financial‑operations (FinOps) processes to enable growth without continual hiring. The narrative emphasizes practical, operational lessons: focus, noise reduction, strategic use of high‑touch wins, and systematic automation for sustainable scaling.
Chapters
What do you think some, some of the kind of pivotal moments in, in growth were along the journey?
If I look at, if, if I look at the, the SMB or the, the, the, the micro kind of marketplace, what was pivotal to growth was actually understanding what each side most wanted and focusing everybody on that, right? The way we did it was literally, I said, guys, I will buy everybody ice cream if we can get 3 transactions this week. Right. I want— I don't care. I want 3 transactions this week. And that had everybody thinking, okay, where are we getting stuck? We have leads, we have rates. What's going on? You know, where are we getting stuck? And having everybody focused and, and having daily meetings to understand, wait, why didn't we get that transaction? What? You know, I'm talking deep dive into everybody, right? And then it took a while, but that kind of started once we identified what we're allowing the transactions, and you gotta get rid of all the noise, right? For example, I remember one of the things that really helped with our growth was when I said cowboy transactions are now illegal, right? So cowboy transactions would be, When some big juicy transaction seemed to be coming down the pipe and everybody would like do anything they could to make it happen. But you'd have the whole team focused on one big transaction that was gonna end up being messy and whatnot, right? And, but it was a big, you know, a lot of money versus those ones that got really no touch. Once we had our— we had a big, a very, very big early kind of cowboy that really helped us move where somebody stumbled, somebody had some huge growth opportunity. They were making some sort of toy and it worked really well and they had no idea what they were doing. And suddenly they had tons of orders from Target and Kmart and everybody was ordering like crazy and they didn't know how to ship. this much. So, they went online, right? And I'm doing support, right? Because we, that's what I did, you know, in the beginning, you know, we're doing everything, right? And some guy's saying, well, how much would it cost to ship? And it was like a million and a half dollar deal, right? And this is a big cow— that really, you know, really got us over the hump because we suddenly were a real player and the sellers were like, okay, we can get really good deals here. And this is really important. It turned out to be the kind of cowboy deal that later I wouldn't let anyone touch. 'Cause it was so high touch. But we did that in the beginning. And in the beginning we had lots and lots of high-touch deals. And then we spent 2 years just on growth, growth, growth, growth, getting sales guys calling, doing everything we did. And then we spent a year optimizing for unit economics. So, once we saw that we had the growth, we spent a full year getting down to profitability. We already had in mind the model because that becomes, that's really important to know How are you gonna get to profitability? But it took a full year of figuring out, okay, do we really need all those sales guys making phone calls? What happens if they don't make phone calls? Do we really need— can we automate these 3 FinOps processes? Let's automate them. Of like really figuring out how do you allow yourself to grow without hiring, hiring, hiring, hiring as things are succeeding.
