Interview With Alon Partuk, Founder and CEO of Octup

Welcome to this edition of the Founder Spotlight interview! Today, we are thrilled to introduce you to the mastermind behind Octup—Alon Partuk. As the CEO and founder of Octup, Alon has created an all-in-one e-commerce operations platform that is revolutionizing the industry. With Octup, businesses can streamline their operations and reduce their costs by up to 30%! Alon is here to take us on a journey with challenges and opportunities. Get ready to be amazed!

Can you share the inspiration behind founding Octup and how the idea for an all-in-one e-commerce operations platform came about?

I have been in e-commerce for seven years since I founded Apricot. It is an outdoor adventure gear company that sells seven figures yearly. In the early days of Apricoat, I managed the operations pretty efficiently on my own. However, as it started to take off, I needed to move on and leverage a 3PL. As the company grew, the operations became more complex, and I lacked good visibility of what was happening from an operational perspective. It was a bit of a black box, and as a very analytically inclined individual, I wanted to find a better way to get the information I needed.

While looking for a solution, I found many tools for consolidated marketing reporting and insights, but none that integrated the operations side. I am a big believer that marketing drives revenue, but operations drive profit, and I really wanted to build an efficient, sustainable business. With nothing in the market, I saw the gap, and that’s how I came up with Octup!

Octup aims to cut costs by 30% for e-commerce brands. What specific features or functionalities of the platform contribute to driving efficiency and reducing business expenses?

Octup helps e-commerce brands cut costs in three main ways. First, our unique invoice ingestion system brings in an e-commerce brand’s operational invoices, categorizes the costs into buckets, and relays any hidden fees or overcharges. In the past, this has allowed brands to find 40k+ per month in hidden cost savings.

Second, our operational screen lets you look into your returns, SLA statuses, and more. By keeping a closer eye on these metrics and making decisions that optimize for this, brands can optimize their operational statistics. Finally, our platform helps brands not overspend on marketing and optimize their marketing investments. You’ve probably heard of all the problems with meta in the news recently, where your marketing spending might spike without you knowing. Octup will alert you of this so you can adjust accordingly and not waste your spending time. Further, find out which campaigns are more effective, allowing you to optimize your spending.

Automation is a key aspect of Octup’s value proposition. Can you provide examples of operations that Octup helps automate for e-commerce brands?

This really comes down to automated reporting. These days, brands collect a ton of data but often don’t know what to do with this information. They generally have to get a team to collect, clean, and analyze the data, which is often time-consuming and expensive. With Octup, all of this data processing is done automatically as we connect with your different data sources and deliver the metrics you need when needed. 

Beyond this, our AI insights sit on top of and read this data so you get automated insights and alerts with recommendations on how to act on this data.

How does the AI technology work with Octup, and what kind of insights can users expect to receive to optimize their operations and improve performance?

Because we are collecting data from a multitude of systems, the AI-insights engine sits on all of this data, finds anomalies, opportunities, etc., and uses these to deliver data recommendations.

These recommendations may be simple, like:

• Reorder a specific SKU, as you will run out of a certain product’s inventory if you don’t reorder now based on the sales velocity and lead time.
• Specific cost for an SKU is rising, increasing the price of the product.
• The invoice line from 3PL is unrecognizable; may be getting overcharged on this line item. Reach out to 3PL to find out more.

Or, get more complex and cross-organization, like:

• Marketing ROAS on a campaign is not as high as reported, as this campaign is leading to a higher level of returns than normal. Adjust reporting and spending accordingly.
• Specific products lead to more return customers than any other product. Discount this   product and market for it to get customers in so they continue as shoppers.

As the founder of Octup, what are your long-term visions and goals for the company?

I want Octup to be the main system brands use daily to run their operations. I want to continue building features and tools that allow brands to scale larger, with smaller teams, more efficiently than ever. I truly believe that by leveraging AI to deliver key recommendations, we can see teams of less than five people grow a brand to over 100M in GMV. If Octup can position ourselves as the #1 operating platform for ecommerce brands, I believe the opportunities are endless.

In the competitive landscape of e-commerce solutions, what sets Octup apart from other platforms?

Octup separated ourselves by focusing on the operations side of e-commerce. Many solutions look at marketing, inventory, or financials, but no system currently combines all of these aspects while focusing on the operational side of the business.

Congratulations on raising $4 million in your pre-seed round! Can you tell us more about it?

I truly believe that in today’s environment, you must stay profitable while scaling and building from the product out. Gone are the days when you get funding and hire a large sales team. That is why we are focused on adding talented engineers with this money, allowing us to continue building a best-in-class product. Further, from the sales and marketing side, we are focused on hiring customer success managers rather than salespeople as we want to ensure that our current clients are as happy as possible as we know customer referrals are more important than anything else.

What exciting updates or innovations can users look forward to in the upcoming years?

For one, we will continue to build out the product, improve the AI engine, and listen to our customers to find ways that we can help e-commerce brands scale efficiently. Further, a new release is coming soon, which helps deal with product protection, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Finally, based on your experiences with Octup, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to enter the same space?

I would say that it’s really crucial to focus on the customer, and build a product that is solving an active problem they are facing. There is so much tech out there these days that building a good, nice product is no longer enough. Now, you have to find a challenge the end client is actively facing and build a product that can solve this issue. On top of this, I would suggest that if you have an idea, go for it. You have to leap and start, because if you don’t build it, someone else will.