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When the birthday gift Eliad Inbar ordered online for his wife arrived, it was all wrong. It was much too big and “totally inappropriate.”
Rushed, Inbar returned the gift and went the brick and mortar route. He knew he wasn’t alone either; lots of shoppers end up disappointed with the products they order online because the size turns out wrong or the pictures misrepresent the item. For retailers, it means money lost spent dealing with returns and unhappy customers. Inbar figured he’d do something about that.
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Inbar and his co-founder Yevgeniy Kuznetsov (pictured left), both originally from Israel, started Tangiblee earlier this year. Their product offers a way for online retailers to give context to their product, by showing its relative size and let’s customers compare the product with other known items. For example, if the store Inbar ordered his wife’s jewelry from had used his system, he could have known the earrings were the size of a baseball instead of a quarter.
Setting Down Chicago Roots
The Israeli duo came to Chicago for Techstars (they graduated in August) and Inbar decided to stay. Navigating the American business system has been a learning curve; adapting to American culture, the language and the sales culture has been a test for the team (from the outside, the company seems to be assimilating just fine).
Inbar says expanding outside of his home country is a typical business route for Israeli companies, but it normally happens much later in the process. He feels that getting the chance so early on with Techstars is helping him learn about a global way of selling. “Chicago being a big community of sales oriented and commerce oriented people, it’s a good place to build your DNA of how to sell the products you are building,” said Inbar.
From their offices in Chicago and Israel, Tangiblee is attracting a global network of customers, including a few large American clients, as well as some in the UK, India, Australia and South America.
Tangiblee’s global client base is due not just to the international nature of the co-founders, but the global nature of the problem. “It’s a problem that’s common for everybody. [Online shopping is] not a tangible experience, its very amorphic, static and flat,” said Inbar.
In contrast, the shopping experience he provides is tangible. And it gives customers a way to gauge their expectations, cutting down disappointment and subsequent returns.
Sell First, Build Second
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Both Inbar (pictured left) and Kuznetsov have engineering backgrounds and worked for technology companies in the past. His previous employer had a technology and then looked for a way to market, but Tangiblee took the opposite route. After getting a minimal viable product, “we develop from the customer acquirement backwards,” he added.
That model has worked well for the team, who can devote time to the right improvements. Tangiblee is working to make their product the default image on their customer’s website, instead of the their current set-up, which is a button on the product page. That development is client-driven and was a pleasant surprise when customers started asking for it.
Now that the company has gotten its product to the right maturity level, the team is looking to expand its market share and scaling their revenue (though they will continue to improve the product). For a product that directly ties to their customer's key performance indicators (KPIs), there is a clear route to showing their value.
Inbar just brought on a few more employees to the Chicago office and says he is always looking for the right sales and engineering talent.
For a company that started with an unfortunate shopping experience, Inbar joked at Techstars that his company saves marriages (or at least helps with buying loved ones the right gifts).
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