Transcript: Building a Company, Not Just a Product: Early-Stage Product Management at Cinch

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi, this is Eyal, and this time Shuki Aharonovich returns for another episode. You surely remember him as a product manager at Augury; now he's the first product manager at Cinch. In this episode we talked about the move to a small early-stage company, how you build a company and not just a product, how you find product-market fit, and about the world of supply chain. It all actually started from a little tweet Shuki posted, and from there this conversation was born. So here we are with Shuki. How's it going? Great to have you back.

Shuki Aharonovich: [00:32] All good, really fun to be back. The previous episode with you was excellent, one of the most successful ones; you were still at Augury, I remember. Right. Go listen to it, about Augury's PM world — a great episode, we got a lot of feedback since then.

Eyal David: [00:46] Amazing, how fun. And yeah, as if you didn't know. Tell me for a minute — so really, since you were last here, you've gone through a journey, right? I don't know how long ago it was; I do know you started working at the new place — which isn't new anymore — a year ago.

Shuki Aharonovich: [00:59] Right, what did you actually do since Augury, what did it look like? Yeah, so I think somewhere toward the end of my tenure at Augury, I started to search myself a bit and ask myself questions about what I want to do in my third and fourth year in product management, and I think I actually realized I had reached a point where I have something to say about product management. I don't just want to do product management, I want to define product management, I want to build a product — like building a product through its various stages and defining it at all kinds of levels. So I reached a point where I have a point of view on product, there are types of product manager I prefer more and less, there are styles I like, I have playbooks, I have, you know, I have in my head what I believe when it comes to product management, and I wanted to realize that.

Eyal David: [01:49] Even before you continue, let me say that I saw your content on Twitter — great, you all have to follow him.

Shuki Aharonovich: [01:55] Thank you, thank you. And another thing that was nagging at me, which connects to the first point, is that I actually felt I want to build a company and not a product. Meaning, in the end building a product is an element that has UI, UX, algorithmics, R&D, customers — great — but I'm saying I want to apply that product mindset to building a company, to all the company's processes, to customer success and sales and employee onboarding and employer branding and defining all kinds of processes in the company that I want to take part in, and to build — instead of building a product at the level of a product, build at the level of a company, where the company is the product. So I felt that passion, and I also just felt like it, and this is a point I don't know how to say other than that I felt like an adventure story. Like I felt, in the big companies I was at, mid-size company and up — and this is probably true for corporates too — I felt it's a bit like, I don't know, a story like War and Peace or One Hundred Years of Solitude, something complex like that, nuances, the human heart, hundreds of characters, like those. And what I wanted was Harry Potter — I wanted to be part of a small team going on a journey like that, good versus evil, doing the impossible, and I wanted that experience. So somewhere there I realized that what I'm probably looking for is to join an early-stage startup as the first product manager, and that was all I wanted, to start from there and start from zero. I don't remember our conversation around this. And you actually started dating, right? Right, so the process is that I actually started first with some kind of pre-discovery, let's call it, where I started talking with other PMs at early-stage startups to understand their experience and what the pros are and what the cons are and what they like and what their tips are for me, as someone searching, and by the way, an interesting point that came up from everyone — and afterward I also used it a lot in my search process. In the end, for everyone, what made the experience good or bad was the relationship with the co-founders — that's the make or break of their career, that's what turned the experience from unbearable to amazing, and I took that with me too. And then I started doing the discovery, let's say, of the network, of the opportunities — I started talking with VCs, reaching out to all kinds of people, saying 'hey, I think I'm looking, I'm looking for a role of this kind,' because you kind of already know what you want, which is perfect; many don't come in like that. I think in general, both at Augury and here, these were already points in my career where I felt I'm taking the reins of — you know, first I start with what I want, and from there I go out to my search. In the earlier stages of a career, especially when you're a junior, inexperienced and nobody wants you, you take a bit of what you can, and the resume also looks like that. Meaning places that shut down after half a year, or places that were terribly toxic and I suffered there, but I needed to accumulate the experience. And I'm really proud of my last tenures, because these are the tenures that started from asking myself what I'm looking for and fighting for it and getting it, and shaping my own luck, so to speak. So yeah, it's really taking control of the narrative of the career. And then you actually arrived at Cinch — do you want to tell a bit? Okay, a year ago, yeah, so I arrived at Cinch. Cinch, in the dating process, it was a long process. Did you know what they do? Were you familiar with this field at all? It's Cinch — they're a startup in the logistics world, specifically a product for logistics in manufacturing companies — Coca-Cola, big ones like that, right? So Coca-Cola isn't a customer of ours, but it's a good example of our customers that we always throw out as an example: manufacturing companies that need to receive raw materials and ship them, often globally — they manufacture in China, sell in Europe, they have distribution centers in Saudi Arabia, and these shipments are complex shipments, meaning it's a ship that becomes a train that becomes a plane that becomes a truck that passes to some UPS courier who hands you a package at the door sometimes, or in other cases a train that arrives at some factory and unloads 500 tons of plastic at the factory gate. Were you familiar with this world before? No, not at all. I knew the manufacturing world from working at Augury — Augury is a system for factories, so yes, I knew the complexity of this world and how thirsty they are for new technologies, and a bit of what it looks like to sell to such organizations, but yeah, the logistics world itself

Eyal David: [06:22] and the complexity it brings with it, I wasn't familiar with. So okay, so you came to meet them, you weren't that familiar, and apparently the founders made a very good impression on you.

Shuki Aharonovich: [06:30] Yes, both the founders and the team I met, and also the process — the fact that the process was as I imagined it was in itself a positive signal for me. The process was deliberately long on both sides, because we understood that this is a moment — they understood that hiring the first product manager is one of the most significant roles you can hire for, I understood that, the experience of what it's like to work in a startup that's so crowded, so small — we're literally in two rooms, where one room has eight people, okay? And the other room has another two or so — it's a very, very crowded experience, so the ability to work with them, and also certainly if I come with a product agenda, I come — I don't really come as a sponge, I come opinionated, I come with a view on how to do product and what I'm looking for and what answer I'm looking for for myself, and to understand that I'd have the space to do that, and that it won't be constant friction with the co-founders, who have some 'I believe' or a very set agenda that happens to be the opposite of mine, so also understanding what their agendas are and what their beliefs are, and also making sure that when I want and I come and bring some case, to understand that there's someone on the other side who hears and listens and thinks and weighs. How long did this process last? Wow, the process I think was about four months of low-touch conversations, there was a first conversation with the co-founder, and then we talked again after another month, also after they'd seen a few more people, and then slowly we warmed up the pace and met with the openings, and then I'll actually take it there.

Eyal David: [08:03] We're actually — this is today's episode topic — going to talk about the differences between working in early stage, product in early stage versus mid, but let's pause for a second.

Shuki Aharonovich: [08:11] Sure, and tell us for a second about the company, really about the business, how it works. Great, so Cinch is a logistics product for manufacturing companies, so as we said, in every manufacturing company there's a logistics team that must receive raw materials and ship finished products to customers, to private customers, to other factories, to stores — every business and its complexity — and our customers' day-to-day before they come to Cinch is a bit of a 1980s day-to-day: they receive information, say, they receive invoices, they receive price quotes, they print them, put them in Excel, put them — sorry — in a binder, the binder they put in a cabinet, and afterward —

Eyal David: [08:49] there's noise here, afterward — take it easy, so you're

Shuki Aharonovich: [08:57] done. This binder in the cabinet — they drown in endless emails of updates about their shipments,

Eyal David: [09:05] because the shipments — global shipments are a noisy thing. No, tell us for a minute about this world, what is such a shipment actually? You said it's kind of a Transformer that passes

Shuki Aharonovich: [09:13] to a truck — what does it look like? So what is a shipment? A shipment is this — a truck that comes to pick up 700 boxes of shirts from a factory in China and moves it to a port in Shanghai, and at the Shanghai port the shipment is split into about seven different containers, each container goes to a different destination, to a different warehouse, one in Europe, one in Korea, one in Japan, one in the United States, and then out of — after it arrived at the port, say the port of Korea, then another truck arrives, takes the goods, moves them to the distribution center of that customer in that country; along the way you need to pay customs, to pay duties, you know, especially now with all the mess of Trump's tariffs, so there's a crazy mess around this story. This probably really caught you, right? It really caught us, it really occupied our customers, actually what scares them most is the lack of predictability — they also don't trust authorities or customs, that say, when their shipment arrives at the destination country, it'll be charged the correct tax, because the tax changes every two days, so it's like, wait, I'm sure they're tracking the tax code and they didn't give me the old rate, more the new one, more, this, and also a period when they come stressed because this thing directly affects their gross margins, and in such a moment, what will my gross margins be in Q2? And that's it, you're a product, let's talk for a second also about

Eyal David: [10:35] this issue — you touch exactly on this point of the margins, right? Of the margins, of the predictability, exactly.

Shuki Aharonovich: [10:41] Yes, so Cinch's core value proposition, after we understood that they work in an unautomated way and in a mess of information and documents — you enter Cinch's site, we use your hero, amazing, I love it, yes, an image of lots of documents, lots of documents, PDFs, emails, Excels, this, and everyone has lots of data but not many insights, no one can say anything about anything, in this world — I say this emphatically, of course there are nuances — and the first thing we do for our customers is we actually help them with the sourcing and bidding process, of choosing the supplier and choosing the route by which I want to plan the shipment. I know that today when our customers want to plan a shipment that's supposed to leave, say, from Haifa port to Marseille port, they send out an email to 20 suppliers, telling them 'this is what I need to do, this is the cargo, these are the dates' — literally a tender, yeah, and their suppliers return answers to them by email, each in his own format, some in free text in the email, some in PDF, neat, some in Excel, some say the service includes insurance, some say the service includes port work, some include customs handling, the dates — one arrives on such a date, one arrives on such a date, and what our users do today is they take these answers from the email, throw them into Excel, do some standardization themselves, and then say okay, so according to this Excel of mine, I have this shipment that's the fastest, the cheapest, the most whatever, sustainable, say, and that's a metric that interests them, and so for every shipment, and they have dozens, hundreds of shipments, depending on the size of the company — it's insane, like, you can't imagine that they work this way. How much money, what does your pitch look like? So our pitch often actually talks about the second value proposition, of the auditing of the invoices, of 'we're able' — two months after the shipment set off, then suddenly the invoice arrives and you as a user, you don't know, wait, which price quote is this invoice related to and whether the amount written on it is the correct amount? And wait, this terminology in the invoice, it says here some line item, some service that I don't think you saw in the invoice, but maybe that's just because the supplier sometimes uses different terminology between the invoice and the price quote, and every supplier does its own format and its own wording, so our value proposition is, we'll do the reconciliation between the invoice and the quote for you, we'll flag for you, you have here a discrepancy of $200 in fuel costs between the invoice and the price quote, so the value proposition is often about, thanks to us you'll save money, and it's interesting that in the end what keeps them, or what excites them, is actually the automation workflow, the UX workflow, that, as I said, instead of sending 200 emails manually, they do it through us, through our system.

Eyal David: [13:20] So in the end they come to save money, that also connects to the bottom line, right, in the end you need fewer people.

Shuki Aharonovich: [13:26] Literally, literally — at one of our customers we saw an example where, say, someone from the team literally quit, I think, and they didn't need to bring anyone to replace her, because the work became

Eyal David: [13:34] manageable by fewer people, thanks to our product. Crazy, wow. One moment before we continue, click the link to the WhatsApp group of Product Builder in the episode description and join the community, where you can continue the discussion, ask questions, and be the first to get updates about new Tachles episodes — we're waiting for you there — and now back to the episode. So you joined there actually a year ago, right, you already have enough insights to give from the vantage of a year. Yes, I think also, say, there's a really good post on Twitter that you wrote, we'll link to it, Twitter we can refer people to, but go ahead and summarize for us

Shuki Aharonovich: [14:12] before we break them all down. Yes, so let me tell the background in general. Our conversation is about — I was at a meetup organized by Symbol. Symbol is the VC that also invests in Cinch; the meetup was led by Matan Gottlieb, we also have an episode with him. Right, right, really, there's an alumni of podcast graduates here, and the meetup was intended for early stage product managers, and during the conversation, I listened to all the conversations between the meetup participants, and I wondered to myself, wait, in the end, these conversations are terribly similar to the conversations of every product manager at every company, just maybe with a swap of the characters — some product manager talks about how hard it is for him with the CEO, okay, so swap that conversation with 'it's hard for me with my product leader' or 'with someone from my VP Sales who's hard for me,' like, you have frictions with R&D — everyone has frictions with R&D — in a small startup and in mid-size companies and in corporate you have frictions with the team lead, fine, maybe different titles, the conversations or the frustrations are the same conversations and frustrations, and that led me to really think about what the characterizing things are, what the different things are, or what the right mindset is in early-stage product management work versus product management at other stages of companies, and I think, I don't know, in my opinion I managed to distill it into three bullets, where the first bullet talks about — you're here to build a company and not to build a product, I think that's also, first of all, on the defensive side, if you as a product manager, in my opinion, don't think about it as 'I'm here to build a company and not to build a product,' you miss out, or you create difficulties for yourself down the line, because if, for example, you build a Sales organization that doesn't think product-wise, for example a Sales organization that strongly believes in promising the customer each and every thing, in the end it creates for you as a product manager some debt down the line, so I have to deal with it, so I have to create a confused product with 700 modules, ultra-customizable for 700 different customers and for every flow that's one single user who uses it, it's really, really it turns into a services company, and that's also stressful, and it's not worthwhile at all this way, but there's also the matter —

Eyal David: [16:22] I think it's AI in the end, right? Like, if you create something that has no real promise in it, then you'll get eaten alive.

Shuki Aharonovich: [16:29] Right, totally, but I'm talking from the product manager's angle, in the end I say, okay, so on the defensive side of it you say, wait, I want to make it easier on myself. On the offensive side of it, you miss here the opportunity to have influence, to have influence, yes, to increase your value and your autonomy, and it's so necessary, it's so necessary, even at these stages, that someone come and look product-wise at the sales process, that someone look product-wise at customer success, that someone look product-wise at the customer onboarding process, at onboarding an employee into the company, that someone cast a product look that starts with wait, what are the results we want to achieve? Really the most basic, what's the outcome we want to achieve? How do I work backward from there? What research do I need to do? What discovery do I need to do? For us as product people these are things that feel maybe easy, natural,

Eyal David: [17:22] you step outside the product department, it's like wow, wait, it's like, hold on. No, at your place it's really two rooms, but there's really a thing I very much believe in, and I also really appreciate what you're saying, because you turn the company, everyone around you, to think this way. That's amazing in my eyes. I'm looking, you come across to me a bit as an ambassador, like an evangelist, I don't know, almost messianic, of —

Shuki Aharonovich: [17:45] if I manage to influence and instill this way of thinking in all my departments, all my people need to think ten percent more product mindset, the impact of that is crazy. And your work specifically, also to see it — literally, literally, literally. Yeah, and you know, and it's not — in the end you say, let's start from thinking about what we want to achieve and from there work backward. It's like, you say, it's almost first-principles, right? Like, such a way of thinking. It shouldn't even be like that. But it makes its impact. Amazing, amazing. The second bullet, or the second point, talks about the fact that you need to understand and embrace the dynamic of small teams. To understand that actually the level of friction, or the level of closeness, that a product manager in early stage is going to have with the whole company, with all his peers, with all his colleagues, is a level of closeness and intensity that in a mid-size company you don't know. The way I know the people who work with me on the team today, it's almost like — it's a bit cliché to say like family, but, you know, it's knowing what their illnesses are, knowing what's happening to them at home, it's knowing how they behave when they're under pressure, and knowing how to respond, it's being a bit of a psychologist maybe sometimes, it's also reaching emotional peaks like that, I don't know, I remember myself in a conversation a month ago with one of the people in the company, who tells me about some project he worked on, and it brought me to tears, it brought tears to my eyes, because I was happy for him, because he was on some journey with himself about his place in the company, and like, these are things that in mid-size and up, you don't experience these intensities, it's a story like, we said One Hundred Years of Solitude or War and Peace, so it's a story like that, and it's not a Harry Potter story with terribly high peaks — so in small-times there's some thing of terribly high peaks, there's some thing of knowing how to contain the characters and understand, this is the team and with it you need to win, and for me that was very, meaning this transition was very hard for me — if we'd talked five years ago, whether it's 'this is the team and with it we'll win,' whether it's 'this is the team, we'll swap the team and then we'll win.'

Eyal David: [19:51] There's a terrible thing here, listen, it's a bit like action I think, in a small company, notice, you're terribly dependent on the company, but you come to meetings and it's more of an involvement approach, okay, how do we do this together, how does it happen, in big companies, also when we sometimes consult, then like, you sometimes scheme, okay, now this one's coming, now he's coming, how do we actually prepare for the meeting, in order to get through it, in order to advance. You really plan how we'll get through meetings, meaning, that's where my focus goes, versus like, we're together in this and let's

Shuki Aharonovich: [20:20] advance well. Let's build the business. Exactly, exactly. So this intensity, it has things that are stunning, there are things that are hard in it, you need to know how to contain it, there's no organizational buffer, there's no distance, there's no 'I'll talk to my team lead, who'll talk to someone else's team lead' and explain to him that what he did isn't okay. There's no distance, not the physical one, and not the bureaucratic-organizational distance let's call it, like, I'm in the data department and you're in the R&D department, and you, it's like. No one here plays discipline. That's it, you also you dance around it, but the significance of soft skills in a small company, it's... it's crazy. It's always important, but in a small company, again, two rooms... literally, literally, literally. Yes, really, really, really. Yes. And the third bullet, it sounds obvious, but in every company your role as a product manager is to care for the company's success, or like, for business results. I just think the right framing for this in an early-stage startup is that you're actually responsible for making sure you're on the way to product-market fit and being with a hand on the pulse. I'm constantly asking myself questions like, did we move away from product-market fit this month, or did we get closer to product-market fit? Are the signals, like, I imagine myself a bit like some hound, that sniffs around, and tries to understand where there's prey, like, did we move away or get closer? Hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold. And that's the game, and there are of course endless books and playbooks written about product-market fit, so I won't deal with explaining how to do it, I don't think I know how to contribute something to it, I'll just say that in the end, that's what I ask myself every morning, are we moving away from product-market fit, or getting closer to product-market fit?

Eyal David: [22:01] What's this metric that leads you, that you really get up to every morning? So it's hard, because at this stage

Shuki Aharonovich: [22:08] it's still very soft, it's a lot from the gut, you know, the customers use the product, so it's not that I'll say ah, I'm looking to see bigger engagement, what am I looking to see? I'm looking to see that deals are sold faster and customers expand faster, right? If a customer after three months tells me, cool, I started with you at my site in Indonesia, now I want to move with you to a site in the United States, I'm like amazing, he loves what I'm selling, so in the end, it's very lagging, right? It's revenue, it's contracts, it's corporate, so it's very lagging. And in between, in the meantime, it's conversations with the customer. Currently I'm our customer success, and I get on every customer call, and I ask myself after every call, did he love us or not love us? Is he angry at us or not angry at us? Does he want us or not want us? Are we at risk or not at risk? And when you have too many conversations where the color is red, then wait, that's worrying, and when you have conversations where the color is green, and you say, okay, we're on the way, we're on the way to somewhere we're about to reach,

Eyal David: [23:03] that's a different feeling. Also that's it, it should also be said that at your place you can measure usage

Shuki Aharonovich: [23:09] but really the cycle, because in the end we're connected to the real world of... until the ship arrives, right right right, the ability to show value takes a moment of time. I want to show you that thanks to me I can identify for you 5% of your spend that's supposedly an overcharge or an unexpected charge you didn't know about at all, and then maybe you'll go and fight with your suppliers, hey, let's not have this happen again, there's some cycle of three months here, that's why often the UX things actually, where it's easy for us to win, because that same user who had to plan 700 shipments now, it's much easier for him, it's already some breathing room, we started, we did it, breathing room, and also another interesting thing we do, we really try to do, is to launch our customers together with processing of historical data, meaning leave the daily grind for a moment, come throw your historical data from Q1 of last year at me, we'll run it, we'll come back to you with results, I'm starting your first day with, here, see what happened with you over the last year, and when we succeed at it, well, it's excellent, it's like, it's already value, so to speak, to the customer.

Eyal David: [24:09] I have a question that'll throw us aside for a moment, and we'll come back. So actually today, if I'm a user who uses your product, from the customer calls you do hear, do they keep documenting it in binders? No, no, the change is significant. Like, that's it, and now I'll stop you, the answer is no. This gap, where they actually used your product and didn't document it in a binder, they're invested in you, what is it actually? If they decide to leave now, the company, the product, what does it look like?

Shuki Aharonovich: [24:38] It's hard, it's hard for them and it's good for us, but it goes hand in hand. Such a value they get, because the expansion with us is not just expansion to more types of shipments, to more regions, it's also even deeper into their workflow, for example in customers where we reached the deepest integration, those are customers where we also moved to being the communication channel, from the logistics department to the finance department, and then suddenly the finance department applauds, because they're tired of sending an email every time to the logistics department that says, can you approve this invoice for me? Here, back and forth — instead no, we mark it as approved for payment in their ERP systems, pay it. That's it, the finance department applauds us suddenly, so yes, that's it, in very early stages

Eyal David: [25:22] I remember it, you try to hold on to what you can, right, really really, so I don't know, I kind of thought that also, to preserve the days they're with you and they're not documenting on the side, and it's hard for them to leave, it's also a boring metric. Okay, so those are the three things, and there's another thing here that's also kind of under the table, and it's, what does your work-life balance look like now? So the work-life balance is really one of the things that worried me and I wondered

Shuki Aharonovich: [25:44] about myself, I'm also a parent and also a person who has another world besides work. I love my work very much, really want to invest and give everything at my work, but I also want to be in shape, I want to do yoga, I want to meet a friend once in a while, you know, basic things for parents, and yeah, so part of the process of discovery I did when I started interviewing and understanding that this is what I want and I talked with people who do this, I understood something very interesting, there's something in work-life balance that on one hand improves for the better, on the other hand improves for the worse. What improves for the better is that the overhead drops a lot, our ability to make decisions within the company is a matter of entering a room and talking about something for ten minutes, so in this house there are no people to sync, there are no very long processes, there are no internal meetings, like company-internal ones, at eight in the evening with some team overseas that you need to talk to, coordinate them, like there's none of this story, everything happens terribly terribly terribly fast, which currently at our size allows us to close, to reach decisions very fast and run very fast, and then in this respect, let's say in terms of amount of work hours, like absolute amount, so the amount is fine, like you can, I'm also very able to control my schedule. Meaning, I don't have corporate conventions where suddenly the product marketing department set our monthly meeting for something at eight in the evening, and we're part of a team of 400 people, and no one reschedules, because it doesn't work for me, so in this respect there's a lot of control. The other sides, but I think the stress level is higher, because in the end you walk around with some kind of worry deep, general, all the time, and also a kind of periodic worry about all kinds of things, for example you still kind of, if now the CEO gets a message from some customer of ours, or a contract that was maybe signed or a contract that's supposed to be signed, but they want to know another A, B, and C, then we'll kind of drop everything we're doing now and we'll be on it, because we want to bring in this deal, we need it, it'll determine the company's future, so I can't play a passive role here and say, well, let this thing wait for me until next week, until Sunday, no, it's some kind of point, every point is almost a make-or-break point. So in terms of amount of hours, let's call it absolute, then actually it's easier, it's better. In terms of stress, it requires some level of tense alertness and a slightly higher stress level.

Eyal David: [28:13] Oh that's wonderful, we'll tell Maayan, since we mentioned her, it's a great topic to do with founders too, all this stress. It seems related to the kind of person you are, I think also that you operate without data in many of the cases.

Shuki Aharonovich: [28:27] Right, that's also a thing, yes, I think I'm not fazed by operating without data, because in high-touch, enterprise worlds it doesn't matter that much, well, they'll stone me for this sentence, data doesn't matter. But I connect a lot to what you're saying, yes, in high-touch, enterprise you're kind of gut, gut, gut, relationships between people, relationships between the company and the customer, being a reliable partner that's trusted, that brings that same business value, that understands their business, and like if this month I see reduced platform usage from a certain customer, I don't kind of panic, I'm like wait, we'll check with them, but it's not now a red flag, a red flag, because like there are other things, so yes, there isn't a lot of data, the number of customers isn't large, it's kind of small, still at this stage, and in general as we said, in high-touch, enterprise in my opinion it's kind of less the factor, and more your gut feeling. So tell me now what the company's focus is, so the company's focus is to grow, and the focus is actually to sell and build, sell and build, to try to sell as much revenue as possible to show the traction that we believe the company can have, and to build the product — the product is a very young product with lots of gaps, on one hand our customers are very demanding, meaning they want lots of things, want it yesterday, for us that's excellent because it's a good signal that the problem is painful and they want us and they want us to solve the problem for them, that's better than sleepy customers who are kind of not sure what they signed the contract on, don't get on calls, don't want anything from you, you ask them how it's going, they tell you fine kind of and then just churn, it's not kind of, those are customers that are kind of that know how to shout at us very very loudly what they want, or when we do something not okay. Well, you were at Augury, you already know,

Eyal David: [30:17] you know this crowd of the design assembly, I have to ask you about this, how can it be, I don't know the competition in this field, what's happening there, how do they still work with binders? So I think it's, if you think about it, it's in every company,

Shuki Aharonovich: [30:32] you say, logistics, if I'm a manufacturing company, what do I prioritize my money on, on tools to — whether to develop more products, on maintenance — by the way, Augury — the upkeep of the machines, the production line, my money-making and all the rest is a bit secondary. But actually I think that in recent years, also of course with the advancement of technology and AI and everything, and also with trends that happened in this market, actually this market became more and more — instead of becoming easier and easier it became harder and harder. If you think about what happened in the logistics and supply chain world in the last six years, so if we count, there was corona, right? Lockdowns, supply chain problems, you can't get things, right, there was a period when you couldn't get new vehicles because there were no processors that didn't arrive from here and there, you had what's happening in the Red Sea, right? Houthis, firing on ships or pirates and you're like, line up, so in the Red Sea you already can't move goods, you have the Russia-Ukraine war, you have the Israel-Iran war, you have Trump's tariff, you have endless things like these that turn the world to just being harder logistically, instead of reaching a place where everything is easier, by the way, that's also one of the trends in this market where in the past the trends talked about consolidation, unification, aggregation, like one supplier, one supplier that does everything for you — all these crises taught them that this market currently must stay fragmented, you don't want to rely on any single piece of the puzzle to do everything for you end to end, you're a bit forced to use as many suppliers as possible and currently that's good, because it gives you options and flexibility, but it's just this complexity.

Eyal David: [32:12] But how, are there competitors there? So there are competitors, currently there are also

Shuki Aharonovich: [32:18] let's say our biggest competitor currently is very focused on activity within the US, which is a big enough market for them, and it's very interesting, we're focused on complex global shipments, meaning not just on shipping a truck from New York to Los Angeles but like, like we said, a truck that moves goods to a ship, that moves goods to a plane that returns to a truck, that returns to a ship. How was it born? Like the founders came with this thing? So the stories tell that the co-founders — I don't remember the exact story, but they helped the father of one of them with import-export processes of etrogim or of, what's it called? The Four Species, import-export of that, I don't remember what, and from there they kind of entered the logistics world for a moment and understood the mess that's there, and from there they kind of got passionate about the field and the rest is history. Amazing, so they actually started with complex shipments actually, that's the day-one thing. I think they understood that there's a problem in the logistics field and they wanted to enter and I think the first customers who kind of opened the door for them, those are customers who 'hey, we're really in a problem here of planning a shipment from Marseille to Hong Kong

Eyal David: [33:28] in seven hundred different ways,' so yes well, because there really was great feedback on the previous episode, so we did an inspiration corner, I want you to give the best offer you can give to someone who's, let's say, between entry into product that's not a role, or between, let's say, four or five years of experience, that'd thank you if afterward we refer to the episode, so tell someone in three months, wow this is the best thing you have to hear,

Shuki Aharonovich: [33:54] it'll be this thing. Yeah I think in general I'm looking for a moment at the episode we just talked about, everything I said isn't relevant to juniors. If you're juniors and kind of looking for the role, your first, your second, it's also a hard market, layoffs, cuts, it's not clear what's happening here, the Israeli ecosystem is expanding and contracting at the same time, that's how it feels, so this whole topic of coming with the right mindset for an early-stage startup and kind of coming to build a company, you don't have the skills, objectively it's probably too big for you, but don't be deterred, do the role, take it, take what you can from this experience, I myself look at my first experience as a product, which was being the first product at a startup and the startup seemed to me unsuccessful, that's also why they took me, because I didn't know anything about product and what I'm doing, and I hold myself 40% responsible for why it went bankrupt within half a year, so I say don't get excited by everything I said, it's kind of not applicable to juniors trying to break into product, take any role, do the best you can and grow from there. What is true, I believe and we talked about this also last time, that your growth in my opinion can't come only from the doing itself. Product is a kind of role, there's a need here for a lot of reflection and looking from inside and outside and looking at what's happening outside, so like books books books, I kind of read dozens of books about product and entrepreneurship and I think it kind of helped me a lot to bring myself to some other level, so that's kind of the tip for people who want to break into the role, and then how they grow from there, for people in the middle of their career. I think I'd be happy to see more people asking themselves, we talked about this at the start of the conversation, what am I really looking for? Why am I looking for it? And to build it a bit like a product, right? To start with kind of what's my job to be done? What's a good outcome for me? And to start working to achieve it and ask ourselves questions about the outcome, hard questions like real discovery, is this really what the user means? Or is it a thing that's kind of a surface-level answer of his and underneath there are more things? And that's it, I know in general, I'm also, I'm 37 years old, it's no secret, you can tell by looking at me, and I think I talk with my peers or friends from home, from work, and it feels like a lot of people gave up on the possibility of having it good at their work, it's like some kind of done deal that every place will have its problems, and you kind of, it's like people gave up on it and I'm like wait wait wait wait, no, in the end, ask yourselves what you want, now it may be that the journey will be hard, say my journey into Augury, where Augury was a perfect company in my eyes for a period, that I needed — what I was looking for at that time was a tough journey, and we talked about this in the previous episode, I interviewed at dozens of companies until there was a match between a company that also wants me and they also do product the way I want and it's an opportunity I'm looking for for myself and it's the manager I'm looking for for myself, so maybe not everyone has the privilege to look for work over time, maybe it's a mismatch, maybe you're between jobs but it hurts me very very much that people just give up on the opportunity to be happy

Eyal David: [37:03] at their work, and wow listen, first of all yes, great, I'm really not shy about saying this, but I'm now reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's book, it's exactly the same agenda, yes, why aren't you happy, he also talks about this, X people, half the people, I don't remember how many, 75% of people in the American market aren't satisfied with their work and then he talks about how important it is to create this vision for yourself that takes yourself to a place you really love, we talked about this also I think at the beginning around this dating you did and you came with a very clear criterion. I love it, I can say that also many people who interview and consult with me this way, these are the first questions I ask, is this what you want? Is this the direction? You arrived and you have no background in B2C, and the company is small and there's no match, and many people I think also kind of work on, maybe how to manage such a process,

Shuki Aharonovich: [37:59] and the most important thing for me in this process is to simply do discovery, like go out and talk with relevant people, say you're software developers and you want to understand what the next company I want is, you have no idea, you maybe don't know companies, you don't know philosophies, culture kind of of what's good for me and what's bad for me and all kinds of such things, great so talk with all your friends, reach out to people on LinkedIn that kind of seem to you worth talking to, I'm sure they'll agree, I this way talked with tons of strangers that I don't know, who kind of agreed to sit with me for coffee so I'd ask them about their experiences and from that you'll form an opinion. But like staying in your own head, it doesn't lead to many places, meaning, you need to get out of your head and your comfort zone in order to learn, gather information and along the way understand what's good for you, great training also in discovery really, it's discovery on yourself.

Eyal David: [38:47] What are actually the things that if someone does roll into an early-stage company, what do you recommend, that these are things one must go through, that otherwise you wouldn't take such a company, wouldn't have been willing to work at such a company.

Shuki Aharonovich: [39:01] I think it's the relationship with the CEO, like I said, the relationship with the co-founders, in the end, the overlap between the first product and the co-founder-CEO who often holds the product role, he holds the product role at all levels, he holds probably the day-to-day development in the product, the product strategy and where it's going, and your entry into the role takes space everywhere, for a moment it takes space, it takes oxygen, if you suddenly enter and maybe you change the nature of the work, how R&D works, how Customer Success works, and you need to give each other the space and also understand that there's a relationship between you that's not just giving the space, but wait, I trust this CEO and co-founder, because in the end here I'm investing my most important thing, which is my time and my energy, I trust him to bring the company to success, I trust him that he'll give it his all at any price, and that's something I'm very proud to say about Cinch, the co-founders are at an almost frighteningly high level of commitment, and they'll do everything and I'm proud to be in this, because I know that they'll always fight even harder than me, and it's fun to be, there's a good culture there, and also something suddenly popped up for me

Eyal David: [40:09] from the interview, from our previous conversation, that suddenly the reading and the mindset change you actually did around product was also a significant leap in your career, I hear you talking now, I really see it. So stunning, well, that's great inspiration, ah Shuki, first of all I want you to come back again,

Shuki Aharonovich: [40:29] before anything I need to make some significant change or that things actually go well for the company and I'll come back already, enterprise product manager, we'll already grow a lot, you understand, but I'm sure many people will want to get in touch with you again, is it okay to reach out to you on LinkedIn? Really really fun, thank you very much, bye bye, hey friends, thanks for listening,

Eyal David: [40:53] if you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe to follow us, of course for more episodes, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app, of course if you didn't find us on some app I'd be happy for you to write to us, we'd be very happy for five stars on every platform and that you follow us so that more listeners can be exposed to us and find the podcast, you can also find the previous episodes on any app or on the YouTube channel, we have links in the description, until next time, come on be efficient and bye bye.