Yair Miranda | Cloudinary | How Do You Bring 3D Capabilities to E-commerce? - Product Builder Podcast episode with Eyal David
Updated: 00:56:06

Yair Miranda | Cloudinary | How Do You Bring 3D Capabilities to E-commerce?

Host: · Guest: Yair Miranda · About the host

Yair Miranda, GM of Dimensions at Cloudinary, leads a startup inside a large company: a 3D product that turns a product's 3D model into images, video and AR experiences for e-commerce, without studio photo shoots. His answer to how you build a new product inside a unicorn is to act like a founder with a board and milestones, work in MVP mode even though everyone around works at scale, let data decide ("data eats conviction for breakfast"), and leverage the company's unfair advantages, like its enterprise customer base.

In this episode

  • A startup inside a large company should behave like a real startup: a board, milestones and show me the money. Vision alone isn't enough to get the next "round," even from the inside.
  • Data eats conviction for breakfast: you can argue in the room, but alpha and private beta stages are what decide. At Dimensions each stage changed the product fundamentally.
  • Use the company's unfair advantages: Cloudinary's DAM, its sales organization and its base of thousands of enterprise customers are things no outside startup gets, which is why Dimensions moved from SMB to enterprise.
  • An API wrapped in a UI isn't a product: when users didn't understand Dimensions, the team rebuilt a graphic, guided experience with ready-made samples so every user reaches an aha moment.
  • When you sell to a persona you don't know, bring in a domain expert early: in hindsight, a creative person from a photo studio should have been on the team from the alpha.
  • A good product person isn't a technician who passes requirements along. They see the big picture, stay curious, interview customers and take ownership like the CEO of the product.

Listen to this episode

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Episode Description

Yair Miranda, GM of Dimensions at Cloudinary, describes how Cloudinary, which started bootstrapped and became a unicorn in media optimization for developers, launches new pods through Emerging Business, a kind of internal incubator that tests ideas fast and shuts down what doesn't work. Dimensions is Cloudinary's 3D: a 3D model of a product that can be placed in a scene, photographed from any angle and shown in AR, instead of sending samples to a studio. Yair walks through the journey from the alpha, through a private beta with hands-on onboarding, to rebuilding the user experience when they discovered customers didn't understand the product. He explains why they moved from SMB to enterprise, how to instill MVP thinking in a team used to scale, why they needed a creative person from the start, and what he thinks sets a good product person apart: seeing the big picture and acting as the CEO of the product.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 · Intro: Cloudinary, from bootstrap to unicorn
  2. 1:59 · What Dimensions is: Cloudinary's 3D
  3. 4:47 · Emerging Business: an incubator inside the company
  4. 13:54 · Toward product-market fit, and MVP mode in a team used to scale
  5. 17:24 · SMB vs. enterprise: where to start
  6. 20:48 · Yair's background: from development to product
  7. 24:13 · Product skills: the CEO of the product
  8. 35:07 · Data eats conviction: alpha and private beta
  9. 43:44 · Customers didn't get it: rebuilding the user experience
  10. 48:08 · The shift to enterprise and looking ahead
Read the full transcript
Full transcript with speakers and timestamps

Selected quotes

“Data eats conviction for breakfast. You can argue in the room a lot, but let's see what actually catches on.”
— Yair Miranda
“Think of yourself as the CEO of the product and go for it.”
— Yair Miranda
“I'm not a research organization, and I don't want to build some pretty demo. I want to sell.”
— Yair Miranda

Questions & answers

What is Cloudinary Dimensions?

Dimensions is Cloudinary's 3D offering: a product that takes a 3D model of a product (in formats like GLB or glTF) and generates images, video and AR experiences from it for e-commerce sites. That way a brand can show a shoe, for example, in any scene and from any angle without sending a sample to a photo studio.

What is Emerging Business at Cloudinary?

An internal unit that works like an incubator. It takes an idea, lets a small team run with it, and checks as fast as possible whether there are "signs of oil." If there are, it continues; if not, it shuts the idea down and moves to the next one. Dimensions is one of its pods.

Why did Dimensions move from small customers to enterprise?

At first they targeted small businesses to reduce risk and move fast, but the data showed that the ones who really convert are larger customers. 3D requires a development team and existing models, SMBs are less willing to pay, and Cloudinary has thousands of enterprise customers it can reach through its existing sales and renewal processes.

How do you measure success at an early stage of a product like this?

In the alpha the goal was to confirm that customers had models of sufficient quality and that the output interested them. Later the metric was how many users were serving an image or model from a live website without hands-on help. Today the focus is paying customers and actual usage.

What does Yair Miranda think matters most in a product person?

Seeing the big picture and being curious, rather than being a technician who passes requirements to development. Nobody else will interview the customers or think about the next stage, so the product person should think of themselves as the CEO of the product and take ownership.

People & resources mentioned

Companies & orgs

  • Cloudinary
  • Radvision
  • Avaya
  • Wix
  • monday.com
  • Intercom
  • Gong
  • Shopify

Tools

  • Cloudinary Dimensions
  • PlaybookUX
  • Fiverr
  • Apple Vision Pro
  • GLB / glTF (3D model formats)
3D E-commerce Intrapreneurship Product-market fit MVP Enterprise PLG Cloudinary

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