It all began in 2014, when I first met Richard my co-founder, in the Agoda offices just across the Phrom Phong BTS station in Bangkok, Thailand. I was there as part of a startup acquisition made by Priceline (now BKNG group) and Richard was an advisor for the Agoda executive team. From that point in time, Richard and I occasionally worked together when we ran into each other when visiting the Agoda offices. Was not till 2019, when Richard came to see me in Tel Aviv, and over a nice dinner in a trendy Dizengoff restaurant that we decided to create a venture to help companies succeed in solving problems around supply and demand optimization. We have seen first-hand that Supply and Demand (s&d) optimization is a huge pain point for many companies and fundamental to why many businesses fail to deliver.
Jackson-Beer Ltd was launched (JB for you) with the sole purpose to take over the s&d optimization universe and build a world leading product that would really move the dial on these frustrations among organizations. At the very beginning we started collaborating with different companies in order to choose what area of the s&d landscape to pick first. In plain English, it means we started working as consultants in order get traction and build a proof of concept for our platform. During this time, we learnt (and keep doing it) some of the real pain points our customers had. What were those pains? Marketing optimization, pricing, supply prioritization, conversion optimization. All with the common underlying exercise of supply and demand optimization. As time passed by, it became clearer that the big vision of a one solution fits all for supply and demand optimization was sometimes a little too abstract for people to grasp and also very different over diverse industries. Companies wanted solutions for very specific problems and investing in a one solution to fix all their S&D problems at once wasn’t exactly aligned to them, in Henry Ford words, they wanted faster horses and not a car. While we didn’t leave our aspirations of world domination (in S&D optimization), it became clear that we should focus first on one vertical of the s&d optimization around search marketing. This was not the 4×4 we have planned to build but wasn’t a faster horse either, this was more as motorcycle to prove our value proposition.
Today, almost 3 years later, we are 10+ people with our first product (ATLAS) managing ~$150M USD for clients in the travel, insurance and retail industry. We have evolved from being two guys solving complex supply and demand problems with some math and code to developing a product that really does helps companies improve their performance, not less than a small miracle.
We feel that Jackson-Beer doesn’t represent us as a business anymore and today we are giving birth to: Search Machines. Search Machines is the new us, focused on search, and while that may change in the future, it truly represents what we are now. (The non-official reason for the name change, is that people were getting us confused with a brewing factory or a fancy lawyer firm.) We are now at the stage where we have proven value over multiple scenarios (clients) and are ready to provide those benefits to a growing number of businesses and industries. Search Machines is where we take our vast experiences and learnings, plus some catharsis from JB, and consolidate into a new vision: to bring the best search performance for our partners across the funnel.
We are still at the beginning of our journey, of building our full 4×4 vehicle, with a clearer vision and determination to succeed! If you received this post’s link it’s because you’re very important to us. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line with your feedback, we love to listen.
Shlomi
