Ali Yıldırım, founder of Sighthem
As a trade professional, I kept seeing the same picture for years: Excel, WhatsApp, and a customer list that lived in one person's head. Sighthem is not a tech suggestion for teams trying to escape that picture; it is the operational backbone they need to step into.
Background & Approach
Sighthem didn't appear overnight. Across years of working as a trade professional inside exporter and importer companies in different sectors, I built modules, formulas, and small systems that made each team's work easier. As I moved from one company to another, I kept seeing the same gap: there was no shared backbone for trade operations. I told myself "trade has to become visible," and over the years I consolidated the automations, systems, and code I had built one by one into a single platform, Sighthem.
Sighthem is the product of pieces validated inside real operations over many years. When a new need or a practical problem surfaces, the solution is shaped together with the teams living that problem in the field, not only on a developer's desk, and then placed into the product. The target stays fixed: work that takes five people running manually should be doable by one well-equipped person, on a single panel, visible to the whole team.
I am both a software developer and a trade practitioner, so I live on both sides from the inside. That lets me answer 'is this actually usable' upfront, in every detail from screen design and data model to document flow and the L/C screen. Sighthem was built for trade practice by someone who is inside trade practice; we didn't bend a generic CRM into trade ops, we built the trade workflow into the data model first and then layered CRM, orders, shipments, and collection on top.
Areas of Expertise
- Trade operations management (export and import)
- Distributor management (domestic and international channels)
- Digital trade (B2B portals, online sales channels)
- Automation and operational systems (workflows, reporting)
- Customer acquisition (lead generation, fairs, digital marketing)
- Brand design and corporate identity
- Forwarder and customs operations (shipping, documents, declarations)
- Import operations (supplier management, customs, warehousing)
Written Contributions
I publish hands-on guides on the Sighthem blog covering practical trade-team problems:
- From Excel to CRM, a 7-step guide
- Exporter VAT-refund guide
- Incoterms 2020 guide, 11 terms
- L/C step by step, 5 lifecycle stages
- How to find the right HS code
Contact
Company details on the About page; product security on the Security page.