Alon Partuk Episode
EPISODE SUMMARY
What Happened vs. What's Happening: Closing the 3PL Billing Gap
Guest: Alon Partuk, Founder & CEO, Octup Intelligence | Host: Ben Hopkins
Alon Partuk raised $2.5 million for his direct-to-consumer brand, Apricoat, then walked into a rented warehouse in China and watched orders being checked off by hand on paper. Years of chasing transparency from 3PLs led him to build Octup, which sits on top of the WMS, TMS and other systems. He and Ben cover what 3PLs lose between the floor and the invoice, and what to do about it.
* WMS shows what happened: A WMS is an execution platform and only part of a 3PL's data. Octup is built to show what's happening and why it matters.
* Billing leaks in three places: Value-added services that never get recorded, storage billed from snapshots, and contracts that don't get translated into the right charges.
* Capture the analog events: Tracking manual work by QR code, voice note, image or file adds almost 20% more billable events, by Alon's numbers.
* Most operators already know: About 90% of the people Octup speaks with are aware they're losing money.
* A crowded WMS market: With 150 to 180 systems out there, about every third client is moving or considering a move. Alon expects more M&A, and not everyone will survive.
* Transparency keeps clients: Brands stay with partners they can trust, and hiding problems doesn't make them go away. Showing the full picture also puts misses in context.
* Agents need a data foundation: Octup built its billing data first, and now adds agents for shipping costs, financing, routing and claims.
* Founder lessons: Work with clients from day one, fail fast, and remember that not deciding costs more than being wrong.
Connect with Alon: Find Alon Partuk on LinkedIn, or look for Octup at industry events like Manifest.
Transcription
Ben Hopkins
[00.00.07]
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Warehouse Underground podcast, real talk for warehouse, DC and FC professionals of all levels around the globe. I am Ben, the host of the show, and joining me on the show today is Alon Partuk. He's the founder and CEO of Octup Intelligence, which is changing the 3PL playbook. They're a full-blown operations platform for warehouses. Now, if you work in warehouses, 3PLs, distribution centers or whatever, you know that as you scale, there is a whole lot of complexity happening inside the system. You've got all these things going on on the floor. You've got invoices, you've got picks, you've got inventory adjustments, you've got things with the TMS and the WMS, and value-added services sometimes get added as well. As you grow, it's exciting when you get more clients, but it can be very stressful for the operators who are trying to manage all that, unless you have a system behind the scenes that can really work for you and help you pull all of those things together. Octup is right there in that space, offering a fantastic solution. So I'm excited to talk with Alon about this, because I have felt this pain myself, as I know many of you have, and I'm excited that there are more tools coming online to help. So with that, I'll bring him on the stage right now. Alon?
Alon Partuk
[00.01.34]
Ben, how are you? Thank you for having me today. Excited to be here.
Ben Hopkins
[00.01.39]
Yeah, you got it, man. We chatted a little bit before the show. Just so people know, it's 6 a.m. where I am, and I know you are across the globe.
Alon Partuk
[00.01.46]
It's 1 p.m. It's the middle of the day.
Ben Hopkins
[00.01.52]
Yeah. So you're out having lunch while I'm having my breakfast in here. We record this podcast at all hours, for the folks out there who want to know, so I appreciate it, sir. It's really good to meet you and chat with you today. I'm looking forward to it.
Alon Partuk
[00.02.06]
Amazing. Thank you very much. And I appreciate that you woke up so early to talk with me today.
Ben Hopkins
[00.02.12]
Yeah, well, I got an extra hour of sleep. We have that cool thing with daylight saving time, so I get that extra hour. Not a problem. Cool. So I gave a little bit about your background at Octup and starting Octup. But before we get too deep into the show, tell the audience who you are. I know you have an interesting background and journey in the industry. What was that like, and what led you to where you are today with Octup?
Alon Partuk
[00.02.40]
Yeah, you're right. I have the luxury of seeing the industry from both sides, in a sense. First, I'm 37 years old, a father to two beautiful boys. One is three years old and the other is seven. I've been an entrepreneur for over 13 years, and Octup is the third company I'm building. I started my journey building my own business when I was still a student and kind of grew up into the entrepreneur world. My experience of seeing the friction, the challenges and the frustrating part of the logistics space came when I founded my own direct-to-consumer brand back in 2017, 2018. I started my journey with an idea on crowdfunding. Kickstarter and Indiegogo were a big thing back then; remember, we're talking about before Covid. I did one of the biggest campaigns ever done in the design category on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I raised $2.5 million in a month and basically bootstrapped the brand into a multi-million dollar operation in the US. I did it before Covid, during Covid and after Covid, so I was able to see all the challenges the industry has to offer, specifically on the logistics side. I was working with many 3PLs. I had one in Hong Kong, two in the US and a few in Europe. And as a brand owner, I always had the gap of getting transparency into what was going on inside the warehouse and transparency on the billing side. So I literally took myself to visit those warehouses, and that is where I really saw how this industry operates and the opportunities to automate and bring a lot of value. That is what actually led me to build Octup, to solve those major challenges in the logistics space.
Ben Hopkins
[00.04.47]
Yeah. And there are many. I think it requires people to do what you did, and that is to go there, look behind the scenes, really peel back that curtain and start to see, gosh, there are a lot of pain points in what's happening here. So in your background, was it a progressive realization that, hey, there can be a solution for this, this doesn't have to be this way? Or was there a lightbulb moment at a particular site, a particular place? How did it begin to form in your head?
Alon Partuk
[00.05.23]
It's a great question. In this specific area, it wasn't one big moment. It was a process, right? When I started, I didn't know anything about logistics. Think about it: I have $2.5 million in the bank, 15,000 end clients that I need to distribute to in more than 80 countries, and 200,000 units that I need to produce. So I took myself to China, visited the factories and the warehouses, started to talk with a lot of people and learned everything from scratch. I didn't know what LTL is. I didn't know how tariffs work. I didn't know anything. That's how I built my knowledge. And it was funny, because I remember when I started to send messages to previous campaign owners on Kickstarter. I said, "Listen, guys, I'm from Apricoat. We just finished a campaign. Can you help me?" People were nice and really tried to help, but they needed to explain the basic terms of logistics to me. Then I realized I just needed to go to China and figure this out. I remember the day I went to the warehouse; if you want, I will send you the picture. We needed to take a full warehouse to distribute our first campaign, because it was so massive that we had to rent a full facility for all of our orders. I remember looking at the people, and there was a guy printing papers, where each paper was an order. Each picker was going around marking a V next to each item, putting them in a bag, and there was a guy checking the bag against his paper. I looked at them and thought, this really can't make sense, that it's all on paper and manual. Obviously there were a lot of issues in this project: missed items, different colors, et cetera, because when you're doing something manually, especially at this scale, you will find a lot of issues. Then I started to move inventory into the US and look at the different warehouses operating out there. Each one had its own level of excellence and its own level of automation. This is one of the largest industries globally, and by the way, it keeps growing. The level of technology in this industry, what it was and still is, is what really caught me. I said, okay, something here is broken, and there is a market failure that needs to be fixed. That's how the idea of Octup came into the world.
Ben Hopkins
[00.08.07]
Yeah. There is a wide variety in the type of capability, automation or technology you see in warehouses. I've been in a lot of them. Some of them are very cutting edge, top of the line, and they get a lot of hype. But there are many, many others out there that are nowhere close to that, and a lot of them operate how you describe, with the paper and the pencil and the check. So while the cool stuff is out there and everybody sees it, I think the lion's share is probably not that way. It's probably more like how you describe. Now, I follow you on LinkedIn. I'll put that out there. We're connected on LinkedIn, and if people are not following you, they should, because there's lots of cool information. One of the quotes I've seen from you that I like is about a WMS, which most everybody knows is a warehouse management system. A WMS shows what happened. That's true. Octup shows what's happening and why it matters. So tell me a little bit more about that quote and what you mean by that.
Alon Partuk
[00.09.21]
When you look at the ecosystem, it's worth mentioning that the industry has evolved dramatically. There is a lot of offering now, and a lot of new technology coming into the space. This is good. This is amazing. The industry is going through a big change. The smart operators are the ones using this technology and not relying on manual processes. Because I also hear people say, "No, I'm never going to replace the 200 hours of manual billing I'm doing, because no technology can do it better than the team." So the gap is still there. When you look at the operation, whether we talk about the 3PL operation or the logistics operation generally, the WMS is a major part of it, but it's one part of the data stream that people operate in. There are so many data points and entries, whether it's the carrier data, the TMS or the OMS you're using. You mentioned value-added services, and that is one of the biggest leakages we see. Most warehouses just don't know how to track value-added services, special projects and all of what we call analog events that happen inside and outside the four walls of the warehouse. So how does Octup solve it? We built a tool that can capture those analog events. You can capture any unexpected inbound, any working hours, anything you're doing outside the regular operations of the 3PL that usually isn't tracked, or isn't tracked properly, in the WMS. The WMS is only part of the 3PL's data set. It's an execution platform. With Octup, we are not only looking at the data end to end, we are creating a live digital twin of the business. We know at any point in time what's going on, and that allows us to better predict, and also to map and reconcile all of those events. We created a very unique data infrastructure that knows at any point in time what's going on inside the warehouse and why it matters. And I'll tell you why it matters. We not only know what's going on in your warehouse, we also know what's going on in the industry today. We're working with hundreds of 3PLs across the US, and that allows us to build many, many models on top of this data set, and each one of them can generate tons of value for the 3PL. Because we own the data, and because we know the context and the industry, we have a view that's much wider than the WMS. A WMS is an execution platform. It was designed to make sure that the order that comes in gets packed and is ready for shipment. Octup is designed to sit on top of all of your operation and give you a view that helps you be more profitable, be more efficient and automate the manual processes happening inside the warehouse. And when you own the data, you can generate endless opportunities, because you have the infrastructure to do it.
Ben Hopkins
[00.12.33]
Yeah, I think that is a fantastic piece of value there from Octup. Here's how it would normally happen in a lot of locations: you have a warehouse manager, you have an ops leader, maybe you have somebody who works in IT, and they design it for the baseline of what they're doing, the blocking and tackling, to use a football term in the United States. But the warehouse is always taking on new things. Can you do this? Can you do this new request from this customer? And they figure out a way to patch it together and make it happen. But it's very rarely fully optimized in the system and specifically designed for that, because it's not really designed by the experts. It's designed by the people at that site, and they don't have that big-picture, high-level view of what everybody else is doing in the industry and what the benchmarks are, and that puts them at a disadvantage. The longer they have to do that, the more that disadvantage grows, the more visibility they lose and the more pain falls on the ops leaders. And that can lead to what we'll talk about here, and that is billing leakage. It's great that all these things are happening on the floor, in the WMS and all the systems. But ultimately, we want to invoice the customer for the product or the services we provide, and that has to work through the system too. Sometimes there's just a gap right there. There are holes between what's happening on the floor and what's happening on the actual billing side. That's the reality, and people need to know that. Your warehouse manager is not going to be able to catch all this, right? So talk to me about that. How do you see billing leakage, and what types of numbers are people actually experiencing out there, whether they know it or whether it's a mystery to them?
Alon Partuk
[00.14.41]
I will start with your last question. I want to say that 90% of the people we speak with are aware that they're losing money. Very rarely do we meet with a potential client who says, "No, we're fine, we're 100% covered." It happens once in a while, and by the way, we really like to prove them wrong, right? Because we know no one is perfect, and we know that technology can catch more. When you look at the WMS market, and I don't like to put all of the weight on the WMS, it's very important to mention that the WMS is a major, dominant part of the operation, but it's a super fragmented market. There are more than 150 to 180 different WMSs in the market, and we hear about a new one coming in every day. Some of them are super legacy, dated technology. Some of them are better than others. Some of them can do good B2B. Some of them can do good D2C. Some of them can do some level of combination between the two. And what we see today, and this is a big added value of Octup, is a lot of movement between WMSs, something we never saw before. Today, every third client we speak with is moving to a new WMS, considering moving or planning to move. The reason for that, I think, is that there is a very confusing situation right now. There are a lot of promises out there that aren't always met. So Octup basically comes in with no agenda. We're saying we're agnostic. We don't care. WMSs can do whatever they do best. We're not trying to replace the WMS. We're not trying to replace the TMS or the OMS. We're not trying to replace anyone. We're trying to sit on top of them. This is the beautiful thing, because if you want to move to a new WMS, you just plug and play the different platform. You keep operating, billing continues as usual, and you don't lose any context of the data. Now let's come back to the question you asked me. Where do we see leakage? I will always come back to the data, because to bill correctly, you need to collect the data correctly. We need to make sure we are charging our clients for the services we have provided. I want to say that the majority of WMSs in the market cannot track the manual events, the analog events happening inside the four walls of the warehouse, what we call value-added services. Value-added services can be a lot of different things, but today we see almost 20% additional events by collecting those manual processes inside the warehouse. So we built a tool that can track those events from a voice note, from an image, from a file you can upload. Think about it: you have daily employees coming into work. You require them to do a few hours on a specific line. Sometimes they need to put it on a note or an Excel file or whatever. So many events get lost that in the end you're just losing money, because you still need to pay those employees. So at Octup we have what we call the value-added services module. The moment an employee scans a QR code, they get the module where they can put in their name and the hours they spent, and even record a note: "I did three pallets for this specific client." Boom. Our system captures those events automatically, connects them to the relevant client and the relevant billing cycle, and makes sure we are capturing all the events. That's one of the areas where we see a lot of value for our clients. The second part is how you capture the storage data in a way that really represents what's going on in the warehouse. A lot of WMSs and systems capture a snapshot: a monthly snapshot, a weekly snapshot, maybe a daily snapshot of the data. At Octup, we know exactly in real time what's going on. We can tell what the maximum storage was. We know the aging of the storage. If you want to charge on different attributes, maybe cubic feet, maybe location type, sometimes you don't have the data to do it. And the third piece, where by the way we see a lot of friction, is how you translate your contract with your clients. It can be super complicated to make sure you really charge them what you agreed on, not more and not less. So when you have the data and you're capturing all the events, you then need to make sure the client is being charged according to the contract. When you have technology that completely automates that, with an agent that can capture those rate cards or contracts, that's where you're covering the full picture of the operation. So they're losing money by not collecting all the events on value-added services, by not capturing some events on the storage side, and by not translating the contract in the best way.
Ben Hopkins
[00.20.32]
Yeah, I like that, because what you said is true. A lot of WMS systems give you a snapshot view of what you see that day, but they're not really giving you the trend. They're not giving you the predictive. They're not really giving you any of the things you need to run the operation, particularly in storage. Sometimes I think that causes people to make inadequate or uninformed decisions, because they can only base them on that snapshot, and that's not really that helpful. A warehouse is a living, breathing being, if you will. What it looks like on October 15th is different from what it looked like on August 15th. So it's just one data point of many that you need, but people make all sorts of decisions all the time based on that one data point, because that's when they went to look at it. And Alon, why do you think... and this is just a freebie question, right? We didn't talk about this before, but I don't know why so many new vendors are trying to enter the space as new WMS vendors. I really have no idea, because it is so saturated. There are so many of them. I look at it and I go, why would you do this? You cannot differentiate yourself from everybody else. It's all the same stuff. It just seems like the space is flooded with WMSs. You're not a WMS, but what's your opinion on that?
Alon Partuk
[00.21.45]
I will tell you what I think, and again, this is my personal view of the market. I want to take you back before Covid. Before Covid, the e-commerce industry was growing, but not at the pace Covid took it to. I remember those days as a brand owner. We literally grew 500% month after month. The industry was exploding. A lot of technology was directed at the e-commerce industry. We had Shopify, we had applications, and really everything was covered for us. But the logistics side was kind of neglected. So many 3PLs needed to build out to support this high-growth industry. The WMS needed to make sure it was meeting the requirements of the warehouse floor, so you saw a lot of WMSs created or growing at that point in time. They're still fighting between themselves, trying first to meet the requirements of the floor, and most of them still have a lot of gaps. No one is perfect. The new era of WMSs is not really good at B2B; they're more D2C. You have more traditional ones that focus on B2B and do a very bad job on D2C. The ones that are really good at B2B have a shitty billing mechanism and shitty reporting, and you have a lot of on-prem systems. There is so much friction in this industry that we see a lot of movement. As we mentioned before, everyone is trying to find the next best WMS. And a lot of operators come and say, "Why has no one really built the perfect WMS?" So they try to build that perfect system. But they discover that they've come into a very tough market, with a lot of requirements and a lot of edge cases you need to support. Creating the perfect WMS is a challenge, but distribution is also a challenge. If I need to convince you to move to a new WMS, you will start to ask questions. You don't want to put your whole operation at risk on a new platform. So there is also an entry barrier. I believe that in the end, this market will go through a lot of M&A, which we already see, and a lot of players will not survive the journey. It doesn't make sense to have such a fragmented market.
Ben Hopkins
[00.24.40]
Yeah. I look at it sometimes and I go, I'm not sure. If you've been into one warehouse, you've been into one warehouse. But if you've been in a lot of them, you see there's so much variation. There are so many variables. This company wants to do this, and that one operates it this way. And I think sometimes these young or new WMS vendors don't have their arms around all that yet. I don't think they have their arms around how big of a lift this is and how complex it is. Maybe they just assume, "Oh yeah, we know warehousing, we've been in here." Then they really start to get in, and they're having to build this customization and that customization, and they get so far away from where they originally started that now it just doesn't work. It's fragmented. I think that happens a lot. There are some very basic facilities out there, but things just change so fast. I don't know why.
Alon Partuk
[00.25.38]
I think you're so right. Look at the 3PLs themselves now, not at the WMS, and why this is so complicated today. The client, the brand, requires a lot of support from its partner. It's the combination of the two, B2B and D2C. "I want you to help me with freight brokerage, maybe import, customs, et cetera." So we see a lot of 3PLs now trying to be a one-stop shop. They're opening a small freight brokerage to maybe do some trucking, and they're opening a small import agency to help their clients with imports, because they're trying to be a one-stop shop. When you start to have that kind of complex operation, that's where most of the WMSs really start lacking. If I need to support my clients with B2B and I need my WMS to support that, I need to find someone who can do both, right? But no one can do both well, because each is a specific expertise. The ones that went into D2C need to manage their resources, and they're saying, "We're growing very well on the D2C side, so we don't have the time or the effort to invest in B2B." So we're living in a very strange and very interesting time. You also don't see the big players, the Googles of the world, the Microsofts of the world, coming in. Ideally, you'd say they would build the perfect system and conquer the industry, right? It's a huge opportunity. It's a $1 trillion market that hasn't found its balance, in a sense, from my perspective. So it's very interesting to see where the market will go in the next few years, because there are definitely going to be a lot of changes.
Ben Hopkins
[00.27.33]
Yeah, we'll see about that. It's growing fast, it's happening fast and it's accelerating. Now let me ask this question, because when you have a product like Octup, all of a sudden the transparency and visibility people get is huge. It gets much, much better. Sometimes the fear people have is, "Okay, well, the more transparent I am with my client or my customer, that's just going to invite more scrutiny. They're just going to want to know more and more." But really, most times it's the opposite of that. Would you agree that more transparency is going to build more trust, and help you grow the relationship, much more than it will invite more scrutiny? What do you see on that one?
Alon Partuk
[00.28.22]
I personally believe that the biggest misconception in the industry is that brands are looking for the cheapest provider. It's true up to a point. I'm still working with the same warehouse I was working with when I started my Kickstarter campaign, and I've been approached by endless providers telling me, "I'm going to give you a better price. I'm going to finance your move." When you have a good partner, and you know that when things get rough and don't go as planned you can pick up the phone and they will help you, you will stay with that provider. When you know you can trust this partner, you will think a few times before moving to a new one to save a few bucks. And I think today more than ever, people are getting used to those reports. It's very easy to create this transparency with AI, with MCP, et cetera. If you don't provide that level of transparency and access to the data, it's going to be very hard for you, because hiding the problems doesn't mean they will disappear. One way or another, the clients will figure out those problems, come to you, and you will need to explain. I want to say the majority of 3PLs really want this transparency. We do see some that have an objection to it, but most of the market really believes in transparency and partnership. And I believe the ones that withhold that transparency from their clients will have a very hard time surviving, because the clients, and when I say clients I mean the brands, really demand it. It also reduces the hassle. Why do you want an email with an explanation every time an order doesn't ship on time, or for every invoice? Just expose the data. Create a good relationship with the client. Provide them everything they need to make a decision and be a partner for them. We're living in an industry that's all about people. It's all about people supporting other people's businesses. You need to be there for them. If not, it's going to be very hard for you to grow or to maintain your partnership with your clients.
Ben Hopkins
[00.30.51]
Yeah. Well, it's a basic principle in my mind. You have kids, you said so at the beginning, and I have two middle schoolers. I tell them all the time, "This problem is not going to go away. You need to be forthcoming and bring it to me, and then we can solve it." I know there are going to be problems. So if all I ever hear from you is perfect reporting, and you're in middle school, I know that's BS. I know there are issues going on, right? The same thing goes for 3PLs out there. If you just say, "Well, I don't want to expose any of the bad stuff," no, no, no. They know it's there. It's the reality of ops. I think you hurt yourself, and you start to lose trust. With so much competition in the market today, people demand that. I think you're 100% spot on.
Alon Partuk
[00.31.36]
I just want to add that sometimes seeing the full picture also allows you to understand the ratio, right? If I see 100 shipments that didn't deliver on time or didn't ship within the SLA, I might ask why those 100 didn't ship. But if it's 100 shipments out of 20,000 or 100,000 that shipped on time, the picture is a little different, right? It's a fraction of the operation. You can say, "Okay, right, we didn't meet the SLA. We will fix it. We have our reasons." Most of the time the client will work with you. But if you create mistrust, it will be much, much worse.
Ben Hopkins
[00.32.25]
Yep, I agree with that 100%. It's just a reality. And honestly, that is something some people will evaluate in a 3PL. How well can they handle adversity? How well can they bounce back from issues? How transparent can they be? Because that's just how the world of ops is. Things happen. Now talk to me about your agents. You talked a little bit about this before, but everybody wants to learn more about AI, artificial intelligence and all that, and agents are a part of that. I don't think they're fully understood by everyone. So if I'm a 3PL leader out there, how could I leverage AI agents in my day-to-day operation? How does that work? What does that look like for me?
Alon Partuk
[00.33.15]
It's a great question, because you're actually talking about the transformation the company has been doing over the last six months. We discussed a lot about billing and revenue assurance, and that is how Octup started. We started by taking the most expensive, manual, fragmented and challenging process in the 3PL, and that's the billing process. Octup now has a top-notch billing engine in the market. The results are outstanding, and the value for clients is amazing. But to build this billing engine, we needed to map every event happening on the floor of the warehouse, get the data, reconcile the information and make sure we were closing the loop. So in the end, we spent a lot of money building this data infrastructure that can connect to endless data points. It can capture events from analog data, from the WMSs in the market, from carrier data, from accounting, et cetera. So we have an asset, what we call the data moat. It's like a generator. We can plug anything into the other side and activate those agents. We talked about billing and payments, which are operating with all of our clients. Now we're offering many other modules, agents or products that sit on top of this infrastructure. Today we have modules like financing and factoring. We allow our clients to get financing directly from the platform, again leveraging this data. We have modules that let you save costs on the last mile. We call it the shipping optimization agent. It sits on top of your data and shows how we can decrease your cost with USPS, DHL and FedEx by 25 to 35%, leveraging our volume and our data. Today it's generating approximately $5 to $6 billion of revenue across all of our clients. We have agents that automate the manual processes your back office is doing today, whether it's B2B routing, which we know is a big pain point, or claims automation. All of those agents, in the end, allow you to reduce cost dramatically. In a low-margin industry, every dollar counts. You want to make sure you're charging your clients what you need to charge, and to focus on what really matters: your clients and your business. We're literally taking one of the most stressed industries out there and empowering it dramatically to do much more, be much more efficient and generate much more revenue for the organization.
Ben Hopkins
[00.36.06]
Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that's just sorely needed out there for so many companies and ops leaders. It helps them grow with less friction and less headache, and everybody wants that. Okay, so I'm going to ask you a question. You have a software company now. What if you could go back in time? Are there things you wish you would have known before you did this? Do you have any battle scars from your past? Or do you say, "No, it's been great. Running a startup has been super easy, no problem, stress free, and I hope everyone does it"?
Alon Partuk
[00.36.49]
How much time do we have? I think I made all the mistakes in the book. Just kidding. The software space has been through major changes in the last year, and there are a lot of lessons learned for me as an entrepreneur. But I want to discuss two things. Obviously, it's super hard and super easy to build a software technology today. It's super easy because AI has basically solved the barrier to building. The entry to building stuff is much easier. But that's also the hard part, right? To build software today, you really need to bring something cutting edge, or you need to own the asset. What Octup has is the data asset. You cannot vibe code the industry data that we have. You cannot vibe code the infrastructure that we created. It's much more in the backbone of the business than something you can write code or reports for. Looking back, the first thing is not to create assumptions that aren't based on experience. As entrepreneurs, when we're building a product, we sometimes fall in love with what we're doing and think the market needs or wants it before we see that happen. When I started to build Octup, I built so much stuff, and I said, "Of course people want it. It's an amazing feature. Why not?" We built it, we came to the market with it, and the clients just didn't want it. So we threw it away. We spent, I don't know, months of development time when the market didn't actually need what we built. So work with the clients from day one. I think that's the tip for any entrepreneur in any business. You will never know what you don't know until you start to be in the market. The second piece of advice is something I got from one of my mentors or investors: fail fast. You need to try. Don't be afraid to try, and don't be afraid to fail. Try something and fail fast. If it's not working, move on. If it's working, double down, because you never know. With tons of opportunities, you need to make decisions. Not making a decision is much worse than trying, failing and moving on. The cost of error today is less than the cost of not making a decision. So I'm a big fan of "let's try stuff." If it doesn't work, move on. But if it works, it can be a game changer for the company. If you don't try, you'll never know.
Ben Hopkins
[00.39.50]
Yeah. The analogy I've heard people use is that it's not like building a human. When you build a human, you get one shot at this, and you've got to grow them for nine months and everything. That's not how this stuff is. You just need to go try, fail, next, next, next, and that's how you grow a little bit faster. So Octup is not a human. That's the takeaway from the show. Cool. Well, where can people find out more about you? Like I said, I follow you online, and I'll put up the link to your website here. I know you're at trade shows and all over the industry at events, so if people go to those, they'll probably see you. But where can they find you, and what do you have on the horizon for 2027?
Alon Partuk
[00.40.36]
Yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn, as you mentioned. You can reach out and connect with me, and I'm happy to talk with any people from the industry. I'm going to be at a lot of physical events next year. You're going to see Octup a lot, whether it's Manifest or other industry events, really growing our footprint in the market. I think LinkedIn is the best way to approach me.
Ben Hopkins
[00.41.06]
All right, good deal, man. Well, Alon, I really appreciate you appearing on the podcast. It was great talking with you. I love the product you've made. I love what you're doing, and I wish I would have had Octup back in my career. When I look back at some of the things I was running, man, I really could have used something like this. It would have taken away a lot of my gray hairs. I'm disappointed I didn't have it then, but I'm really happy that you're here now, providing so much value for the operators and companies out there. It's a great product. I really like it.
Alon Partuk
[00.41.41]
Amazing. Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate it. It was a great call, and thank you for inviting me on the podcast.
Ben Hopkins
[00.41.48]
You got it, man. Absolutely. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and I will see you around the LinkedIn streets, as they say, Alon.
Alon Partuk
[00.41.54]
Thank you. Take care, my friend. Bye bye.
Ben Hopkins
[00.42.01]
All right. Alon Partuk, founder and CEO of Octup. Check him out today if you do not follow him. If you're not familiar with what they do, you should be, because they are on the cutting edge of something very good that can really help operations, and honestly it should just be the backbone, the foundation of what you run. So thanks again, Alon. I really appreciate you appearing on the podcast. As The Warehouse Underground goes, please sign up for the community. We are approaching 400 people who have signed up for the community. It's free at thewarehouseunderground.com. There are message boards, networking and information sharing in there, and we've done some live town halls. The community gets bigger and bigger every week, so sign up for that today. Also check out the Learn Lab at The Warehouse Underground. We have five new contributors in the Learn Lab right now, with a bunch of new articles and new tools in there. So check that out. And lastly, please check out The Tiger Team Show. That is the other podcast I do with my co-host, Jordan. If you haven't heard that show, you would love it. It's like this show, except much different. It's all about life in warehouses, DCs and FCs, but with a lot of wit, humor and sarcasm draped all over it. It's like being in the break room with your peers after HR went home for the day. So if you want some lighthearted relief during peak season this year, check out The Tiger Team Show today. If you work in those facilities, I know you will get the humor right away. As this podcast goes, I will see everyone next week for another episode. Thank you for listening. Bye bye.
