Transcript: How to Build a Product for an Industry You Don't Know | Eliav Moshe (Fullpath)

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi, this is Eyal, welcome to Product Builder, the place for the most interesting product conversations. I'm the owner of Userflowzz and, among other things, the host of this podcast, and my goal here is for us to improve our product skills together. If this is your first time here, I hope you enjoy it, and if you've already listened and gotten value, I'd really appreciate it if you shared the podcast with a friend. So let's go, we're starting. What's up, Eliav? Great, great. Even better seeing you. Great to see you. You came down to us from Jerusalem. Did you come down? I came down... don't tell me "came down"; to Jerusalem you always go up. So with us is Eliav Moshe, who is co-founder and CPO at Fullpath.

Who is Eliav: from App Store apps to Fullpath

Eliav Moshe: [00:43] Eliav, tell us a bit about yourself. Born and raised Israeli, as they say. I grew up in Jerusalem, a Jerusalemite in my blood. I studied mathematics at the Hebrew University, with a passion for software development from a very, very young age. I think I wrote my first program somewhere at the start of high school, and since then I've been in these worlds for twenty-something years, approaching 30. Wow. And how did you end up at Fullpath? So the truth is that in those days I was deep, deep in app development; those were the early days of the iPhone, the App Store celebration, app development. And my passion was always end-to-end software development. So really the business side, the technology side, where both can meet and help each other. But when I say end to end, I mean everything, that is, it's also sales, it's also customer support, it's really like a one-man show. So I developed a few apps, and then my partners of today made me a pitch of, come, leave all your gigs for a second and join us for something a bit bigger. There are a lot of strings that touch; I've known them for many, many years, and from there we started this venture. When they approached you, was it really just an idea? How was it? The truth is it was a bit funny. They asked me to do some proof of concept for something; I looked at it and said, listen, I don't know what this nonsense is, but first of all, amazing people. Amazing people. My two partners: Aharon Horowitz, today our CEO, and Yishai Goldstein, our CTO, and I'm in the role of chief of product. Because when you do startups, it's mostly the people. Yes, ideas evolve, ideas change, you make pivots, you go with the flow of the venture, and it's simply magic, magic to connect with good people and set out with them on a journey, a technological and business journey. So let me sum up: you basically entered a venture you weren't sure about. One of them is a CTO, you mentioned, but still, you went and built the proof of concept with your own hands. Why? Right, right. So the truth is the CTO is mostly, he's hard-core backend in those areas. My area of expertise is mainly end to end, so I also write some backend when needed, but the uniqueness is in the full-stack area and the business connection. So when you need to write a POC and you need to run fast and you need all the pieces in one place, the emphasis was more on those areas. Of course he was also part of developing the POC. Fine, everyone does everything.

Eyal David: [03:37] Excellent. So okay, I assume that since the guys came with this business direction, they know the industry well. So let's talk for a second about the industry in general, the car industry, and maybe focus very much on where you operate.

The US car industry and the data-silo problem

Eliav Moshe: [03:48] Yes, so first of all, as an Israeli; my two partners also have American roots, so they know this industry a bit more, from home, as they say. But as an Israeli, for me it's mind-blowing. I mean, you meet an industry; we know the car industry, we know there are car dealerships and importers here, how many people already buy cars here in Israel from the importers; most of our market is a used-car market. In the United States, the car market is a superpower. To explain it to a layman, as they say: an industry that sits deep, deep inside the American GDP. We're talking about, I don't remember exactly how many percent, something like three, even above 3 percent of the GDP of the largest economy in the world. A market that rolls trillions of dollars, that's with a T. When we now hear Trump imposing tariffs on all kinds of countries, a lot of that is tariffs on which manufacturer can sell where, and whether BMW will be able to bring cars here or there. In the American consciousness, a car is the equivalent of an apartment in the Israeli consciousness. I mean, every American citizen reaches the stage where they buy a car; there's no such thing as not buying a car, and usually it's more than one car. Who do they buy it from? It's a bit different there, right? Yes, the structure of the market, and it's organized maybe historically in America: car manufacturers sell their cars through local dealerships. Through franchises. And so this greatly strengthens the American economy; it's the American middle class, small and medium businesses sitting there, and so it's very much in the American roots. And what are their challenges? So it's an industry that, technologically, if I zoom in on technology, the place where we operate, the industry is very, very fragmented. I mean, a certain dealer, a certain car dealership, when it wants to manage its operations, uses at least ten vendors, ten different technologies that don't talk to each other. That makes it very, very hard for them to create a unified experience for the consumer, for the car buyer or whoever services cars. All that distribution of data, and unifying it in a way that would later let us make an informed approach to each consumer at the right time, is something that's very, very lacking. So that's one of the challenges that, when we started working with the industry, very quickly surfaced. The question was how we can bring the Israeli mindset, the ability to solve problems, let's call it, in a very, very sober way, very fast, very technological, connect all the dots and offer a complete solution that this car dealership, this car dealership in the United States, can take, implement very, very easily in their organization, and then come and create all the marketing activities, all the interactions basically, that happen day to day as a car dealership

Eyal David: [07:11] together with their consumers. So just to get it straight for the ear: what is it, actually, you talked about easy implementation,

Implementation: from two years and a million dollars to under a week

Eliav Moshe: [07:18] what was a regular implementation, the norm until then, or now? So, excellent question, I think that's one of the pain points. A regular implementation until now, or until a few years ago, was a process that took on the order of two years, just to connect the information, to do those integrations between those systems that don't have integrations between them. On the order of two years, a cost of a million or two dollars; yes, a million dollars, you need to spend. A huge headache. More than a headache, it was something only very, very large dealerships allowed themselves to do or to get into that adventure. The product we developed is basically a product that can integrate with all those data silos, we call them, those isolated islands of data inside the dealership, in a way that everything, everything connects to each other. Today, onboarding, bringing a customer into the database and starting to let them run activities, is something that takes less than a week.

Eyal David: [08:24] Amazing. So maybe let's go deeper into that. So just tell us, where did you actually start? So that was the problem you identified, maybe let's focus it even more. There was a problem there that, A, they don't use technology, or if they do, that means there's a multitude of tools, right? Probably it also costs a lot of money, a headache, a lot of headache, that's how it sounds, and probably also not measurable. And it's not like in other industries, they basically didn't move forward, right? And there's also the element, I assume, of bringing in something new, also you,

Why the industry got stuck, and entering through conversion optimization

Eliav Moshe: [08:51] you mentioned it that way along the way. Is there more, are there more problems there that you identified? I think the question is, I'll zoom out a bit, just so the answer makes a bit of sense. So first of all, this industry, because it rolls enormous amounts of money, is an industry that's very thirsty for technological solutions. And the truth is that this industry is always on the front line of adopting new technologies. The problem is that because it's on the front line, sometimes it's behind. What do I mean? If we look back at the days of telecommunications, it's an industry that's been around for almost a hundred years, right? When the whole communications thing arrived, and I'm talking about pre-cloud days, computers came in, this industry was among the first industries, together with banking, right? So you understand, these are enormous amounts. They came in and they built huge infrastructures, including on-premises technology; they had servers in every car dealership and cables running through every office. What happened is that a few years later the cloud world arrived. What you're saying is, they were already invested in this thing. Very, very much; they invested billions in building infrastructure that, after a few years, simply got replaced by much newer infrastructure. For them, they couldn't get out of those investments they'd made, and so it took on the order of ten years until they understood that it really was time to reinvest in the worlds of cloud, the worlds of integration, the worlds of APIs and so on. And today they're closing the gap at a crazy pace. So where did you start? I'm going back to the question. So we met, our penetration into this industry came from the world of conversion optimization. Was that the same POC you talked about? Right, right. We developed a technology that basically sits inside the website; you embed it in the website, very similar to Google Analytics, and it monitors the actions of all the visitors, but unlike Google Analytics it also has an element of activation. I mean, this technology can also address each visitor according to the situation they're in, and interact with them in a way that can increase sales for that car dealership. For example, for example, a kind of survey, not a survey, but something where I'm having a conversation with it, which survey? Exactly. Let's say you're, for example, a potential car buyer, you're looking for a new Jeep and you enter the website. A car dealership doesn't only sell Jeeps; it sells a lot of types of cars with a lot of combinations and so on. When you arrive, that technology basically tracks all your actions and gradually identifies what the offer is, or what's most relevant to you, and then it starts talking to you. I mean, it can be a chatbot, it can be a certain offer, it can be changing the content you see on the website at runtime, according to the actions you take. This world is called conversion optimization; the goal is to take those visitors and convert as many of them as possible into leads, so that the dealership can later call you and close a deal. From there we expanded very quickly; we understood that all this database we'd collected could be used for additional activities beyond optimization inside the website. For example, automating the entire advertising operation. So that's further up-funnel, even before you reached the website: how you work with Google, how you work with Facebook, which ads to create, which target audiences are worth addressing. And so basically our product expanded and came out of the website and also went up-funnel, and today it's an autonomous advertising system. I can say, I want to invest 10,000 dollars, 20,000 dollars, 30,000 dollars, each according to their budget, and the system knows autonomously how to read the dealership's situation, meaning their inventory, their promotions, their target audience, and build the whole advertising operation automatically, manage that budget, drive the traffic to the website, and the second component, which does the optimization on the website, can take that over too.

Eyal David: [13:25] I love that you chose to sit where the money is, or where deals close. Take me back a second, okay? Why, I assume I also know what the answer is, but why did you actually decide to start from that place, inside the website, which basically starts around capturing the segmentation and converting better, why specifically from there?

Eliav Moshe: [13:43] So the truth is that before that we started with emails, and then from emails we got to the website. What does it mean, with emails? I have an email database? I start sending it basically to the customers... Yes, let's say you have some mailing list and you want to tailor the email to each consumer with the specific content for them. One of the things we noticed very quickly is that the amount of data you can work with in email is significantly lower than the amount of data you have on the website. Simply the number of signals you can draw. And so we moved very quickly to the website; we understood that the website has a lot of visitors, a lot of activity, an order of magnitude more. But the move to the website basically allowed us to create the buyer database, and from there came appetite; I mean, the appetite came in two places. On one hand, business appetite: a dealer comes and says, can you solve more problems for me? And I think that's maybe what symbolizes Fullpath's DNA as a company and our way of product development. We are very, very, very, very attentive to the customer. There's something else here that you're saying about it.

Eyal David: [15:05] It was also probably easier for them to bring you in; probably when you did the calculation of where to enter, it's easier to come in as an additional tool on the website that can be tested for a period. It's a pilot that probably also proved itself. How did that look? Right, from the dealer's point of view, when they come to adopt a new technology,

Eliav Moshe: [15:19] of course anything related to their revenue stream is much, much more sensitive, and so marketing is something you can only do in a second stage. Embedding something in the website, trying it for a month or so, for them that's low risk. But I think this element of coming and identifying where your customer is often surfaces solutions or paths you didn't think of, and it basically makes you go through that evolution. So the customer kind of pulls you, brings you in and invites you into their business and says, wait a second, could you maybe solve problems like this and problems like this and problems like this for me? Once you're sitting there and you're very open to listening, you're not fixated on the single product you wanted to build, it creates a lot of opportunities for evolution. I don't want to call it a pivot, because it's not really a pivot,

Eyal David: [16:13] it's simply an expansion of the product portfolio. And basically what, you heard that same feedback from several and several and several vendors, from customers, how was it?

Manufacturers, co-op and go-to-market from both ends

Eliav Moshe: [16:24] You can't ignore it. Certainly, but I think there's something here maybe a bit deeper, because it's not just one or two or three customers, it's more than that; you need to come and survey the industry you're in. So for example, when we work with the automotive industry, we of course work with the dealerships, but we also work with the manufacturers, and you also work with banks that finance... How can you, with the manufacturers, if you can... what, on the manufacturers' websites, no? No, the manufacturers themselves. So let's take, for example, we talked a bit about the structure in the United States, about car manufacturers selling through those dealerships, but they have very, very high incentives for those dealerships to sell. So take Mazda, for example. Mazda is a manufacturer that originally isn't American; it wants to sell its goods in the United States, so it goes and signs deals with those local dealerships in the United States. But it has an interest in them succeeding, and so it funds a lot, a lot of their activities. Through that funding, which in the industry is called co-op, it can control all those activities the dealerships do. So it's not exactly a puppet theater, they're still the ones who make the decisions, but the manufacturer here is a very, very decisive factor.

Eyal David: [17:41] So just give it a word: so basically it's a great go-to-market, that's what you're saying. Instead of now approaching each one individually, you basically approach the hub that holds all of them, that you can... How was it to suddenly create a meeting at Mazda, or whoever it was?

Eliav Moshe: [17:53] A, very hard; we're talking about Fortune 500, very long processes of getting into the industry, especially an Israeli company that's overseas and suddenly comes in. In those days we didn't yet have a very strong operation in the United States; since then the situation has changed a bit. But it's a process you hold from both ends, because you don't come to a player like General Motors, Stellantis, you don't come to them and say, hi, I'd like to do business with you; you hold it from both ends. Once you come with those dealers, those car dealerships, that you serve and they suddenly become your champions, they go and tell that manufacturer, listen, I did something with Fullpath and it gave me an amazing improvement in sales; that's your entry door. Then you can sit with that car manufacturer and think together with them how to leverage this momentum, how to come and implement this technology at many more dealers. Penetration through them, again, it's not that they can decide everything, but they can create the incentives, they can fund activities, money never hurts, and through that bring you in and create expansion to more customers. Amazing.

Eyal David: [19:14] After that you can also basically connect to the next manufacturer and the next manufacturer once you've created the case study; I really like that. So how long did it actually take, that stage, until you got to now working also on the ads and on the whole marketing side of the thing?

Land-and-expand cycles and working with marketing agencies

Eliav Moshe: [19:27] Broadly, we, I'd say there's a kind of land-and-expand cycle, which is basically a year and another year. So almost every product of ours is roughly a two-year cycle. I mean, product development usually takes on the order of about half a year. Then there's an initial go-to-market that takes another half a year or so. That's the year called Land: introducing a new product, a new solution, to the market. But afterwards you want to establish this product in the market. You get a lot of feedback from customers, a lot of adjustments happen, there are additional use cases, and basically the Expand is a year that's very, very essential. So throughout the company's history we've had, I think, three such rounds of land and expand, land and expand. I'll ask another question: so basically these customers worked until then with agencies, which probably ran their campaigns or all their marketing activity.

Eyal David: [20:30] You basically suddenly arrived, you had more data, so what, did you push them out, did they stay in the loop somehow? How did that look? That's also a good question of how you do market penetration,

Eliav Moshe: [20:38] because you're entering a market that already has players, and the question is whether you're entering as a direct competitor or you've come to make a certain revolution. Our tactic was a bit different, because our tool, which sits as infrastructure, can serve either the dealer directly or the agencies acting on the dealer's behalf. So our tactic was actually to work with the agencies and offer them ways to streamline their operations and ways to reach much, much better performance. Those agencies acting on behalf of the dealers are also a channel; we talked about the manufacturers, so you can do it with those agencies too, because they hold dozens of dealers in a concentrated way,

Eyal David: [21:26] and embed it in their business. They have an interest. Exactly. Cool, really. So now you're basically, tell us a bit about the company's state now.

Eliav Moshe: [21:36] So today we operate, first of all, with a very wide geographic spread, already six offices, geographic coverage across the United States, we also operate in Canada, we work with all the manufacturers, on the order of 30-something car manufacturers. In terms of car dealerships, it's already approaching 1,500 businesses that use Fullpath's technology.

Eyal David: [22:06] Businesses, meaning there's also a chain of locations there, and it's not, it's not, it's not one space, right? What does such a dealer look like, for that matter?

Eliav Moshe: [22:15] So it's significant. Yes, we're sitting today in Tel Aviv; here, if you look, there's a Peugeot dealership, a Hyundai dealership and so on. If you drive around the United States, you'll see in almost every town some avenue like that, where you'll see those dealerships really one after another, some kind of mile you drive through where you can see the car showrooms. Each one like that is, for us, a potential customer. Each such dealership employs on the order of 200 employees, I mean it's a serious business, there's real substance, totally. So let's close the parentheses, let's bring it back to the state of the company; so basically, so today how many employees are you? Just complete that. The truth is, it's hard for me to keep track already, it keeps expanding. I think they're approaching 250 employees. And the bulk is in development? In product and development? So it splits about 50-50, development versus go-to-market. In terms of our distribution, our target audience is in the United States, North America, the United States and Canada, so that's where we concentrate all the go-to-market; that's where marketing is, that's where sales is, that's where business development is. Everything related to development, product, R&D and management sits here in Israel. And basically, what are the next countries in the car industry? Germany, I assume, something like that? What's the next thing? Where else do they consume cars? So the car industry is very, very interesting in that it's very different in its structure depending on geography. The American market is considered the biggest, biggest, biggest market, it's also the most aggressive, and its mechanism, its financial mechanism, is very, very interesting, very American in its DNA. The Europeans are much more conservative; the structure of the industry there is different, there the manufacturers are much stronger than those dealers. If you look at Asia, that's a completely different world; if you look at South America, that's also completely different, Australia, I mean, it's a different structure of markets.

Eyal David: [24:33] And are there other players who know how to work there, for that matter, like you there? So usually the other markets trail behind the American market.

Eliav Moshe: [24:44] We see a lot of delegations of software developers and so on who come to the American market to see how the American market does things, and then import the technologies to those markets. We're in conversation; usually what drives it is those manufacturers. So if you have Mazda, which sells cars both in Europe and in the United States, they usually take what they saw working for them in the American market, which is much more aggressive,

Eyal David: [25:10] and import it, usually to the European market, and from there onward. And taking us back a second, because you talked about onboarding, basically, of a customer, which today takes much less. So how does it look? In the first stage you bring them only into the website part, the conversion optimization, and then after some time you add the marketing element,

Eliav Moshe: [25:30] how does it look? So one of the things we focused on during the last two or three years is developing integrations, in order to make sure onboarding can be as fast as possible. So on average, when we do onboarding for a specific dealer, we'll connect on the order of 15 systems. And connecting 15 systems in a week is a challenge, making sure they're really synchronized, and so we developed a lot of integrations in collaboration with those companies. Today we offer 200-something integrations, all automotive-specific, just so you understand the size of the tech industry in automotive. So today we have integrations with them, and it's really a one-click integration. I mean, you can go in, put in an API, or you can go in and put in some identifier relevant to that integration, and that's it. So the process today is very, very simple; all you need is to have the permission,

Eyal David: [26:36] that's why it takes its course. Fine, clear, and that's the thing. And then you basically start from the website, I understand? So we'll also start from the website,

Eliav Moshe: [26:43] from there we'll continue to their CRM, which is the customer management system. There are other automotive-specific systems; there's a system called DMS, Dealer Management System, which is basically the system that connects them to the manufacturer, the system that connects them to the Ministry of Transportation and so on. And of course we connect to their entire marketing operation. So whether it's the software that sends emails, how they send text messages, how they advertise on Google and Facebook; the goal is to create a complete picture of every car buyer, and so you want to be in all those places. For example, an integration we recently expanded is a connection to call tracking. You want every phone call to come in, Gen AI analyzes it, puts all the information into the personal profile of each visitor, and from there the information flows across the system to all the marketing channels. What did you use? So in that area we use, either if there's a company already doing it, doing their call tracking, we take it from there, or they don't have one, and then we offer it; here we use OpenAI.

Eyal David: [27:55] Okay, cool. So where are your challenges today? The state of the company right now, or the company's phase right now,

Foot in the door, the end-game and ROI in B2B

Eliav Moshe: [28:03] is growth. Basically expansion, basically to more dealerships, more customers? Yes, so right now the effort is very, very concentrated on expanding our activity to more dealerships. Again, there are players in the industry we compete against; every time we go and give a pitch, you need to understand these are businesses that roll a lot of money, you need to come and understand what the existing tech stack is, how you replace it, whether you can really replace all of it. So today go-to-market is our main focus as a company. And it's much easier, though, to come in with just the conversion optimization, right? At the end of the day. That's true; getting a foot in the door, coming in with solution 1 and from there coming and expanding, that's the common tactic. At the same time, once you work with B2B businesses, they always ask what the end-game is. I mean, these are businesses, think that you have 200 employees, you don't want to bring in some solution every three days and implement it in the company. That's something very significant operationally, and so they always want to know where this is going, where it's expanding. So what will the full plan be? There's no problem starting in one place, but you already have to come and lay out your doctrine, or how this thing looks on a timeline. What's the next thing they want? Today, the thing that maybe most drives those car dealerships is of course the bottom line, sales. They want to see that you can come and streamline their operations and help them sell more, but efficiency, I mean the cost of operation; the competitiveness in this market is very, very high, and so they want one solution that's complete, that lets them save money, they don't need to pay a lot of providers to perform those activities for them. And so when we come, and this is maybe one of our philosophies, we're always, always in a trend of expanding our product scope, in a way that lets us provide one complete, holistic, fully integrated solution to that car dealership. So ROI is the thing you basically want to present all the time, okay. Totally.

Eyal David: [30:30] So tell me for a second, okay, we understood Fullpath really well, I think. I didn't go down much into product matters, but it sounds fascinating. Tell me, so today when you're basically looking for product people, what in your eyes are the most important skills? Product people, I think it's maybe the persona that's most, in my eyes,

What makes a good product person: the dance between business and technology

Eliav Moshe: [30:48] most interesting sitting inside our company, inside the world of development in general. A product person is multidisciplinary by definition. Doing product means sitting in the middle between business, understanding your company's goals, and the customer, on the other side understanding the customer's goals, and also sitting very deep in the worlds of technology, so you understand which solutions you're able to create, and also being inside the worlds of sales, to know how your product can really be made accessible, who your competitors are, and you also need to be inside the worlds of customer support, to understand the challenges there. You have to master everything. There's this anecdote: when I went to university, mathematics studies, I was debating whether to study computer engineering at the Hebrew University. I was there at the open day, and the late Professor Tishby was there, he passed away a few years ago, and he told us a sentence that really bothered me at the time. He said, if it were up to me, I wouldn't accept any of you, because to study computer engineering you first need to study computer science, and mathematics, and physics, and then we'll consider whether to accept you to computer engineering. Some kind of threshold condition like that. When I take that today to the worlds of product, product management, then a good product manager, supposedly, I'd first send them to business school, I'd want them to spend some time in sales, I'd want them to spend some time in customer support, I'd want them to spend time in all those areas, because then they'll be able to create that ensemble, the connection between those worlds. I say it because we really see it day to day. We see that when you need to create that connectivity, to really offer a solution where all those stakeholders are all happy, and you reach a product that's very, very complete, where you really managed to understand the problem space, you really managed to understand the solution you're offering, and it really plays, and you can really take it to market in a way that the market adopts it, and the company enters a growth mode,

Eyal David: [33:20] hyper-growth. That's a very serious challenge. And tell me, Eliav, it sounds a lot like how you were when... pitched you the idea, right? You'd been through quite a road as a founder and such. So tell me for a second: today, when people come to interview with you,

What a product interview at Fullpath looks like

Eliav Moshe: [33:37] what do people fail on? Is it on those areas? Which questions do you ask to actually validate those areas? Look, I'll tell you roughly what an interview looks like with us and where the weak points are, or what I'd recommend people pay attention to. So broadly we try to examine, in a relatively short interview, an hour, an hour and a half or so, whether that candidate, whoever comes to interview for a product role with us, really has that DNA of being able to live with one foot in the business, one foot in the technological world, and make the connection between those things. So at the most basic level, do you need to come to you already knowing the business? The truth is that the DNA matters more than knowing my business specifically, and so you can do the same exercise on almost any business you like. But something very, very important that we put a strong emphasis on during the interview is taking you a bit out of, as they say, the comfort zone, because you want that flexibility of thinking, to identify how sometimes a certain opportunity in the business can have an impact, and how you'll now find the solutions in the other worlds to support that need the business raised, and vice versa. I mean, if you have, for example, when you look at the technical worlds and you identify those challenges or maybe opportunities you have in the technological worlds to drive additional things, do you have enough of that mental flexibility also in the worlds of business, also in the worlds of sales, a lot of creativity? Let's call it that dance between art and science, so here too, to see mainly the way of thinking. Are you very fixated? Yes, you prepared something, you have a certain agenda and now you're trying very, very hard to stick to it, or are you open enough to create that flexibility along your way? Here too there are questions of dosage; you don't want to be too flexible. You still need to have a certain line you want, you need some kind of compass. So again, to come and challenge a bit. So give an example of such a question, how do you start something like that? I think a typical question: we usually present to that candidate our business, Fullpath, the industry we're in, and we invite the candidate to think about some feature or product. It can be something aimed at that car dealership, it can be a product aimed at the car buyer, it could be some idea for a product or feature that's internal for Fullpath. Really flexible to choose whatever they want, because again, that's not what we're really testing; the idea itself isn't what matters. And then we'll come and see, we'll ask that candidate to define which problem they're trying to solve, what the solution is, which tools they use, how they present ROI. So that's, let's call it, the start of the conversation. But then, during the conversation, we'll try to take it specifically to the places that weren't planned. We'll try to change a bit the basic assumptions the whole structure is built on, to see how that change happens at runtime, right? So of course this is done as a dialogue, it's a conversation. It's simply sitting and talking about product, and you gradually understand how people's way of thinking or approach to certain places works,

Eyal David: [37:16] it's fun, it's fun. It's fun on your side. Tell me, and how actually, where do people fail? In which places do they fail?

Where candidates fail: rigid thinking and no business connection

Eliav Moshe: [37:26] So I think people mainly fail either on mental rigidity. I mean, when you come and I planned something specific, no, this is the line and you have to stick to it. That's one place. I think another place is the business connection. A lot of people who do product, as they say, have a certain philosophy about what it means to do product, to do product right. This is how you do product. I read, I learned, I heard, this is product. So the truth is that product is about finding the solutions for your customers. You're here to serve your customers. Your goal is to understand the customer, understand the problem they have, and come and offer them a solution, a specific solution. If that solution doesn't work for the customer, you didn't do product. You think you need to think about the customer but also about the business. Certainly, certainly. It's important to remember that, we're not philanthropists. Right, right. And so product is in all those worlds. I mean, you basically need to create that constellation where you solve your customer's problems, but you serve all the stakeholders, because if you created a product that solves the customer's problem but isn't technologically feasible, you did nothing. And if you created something, solved the problem for the customer, and even created a technological solution, only implementing it will take you two years, you did nothing. And if you made a product that's worth a million dollars, but the customer is only willing to pay a thousand dollars for it, you did nothing. And if you made a product that has a lot of friction behind it and you can't serve the customer over time, then again you did nothing. So basically creating that constellation, where you understand all the stakeholders, you understand the whole set of business considerations of all those stakeholders,

Eyal David: [39:26] and you manage to create a solution, then you succeeded. Totally. And another question, tell me, do you do this interview? Do the two of you do it on a whiteboard? Are you basically also the source of information? How does it look? Is there anyone else in the room? We usually use, we let the candidate present.

Eliav Moshe: [39:45] First of all, so usually it will be a presentation they prepared in advance. What do you expect to see in that presentation? The story you just talked about? Yes, yes, very much; it doesn't need to be a lot. Again, it's just a basis for discussion, the goal isn't the presentation. So it's presenting the problem, presenting the solution, maybe two or three more slides of the product architecture or something like that, but the emphasis isn't the presentation, the emphasis is the conversation that takes place afterwards. The conversation usually takes place really verbally; you sit around the table and simply talk. Of course there's a whiteboard and every now and then we scribble on it and draw, just to illustrate the ideas. But it's mainly, again, we try to see how people think. Will people be creative enough, mentally flexible enough, to come and enter a certain industry,

Eyal David: [40:37] understand the challenges and create solutions? I love that, I love that you opened that up. I hope that maybe if people hear this episode they'll come to you better prepared for interviews. Overall, in my eyes it was a really good and interesting episode. I think I'd be really happy if you came back in a year to tell us basically how you conquered the market,

Eliav Moshe: [40:56] how you entered... why the next territory you said you're entering, that you want to enter? Because after all every state in the United States is also a territory for you, right? How does it look? Right, so right now in the United States we've already spread across all the states; we have good geographic coverage. We have a customer in Hawaii that I'd really like to visit one day, but yes, the expansion right now will probably be to additional markets; again, we're starting to talk a bit about Europe, but TBD. TBD, so in a year we'll do a ping. Okay, what do you wish for yourself in five years? I would have said grandchildren, but the truth is I deserve a congratulations: a grandchild was born. Congratulations! Yes, a grandchild was born about a month ago, so maybe lots of grandchildren. Business-wise, we're in growth, there's very, very big momentum; I'd say conquer the market both here and there. You don't look like a grandfather.

Eyal David: [41:59] So heartfelt congratulations, and good luck with it. And if people want to get in touch with you and ask questions, where's the best place to do it? It's LinkedIn. So we'll leave a link. Okay Eliav, thank you very much and happy Purim. Thanks, thanks, bye bye. Hi friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and follow us, of course, for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app. And of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd love for you to write to us. We'd be very happy with five stars on every platform, and for you to follow us so more listeners can discover us and find the podcast. You can also find the previous episodes on every app or on the YouTube channel; we have links in the description. So until next time, let's go, be efficient, and bye bye.