The Freight Pod
The Freight Pod is a deep dive into the journeys of the transportation and logistics industry’s brightest minds and innovators. The show is hosted by Andrew Silver, former founder and CEO of MoLo Solutions, one of the fastest-growing freight brokerages in the industry. His guests will be CEOs, founders, executives, and leaders from some of the most successful freight brokerages, trucking companies, manufacturers, and technology companies that support this great industry. Andrew will interview his guests with a focus on their life and how they got to where they are today, unlocking the key ingredients that helped them develop into the leaders they are now. He will also bring to light the fascinating stories that helped mold and shape his experiences.
The Freight Pod
Ep. #50: Dhruv Gupta, CEO and Cofounder of Drumkit
For the 50th episode of The Freight Pod, Andrew welcomes Dhruv Gupta, CEO and cofounder of Drumkit. Dhruv shares his journey from studying transportation planning at Harvard to founding Drumkit, an innovative AI-driven workflow solution for logistics companies.
In this episode, Andrew and Dhruv talk about:
- Dhruv’s experience of dealing with failure — calling his first business a “faceplant” — and what he learned that he still carries with him today.
- The importance of leading with confidence, especially through uncertain times.
- How Dhruv and his team are building Drumkit to be a tool that “conforms” to customers’ processes — and with that, how he thinks about scaling his team internally to build faster and land more customers.
- The biggest challenges the Drumkit team is having with securing new business and the unique qualities they’re bringing to the brokerage sales process.
Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.
*** This episode is brought to you by Rapido Solutions Group. I had the pleasure of working with Danny Frisco and Roberto Icaza at Coyote, as well as being a client of theirs more recently at MoLo. Their team does a great job supplying nearshore talent to brokers, carriers, and technology providers to handle any role necessary, be it customer or carrier support, back office, or tech services. Visit gorapido.com to learn more. ***
A special thanks to our additional sponsors:
- Cargado – Cargado is the first platform that connects logistics companies and trucking companies that move freight into and out of Mexico. Visit cargado.com to learn more.
- Greenscreens.ai – Greenscreens.ai is the AI-powered pricing and market intelligence tool transforming how freight brokers price freight. Visit greenscreens.ai/freightpod today!
- Metafora – Metafora is a technology consulting firm that has delivered value for over a decade to brokers, shippers, carriers, private equity firms, and freight tech companies. Check them out at metafora.net. ***
Hey listeners, before we get started today, I want to give a quick shout out and word to our sponsor, our very first sponsor, rapido Solutions Group, danny Frisco and Roberto Acasa, two longtime friends of mine, guys I've known for 10 plus years, the CEO and COO respectively, and co-founders of Rapido Solutions Group. These guys know what they're doing. I'm excited to be partnering with them to give you a little glimpse into their business. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near-shore talent to scale efficiently, operate on par with US-based teams and deliver superior customer service. These guys work with businesses from all sides of the industry 3PLs, carriers, logistics, software companies, whatever it may be. They'll build out a team and support whatever roles you need, whether it's customer or carrier, sales support, back office or tech services. These guys know logistics. They know people. It's what sets them apart in this industry. They're driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. In the current marketing conditions, where everyone is trying to be more efficient, do more with less near shoring is the latest and greatest tactic that companies are deploying to do so, and Rapido is a tremendous solution for you. So check them out at gorapidocom and thank you again for being a sponsor to our show, a great partner. We look forward to working with you To our listeners.
Speaker 1:That's it. Let's get the show on the road. Welcome back to another episode of TradePod. I'm your host, Andrew Silver. I'm joined today by Dhruv Gupta. Did I say your name right, dhruv?
Speaker 2:It's close, it's more like the word through, with a V at the end. So, like Dhruv, dhruv, that's perfect, that's perfect.
Speaker 1:Dhruv. All right, I'm glad. Thank you for the correction. I will not screw that up again. So I'm joined today by Thruv Gupta, the CEO and founder of Drumkit AI. This is my second full-blown AI conversation I've had on the show. I still know very little, but I'm trying to be as curious and eager to learn as I can, to help both myself and the audience. I would say that 2024 has been the year of AI showing up in prevalence in our space for carriers, for brokers, for shippers, and it's going to be very fun to see how companies like yours make their way in the space. But before we go deep down the rabbit hole of your business, take me back to the beginning. How did you even get into this space? Walk me through your background a little bit. What kind of led us to this point here today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and thanks so much for having me. This is going to be a lot of fun, I okay. So I moved a decent amount when I was a kid and we spent almost all of that on road trips and driving around. I just got excited about transportation, trucks and trains. I was that like loser kid on the school bus who thought like trains were cool, like, honestly, like that's the story.
Speaker 2:And so then I went to college, I went to Harvard to study computer science and political science with a focus on transportation planning, and spent a lot of time there doing research on last mile mobility, bikes and scooter sharing, all of that kind of stuff, with a real focus on this thesis that I think fundamentally, any developing economy and any developed economy is determined by how effective their transportation networks are, whether that's for people, whether that's for freight, everything else is a byproduct of that. I think that's controversial, but that's my personal thing. I think everything else is a byproduct of your logistics efficiency. And so you know I just got excited about it. I don't think I could ever do anything outside of the space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know if that's controversial. I think you could maybe argue if everything's a byproduct, but what you can't argue is the importance of it, whether it's the nucleus or it just the logistics of everything, you know drives how efficient you can do anything. So I think I think it's fair to say that was a intelligent focal point for you. Now.
Speaker 2:Well, look on the on on something called the freight pod. I feel like that's the right answer that's a good point.
Speaker 1:So you see, you went to harvard, you studied computer science, um, and transportation planning. Like, was transportation planning a major?
Speaker 2:you could study at harvard or no, uh yeah, technically it was political science science, but I did a lot of my research and work at either the Kennedy School, which is like their school of political science and government on the graduate side, so you had had like former DOT secretaries and stuff doing classes there, and then on the at the design school, which is basically architecture and transportation planning.
Speaker 2:So again you had, you know, former DOT secretaries and stuff doing doing classes there. So just a lot of opportunity to learn from people that like from from the low level where, where they're talking about okay, well, you know, if you're trying to plan a road, this is the capacity that you need and I've done things like standing outside and in like the 10 degree Boston weather clicking, like how you know, trying to trying to tally how many people are walking down the street, how many cars are driving by, to ride alongs, to even rebalancing bikes and scooters out in the streets. So it's one of those things where you can get your hands dirty but also learn a little bit more about the math and some of the science behind how people make some of these economic decisions around logistics.
Speaker 1:And was the plan all along to start your own business, or what was when you finished school? What'd you do from there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So right out of college I actually did start a Y Combinator backed business where we were doing last mile delivery optimization, bikes and scooter sharing optimization. This was going into COVID, though, so, honestly, kind of a crap time to be starting anything. So I ended up leaving and started an election tech nonprofit. We helped a few thousand folks vote in Milwaukee and in Atlanta, both sides of the aisle. It was a great time. And then from there I realized like my background was all in product and engineering and I wanted to get better at rounding out my skills.
Speaker 2:My thought is I'm the child of immigrants. I immigrated here when I was a year old and my parents worked really hard the classic things right, studying under the candlelight, finding a way to get a degree in the US and whatnot, of light, like finding a way to get a degree in the US and whatnot and so I felt kind of I almost felt like I owed it to them that at least in my 20s let me take a bet on myself, let me just try, see what happens, and if it works, it works, that's great. If it doesn't work, it's okay. I've got a good degree, I can get another job and there's a way for me to have that stable lifestyle and so, frankly, I I I'll be the first to acknowledge I think I come from a really privileged background, but, dude, that's like. It gives you the opportunity to take risks. I think that's fundamental thing that people have to acknowledge that, like, if you want to do something big, you need some resources to do it, and I'm lucky enough to have some of those.
Speaker 1:You need some resources to do it, and I'm lucky enough to have some of those, and so your first business you started was a yc business around. You said last mile for scooter and bike sharing yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I I would bike around a lot in boston, um, and uh, I don't know if you can see it, but I've got my bike helmet on the on the shelf there, um, no, I don't yeah, it's okay, um, uh and and dude man, those systems are managed like crap it's.
Speaker 2:It's really rough like he any any place. You try to go where where they've got like high demand. You're never going to be able to find a bike or scooter or anything like that, and vice versa. So I spent a lot of time doing simulation research on you know what's the most efficient way of getting bikes and scooters out there. How many, how many do you need in a certain location that kind of stuff? And then tried to turn that into a company. But it's tough to sell that kind of product when no one's riding bikes.
Speaker 1:So the first business was a fail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely yeah, faceplant.
Speaker 1:And kind of walk me through that experience of what what dealing with that failure was like. Were you attached to the business or were you just kind of a 22 year old kid throwing, throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck?
Speaker 2:No, it was really personal for me actually, um, because I had spent three years building that technology, um and uh, I still think it's actually like really useful and valuable and valuable. Started the business with a good friend of mine and I think once we got there, once COVID hit, honestly we just couldn't figure out. We got in our heads that this product is never going to work and we just couldn't figure out what to do next. So, you know, had a falling out as a result of that and it just feels like this personal failure, both from the perspective of I feel like it sucks that that relationship didn't pan out and also from the perspective of I spent a long time trying to build something here. We got some traction, we had people using it that really enjoyed using it and, because of circumstances that are somewhat out of your control, you just got stuck.
Speaker 1:And I mean so, would you say COVID was the driving factor behind that business failing.
Speaker 2:I don't want to blame COVID. Covid is the easy thing to blame. I ultimately came down to personal relationships and not feeling confident enough in like an ethos or in like a vision. I think, had we stuck it out, we probably could have built something really impressive, but we just didn't chose not to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what kind of lessons could you take from that experience to certainly carry with you into future endeavors and you know certainly your current endeavor- yeah it.
Speaker 2:I think it's a. It's about confidence. At the end of the day, it's about confidence and then making sure that you emanate that confidence with the people that you work with. Um, there's like a couple of ways to to lead a company and you see stuff like this all the time right, where folks are, there's like cracking the whip. And then there's bringing people along and look, I'll be the first to say there's a time and place for both of them. Sometimes you really do just have to crack the whip and say, look, you got to trust me, we just got to get this going. And sometimes you have to spend all your time and energy making sure that people feel involved, excited and enthusiastic about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:In fact, drumkit is the result of a pivot. We spent a couple of years building out telematics device integrations, like API integrations into those tools, which I think was a great product. We have another partner that's carrying that torch forward and I think they're going to see a lot of success. But, frankly, my team fell out of love with it and I think basically the experience that we had was hey, we're a venture backed. You know, company that comes with different expectations good or bad but it comes with different expectations the amount of money that you need to make and the speed at which you need to get. That is something that we felt like we weren't passionate enough about doing on that side, and so we had to bring along our team that had signed up to build this API integration product to first go through pivot hell, where you're basically thinking, shit, I don't know what I'm doing all day. What am I supposed to tell the team? I don't know what I'm doing all day, to then transitioning to doing all day, to then transitioning to okay, here's the new vision. Everybody's got to get along and here's why it's going to be the next big thing. Or here's why we can support our customers in doing this thing that they couldn't do before. We can measure our impact on these folks and percentage of GDP.
Speaker 2:You want to start thinking, thinking about those, those large dreams, but sometimes you have to. Sometimes you really just have to tell people guys, you gotta you just gotta trust me, you gotta keep going and we gotta get this done. Um, and so I think the biggest thing was like calibrating on. When do you decide this isn't right? And then how do you make sure that the people around you follow you through that.
Speaker 2:I'm not an expert by any means, but at least experiencing some of that failure also helped me kind of feel like you know what. The downside isn't that bad, because not only did I learn a lot, but also the people around me respected that. I took that bet on myself and it kind of comes full circle to to like you know the, the things that I'm doing for, inspired by my family or my experience there. They were the first to say, hey, you tried, like that's okay, I'm proud of you either way and I want you to try again. Not like you tried. That's hilarious. It sucks that you failed like boo-hoo, go get a job. There was a little bit of that. There was a little bit of go get a job. Time to go get a real job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I couldn't do any of this without their support.
Speaker 1:So you said a number of things there that I kind of want to touch on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you, let me just ramble.
Speaker 1:No, listen, I enjoyed it Very, very kind of, thoughtful and insightful. So the first thought I have is around the confidence piece as a leader. It's so important. I mean, as you were talking, there are parts of my own history that kept jumping back into my mind as you were talking, there are parts of my own history that kept jumping back into my mind and in those 10 of times of uncertainty COVID being a great example of one, and it's different, right, you know, in your case COVID put a halt to your business and made opportunity look quite scarce In brokerage.
Speaker 1:Covid, in a lot of ways, exploded opportunity and there still was a lot of not concern but uncertainty around how long certain things would last, what was coming. I mean, certainly at some point, the danger of what we were dealing with. And there's there's definitely a time and a place to be extremely honest and open about the lack of certainty you have, but pair it with confidence around the things that you know your team is good at and the thing that you know have gotten your team to where they are. So I think, as I try to put this in words, that may help other founders and and leaders, it's like in times of uncertainty. There are two ways, I think, that you can help your team along, one of which is to be honest about the challenges that you face and being willing to admit you don't necessarily have all the solutions to the problems, and a team appreciates hearing that from their leader, necessarily like in a way that's kind of humble. The second part to that is being confident and leaning into the strengths of the team and understanding. I think you know, in my case in brokerage, it was leaning into the fact that we know how to execute for our customers in a way that makes them happy. Orders are going to be whether it's 5x because there's panic buying, or a 10th of the amount, or all new lanes because of certain changes that are happening in the network. Whatever it may be, we knew how to execute and if we lean into that, we can give ourselves confidence in what we're doing and carry ourselves forward.
Speaker 1:In your case, I'm thinking about it from the lens of like you know. You know you have a really smart team, really capable team, who's built great technology, but you've fallen out of love with the product. Yeah, there's, there's. There's something that I as an employee would really, I think, appreciate about my leader coming to me and saying, hey, like we don't think this product is the path we need to be on anymore, because it doesn't make sense to us. I can't be passionate about it. We don't see the future for it the way we did before, but, leaning into the strengths of look at what we've built, though. Look at the way our team works together. Look at how much progress we made in the time we did. Let's keep this team together. We see a new path, and then you got to get the team fired up about that path. Am I kind of hitting on how you went through that process, or does that make sense?
Speaker 2:You described it perfectly. What we did was we flew everybody out to Boston and we said hey guys, here's the deal, here's the situation, here's how many years we have of cash left in the bank, here's the current team and the capabilities that we all have, and we know we want to build something in freight and logistics. Here are the five ideas that we have of things that we think could be really useful, because we've been talking to different customers and different prospects and trying to figure out what the opportunity looks like. We're going to spend the next two months trying to figure out what sticks and if any of that clicks, we're off to the races and and then we expect that over the next couple of months we'll be in maintenance mode. You know, take your vacations now, because as soon as we figure that out, it's pedal to the metal and, frankly, that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2:Within a couple of months of us having that conversation, we picked one. We ran with it. Dave Boring, the folks at NFI were so helpful throughout that process and helped us narrow something down and we ran with it. I remember I was on the phone with this with cole stevens from from uh, stevens trucking um, I love cole what I?
Speaker 1:I only know him a little bit. Uh, I, I, yeah, he's a great guy what a great guy, really, really good guy. I'm glad you just threw that name out there out of nowhere yeah, he was great too, but I've interviewed dave cole. I just have had a few conversations with separately.
Speaker 2:Sorry, keep going no, of course it's a really optimistic person both great guys full of it, both of them full of ideas, um, but cole's got that. He's got that hustle, bro, energy that just gets you fired up about everything. I, I absolutely love it. Um, and I was I like that's where I had the epiphany. I was on the phone with him I I was like, wait, I think we have something, I think we're doing something that can be really useful. And he was like, yeah, bro, let's get this going. It just has that energy and that epiphany, I think. And that moment was sort of that turning point where we looked at Jin, my co-founder, and I looked at each other. Then we looked at the team and we said we are the team to build this and we can build this. And so you know, we've been fired up about it for the last year and a half and that's the rest is. The rest is history or the rest is forward-looking, whatever, whatever the saying is.
Speaker 1:No, I'm no good at things. The rest is still to be written. I think it's it's early for you guys, but let me kind of zoom ourselves out for a second, because we stumbled our way into the drum kit part of the conversation here and we're going to spend probably the rest of the episode on this. So what I'm understanding you say is you went through YC to start this API business and raised venture money on that idea and then realized you didn't want to do that anymore, kept the same cap table and pivoted the idea entirely to create drum kit. As it is today Is that kind of the order of operations for how we got here?
Speaker 2:Almost one. There's a time gap there. The YC company was a separate company altogether, so okay, and then then I was at a seed state startup for about a year and then started another company, once my now co-founder. He was my research advisor in college, excuse me, dr Jin Zhang. He graduated with his PhD in data privacy and then he called me up. He was like so we're working on something again together, right? And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like no, no, we are.
Speaker 1:So that's when we started. He was telling you that we would be working together.
Speaker 2:It was not a question. It was not a question. He's such a fantastic guy. But yeah, that's the right chronology.
Speaker 1:So you raised VC money on the premise of one idea and realized within a year or two that you needed to pivot. Yeah, what was that process like with your investors?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, at that stage, when you're throwing a million, couple million dollars at someone, you're basically not investing in their business. You're investing in their ability to tell a story and you're investing in. I believe that these two guys can probably put something together. And our investors were very upfront about that from the beginning. They were like hey look, we know logistics, we know that there's a data gap here. We're not sure if your approach is 100% right, but we're pretty confident that you guys will figure something out, and I think that's a fair take. Whether we figured it out now or not, you know, remains to be seen, but I feel like the. I feel like the bet that the investors are making is less on the specific business, the specific idea, and more on, you know, do we think that these people can come up with and build a you know a business?
Speaker 1:people can come up with and build a you know a business, and so it was the conversation with Cole that was the impetus for the pivot, or the now origination of drum kit as it is today.
Speaker 2:Is that correct? It really was. I don't know if Cole knows this actually but it was, he will soon.
Speaker 2:I hope so he will soon. But he was one of the first flash points. He wasn't the reason for us wanting to find something else, but he was one of the first flashpoints. He wasn't the reason for us wanting to find something else, but he was. He was one of the guys who who first said wait, this is a direction you can go um and you can start thinking about. You know, I've seen all these ai tools you can start, you can start building automations around those. He was one of the first to sort of put those pieces together for us and and what was that so?
Speaker 1:So what was Drumkit to be then? Is that the same as it is now? Let's get into kind of the meat of Drumkit and what you all do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what we do now is, at our core, we're actually still an integrations business. Plug into all of your tools, t know, tms, scheduling, quoting, whatever else you have and then we sort of act as a virtual employee. You tell us, hey, we, I want to schedule this appointment, or I want to do this, I want to send back a quote, and then we'll handle it for you while also giving you, you know, as much of the information as we can, tied mostly to your email inbox or, you know, or WhatsApp text message, that kind of thing. And so, at the end of the day, we like to think of ourselves as I think I said this before as a virtual employee. People like to describe us as a co-pilot, an assistant, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Cole's initial impression was hey, what if we take a lot of this data that you can get and we try to validate? You know whether Fleet is who they are or is who they say they are. You know they're sending me text messages. They're sending me emails. I don't know how to know whether they're legit or not. You know we didn't want to end up rebuilding Highway or anything like that. Those guys are just doing a phenomenal job, better than we ever could. But it gave us a sense of direction of, okay, most of your workflow is in your inbox or in your text messages. So where's the gap between what you do day-to-day and the communications that you're having? And then folks at NFI helped us bridge some of that gap. They're like well, if you can, if you're plugged into our inbox and you can automate this particular task for us.
Speaker 2:You know, scheduling was one of the first things that we looked at. That would save us a lot of time. And it kind of forayed from there. The folks at Wicker Park Logistics in Chicago as well just started to kind of pick at well, if you're already plugged into our inbox and you're helping us with scheduling, can you also help us respond to these quotes?
Speaker 2:And it became one of those customer-driven, user-feedback-driven products where we started to cobble things together, cobble ideas together that we were getting from folks, and realize that, wait, this actually works as an ecosystem product where if we're integrating all of the other tools that you have and your workflows mostly start either from your inbox or from your TMS, then you don't want to have to deal with the app fatigue anymore. Let us give you this one single pane view of all the actions that you have, without you even having to worry about what's going on behind the scenes. Just tell us, hey, you want to schedule something and you shouldn't have to care if it's E2 open or, you know, retallix or whatever, we'll handle that. So that became that. It became that sidebar assistant experience very quickly.
Speaker 1:Can you help me understand? Because when you keep saying you want to schedule something, is that a? Is that something that someone's doing on a one-off, where I see an order come in I want to schedule it, so I go ping drum kit, or is it you have an end-end scheduling solution that, when I sign up for it, every time an email comes in, that is basically an order requiring scheduling? Drum kit takes it and and schedules it on my behalf?
Speaker 2:oh, it's a great question. I think what you're describing is the difference between having the human in the loop and being an assistant experience versus being an automated experience. I strongly believe in the human in the loop experience. I think there are things that you can do that are eventually, once you get comfortable enough, you can flip the switch to automate it. But I believe that, at the end of the day, a shipper isn't hiring your business. They're not even hiring your technology. They're hiring you because they trust you to make certain decisions on.
Speaker 2:I trust that he's going to pick the best time for me. I trust that he's going to stay on top of my shipments to make sure that it gets there on time. I trust that he knows exactly what's going on at any given time with accessorials and whatnot, because when they give you a call, they don't want your answer to be let me look that up. They want your answer to be yeah, I was just dealing with that. Let me give you. Here's the answer.
Speaker 2:The tools that we're building can help you handle, you know, rather than 10, 20 loads a day, 50 loads a day, let's say, at scale. But you still want to be on top of it, because I think that relationship building part of it is something that I don't trust AI to automate away. I don't want AI to automate that away. I want you to be in charge of my shipments. As you get more comfortable with the workflow, with the data, maybe it's okay to flip the switch and say you know, scheduling isn't one of those things where you have to know everything at all times. Maybe you can just flip the switch and automate that. But that human in the loop thing really matters to me, I think, and so we don't really like thinking of it as and maybe this is controversial, but we don't really like thinking of it as disintermediating anyone or even wanting to disintermediate anyone.
Speaker 1:So can you kind of paint the picture for a visualization of what it looks like? An order comes into my inbox. How do I engage drum kit as my co-pilot, as my support? What does that kind of look like if you were to paint the picture visually?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, order comes in. We've got a sidebar in your Outlook, in your Gmail front, whatever tool you might use, and we'll give you a little chirp that says, hey, we detected an order here. Here's the three loads that we think that are part of it or whatever it is. You kind of click through, do a quick scan, okay, cool, this looks right, and then hit submit. So now that order is submitted, you send back the quote, whatever process you need to go through to do that book the load. Then that gets submitted directly into your TMS. That entire flow is just a single click, maybe two clicks if you want to separate booking the load and quoting that back. Now you're in the position where, okay, cool, this is booked, this is loaded. Now I have to schedule this up. So we'll then pull in all of the data from your TMS to realize, okay, it's this customer that just sent this over. They're associated with these warehouses which are associated with.
Speaker 2:Well, you have to email for the pickup and you have to use E2Open for the drop-off. So in the sidebar we'll tell you hey, here's the recommended time. We think the pickup has to happen at 10 am and the drop-off has to happen by 8 am three days later. Would you like us to send an email out to the pickup doc manager? And then also here's the times that are available for the drop-off. Do you want to just select that time? And so all of that's happening in that sidebar. I didn't have to switch any screens, I didn't have to go anywhere and it's all sort of happening in real time as well.
Speaker 2:We aren't necessarily driven by an email. It's sort of driven by the steps that you would normally take, and what we'll do is sit down with you and say, hey, walk us through your process, it's consultative. Walk us through your process, tell us what your order is. We have folks. I'll give you a very specific example. We have a tool where we can reach out to carriers and ask them for quotes and then respond back to your shipper with a truck in hand.
Speaker 2:We got feedback that, hey, I don't want to do that for the quoting process. I want to do that once the load is already booked so that I can just cover. It Makes sense. That seems like an obvious thing that we didn't think of, but for us that's a 10-minute code change For the user. It's a totally different paradigm in the way that they think about their ability to even reach out to folks in their routing guide. Maybe they don't have a routing guide in the first place and they're restructuring their processes and building those SOPs around the new technology that they're bringing in. So for us we live either in your inbox or in your TMS as a sidebar and then we walk you through the entire load lifecycle as much as necessary in our sidebar, updating based on whatever conversations come in associated with that shipment into your inbox that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Can you walk me just quickly through all of the functions that drum kit participates in?
Speaker 2:so we've got a few uh. The first one is capacity management. Um, you'll have trucks, you know. You'll have lists of trucks sent in by your carrier saying hey, I got, you know something. I got some trucks starting from here heading here, you got anything for me. Most of the time folks don't do anything with those emails. They can be really useful. You can save a lot of money. But you know who's going to do that data entry, who's going to read through those? So we have some DFM tools where we can read those, match them against loads that are in your TMS and then send those shipments back. So that's one. The second is we can integrate with tools.
Speaker 1:With the capacity management. Sorry, I figured I'd ask questions as you go With capacity management. Will that also just take the capacity? So let's say that uh cole has his truck list he sends me and he's got a dallas truck, an oklahoma city truck and a chicago truck. Will it also just take that capacity and plug it into my tms as logged capacity for whatever days, so that in the event that there aren't available loads now, if loads come up later I can match against that, so I don't have to do that manual entry.
Speaker 2:Depends on your TMS. But yeah, if your TMS supports it totally.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So it depends on the TMS. So I guess have you seen in some of the TMSs that isn't a feature that is available, so you can't provide that that isn't a feature that is available, so you can't provide that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of these like we don't want to be your source of truth. We want your TMS to be the source of truth and to be your database. There's good reasons for that. There's reporting reasons, analytics reasons. But also, at the end of the day, we're not trying to build a TMS, we're just a workflow solution. The day we're not trying to build a TMS, we're just a workflow solution. And so we basically periodically sync with your TMS to make sure we have as real-time data as possible. But if your TMS doesn't support something, we don't want to be taking over as the TMS itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do you think about before we go on to the other functions how do you think about what products to build, given that every TMS is different and some TMS like you know, mastery has an exceptional capacity management tool that, like is, as far as I know, the best in class. I'm even surprised that there are still TMSs out there, maybe, that don't have the ability to log capacity and match it against available loads. But knowing that there's kind of a spectrum of capabilities within various TMS platforms, how do you go about deciding what to and not to, I guess build or implement within your solution?
Speaker 2:all of that considered, At the end of the day, it's driven actually use and how does it impact their day-to-day workflow? Like I don't go into a brokerage most of the time and say, hey, your process sucks, use ours. It's almost always the other way around. You've got a process that clearly works for you or that you're excited about, or you're trying to switch to something and you need technology to support that. We'll work around you and work with you.
Speaker 2:I think if folks start to feel constrained by their TMS, if folks start to feel constrained even by us, we try to build around that and try to give them tools to accelerate that.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a specific example. We had a couple of folks that were using certain internally built rating tools. They would do some math around. Okay, I'm pulling in dat here, then I'm pulling in green screens here and I'm taking some sort of weighted average to figure out what the actual rate is and then they were like, look, we've done all this stuff, but I realized that we aren't actually benchmarking this against any of our lane history, and so that's a pretty straightforward thing for us to do.
Speaker 2:Pull in the algorithm that they have, integrate with that, show them the information as they're building a quote through our system and then also pull out all of the lane history that they have from their TMS. It's a really simple thing for us to do, but it totally changes your workflow right, because now I'm not just relying on this math. That's done. I know what I've quoted in the past Kind of obvious as you look at it in retrospect, but for them it was totally game changing. So we try to be as customer-driven, as user-driven as possible, because at the end of the day, all brokerages do the same 10 things, but they do them very differently.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point, and there's a comment I almost want to make. That's like thinking about your business and your competitors, where we're going to get to a place where I think a lot of you all do the same things, but you're going to do them very differently, and it's going to be interesting because I almost feel like you could go through each function that you'll list, that your team provides or manages or supports, and there are 10 to 20 active competitors in each of those individual spaces, and then there are probably 10 to 20 and the numbers are probably off here. There could be 50, there could be five, and over the coming years, I'm sure the numbers will just continue to grow, but there are probably going to be plenty that are just kind of in the same kind of platform type space of you know, and it's the how, though, that I think will differentiate yours from the others and others from yours, but, um, let's keep going. So, uh, capacity management is one. What else?
Speaker 2:yeah, I want to before before that. Uh, I know we're getting super tangential, but I want to pick on one thing. You said the how. The how really matters, because it's not just, it's not just we do it the best way, it's that there's a really substantial difference between the way we do it and the way your business might react to that, and that's a weird way of just saying you got to find what fits for you, man, there's going to be multiple winners in the space. There's multiple winners in every big vertical SaaS type space out there, and you got to figure out what works for you.
Speaker 2:There's a reason why everybody tries to build their own TMS Like 40% of the large businesses have their own TMSs because they feel like nothing around them really fits for them, and I think it's going to be really critical for us to be able to succeed.
Speaker 2:It's going to be very critical for us to build something that conforms to what our customers actually want to see, to be modular, to be able to split things out and say, okay, cool, you don't want capacity management, no problem. Or you want quoting to work in a particular way, no problem. And so, tangent aside, that actually forays into the next thing. We then plug into tools like DAT, green screens, truck stop and whatnot, to pull in quotes. We can pull in rate quotes. We can integrate with your internal tools as well and your TMS lane history to give you all of that information into that sidebar. So when quote requests come in, you can or spot requests, or whatever it is you can respond to that rapidly, and so we'll auto draft the email, send it out to send it out to the customer, and then we can also reach out to carriers, get quotes from them and and respond back with a with a truck in hand, if you'd like as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's multiple aspects of the pricing game. So for one is the ability to aggregate multiple pricing tools to give a kind of customized you know your company specific pricing solution. On that piece specifically, let's say Wicker Park says they want you to wait 40% towards lane history and NFI comes in and says, ah, we trust DAT more than our own lane history. I don't know why they'd say that. No offense to DAT, but lane history is like the goldmine there, sorry, but not necessarily forward-looking. Is like the gold mine there, sorry, but not necessarily forward-looking. So we want to forecast against expectations of a 20, 25, 10% rate bump. So we want you to wait towards that. My question is are you customizing, customer by customer, with respect to how you code that tool?
Speaker 2:You have to. There's no other way to do it. Dude, they're like these guys are um, that's, that's part of the secret sauce for for the brokerages is is how they price and how they win loads. So, um you, you have to. Whether it's whether it's just displaying all the information or helping them do the math, uh, there's no other way for it to be useful.
Speaker 1:Does that create issues when you think about scaling or I don't know? Clunkiness of this customer has it this way. This customer has it this way. What does that look like on the back end in your world? Help me understand what that's like for you Look on the back end in your world.
Speaker 2:Help me understand what that's like for you. Yeah, we try to go out of our way to build internally customizable tools. I don't want to deal with the Zapiers of the world where you're telling people okay, here's a drag and drop interface, you can click this and click that and then do whatever you want, like a no-code solution type thing. I don't want to do any of that stuff. We want to sort of parachute in you. Give us two days to learn and understand your process and then on the third day we'll give you something that at least starts to conform with or, you know, starts to make sense with your process, and I think that's going to be an ethos thing going forward.
Speaker 2:We want to be that consultative approach Is there. Does that mean it scales a little bit less quickly? And does it mean it's a little bit harder for you to sign up online and, just you know, start using the product? Maybe, but the secret sauce of a brokerage is your SOPs and the relationships that you build with your customers, which all sort of tie together. You're going to have better relationships if you have a more defined, better process. Software is there to help you define that process. So I think as soon as we start being rigid, we're going to start losing people we start being rigid, we're going to start losing people.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting hearing you're the second AI business I've spoken to now in the last week. Granted, I guess time is different for me as the recorder versus the audience, who's going to get the episodes when they get them, which means that we're recording this December 23rd. I don't think it's coming out until late January, but in any case, the other conversation I had was just a week ago. That will release January 1st. But it's just interesting hearing two very intelligent people who've never brokered a load in their lives talk about this secret sauce to brokerage. But SOPs has come up in both conversations and I do agree. Sops has come up in both conversations and I do agree. And especially as we think about how AI is going to play in this space, sop is going to drive that and you know this co-pilot model is the success and failure is largely built around the quality of the SOP. Is that a true statement, do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I actually think of it as a bit of a ladder right. A true statement, do you think? Yeah, I actually think of it as a bit of a ladder right. So you start with. It's almost like people always start with cradle to grave and then they split to the team's model or the pod's model, and then half the folks are like this sucks and switch back, like there's always that like back and forth, but it's usually a progression and I think technology adoption and SOP adoption go hand in hand and are a progression, and I think technology adoption and SOP adoption go hand in hand in our progression.
Speaker 2:You'll start with, all right, well, we're just getting off the ground, like, do whatever you can to win freight, get it out the door and let's make some money. Then you start realizing, okay, I need to have a process around. You know here's where our quotes get logged and everybody keeps track of win rates and whatnot. And then you realize that's super tedious. Maybe I need technology to automate capturing our win rates, and so then you know they might reach out to us and we can help with that. That's something that we do. And then you know you're like, okay, well, I know exactly how my scheduling and tracking functions work. Let me go down to Columbia and outsource this. And so now these guys can run this Well, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, they kind of have these binders of understanding the process now, but I really want to make it rigid for them so that they can just click a couple of buttons and then they won't make as many more mistakes. Let me get some more software to do that. And so, as your business matures, you sort of go up this ladder of getting more and more specialized in the process and, as a result, more and more specialized with the technology. And so I think they and this is true for any business, it's true for our business too where you know a really basic example PTO policy. Like we, at first we were like okay, look like, just take time off to let us know, send me a message, it's fine. But then you have to implement a PTO management software and then the whole company needs to know when someone's off. So you have an SOP around. Okay, you've got to put it on your Google Calendar. That's obviously a basic example, but it's just how it goes.
Speaker 1:And I think technology and SOPs go really hand-in-hand. You have to get both of them right to make a process simple. Yeah, I mean that feels like the first major lesson I'm taking from these AI conversations is the value of SOPs to drive efficiency through the use of AI. And if you don't have really strong like as I've for some reason, you know, as I continue to have these conversations, I just continue to imagine myself in a future brokerage, whether that's four months from now or two, more likely in two years from now, whatever, maybe and I think about, like, who are the people I would want to do this with? And I keep moving towards these SOP, like, who are the people who are best at creating and managing SOP processes?
Speaker 2:That's center.
Speaker 1:Yeah, SOPs Want to know if that was redundant. It just feels like that's becoming a bigger and bigger part of the solution in how to navigate. You know, continuing to build people-centric brokerages that are focused on execution, but with the right technological support, and that latter piece is really going to be driven back into having the right SOPs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the reason for that is we think of AI as a decision-making engine of some sort. That's not right. You don't want AI to be making decisions. You should be making the decisions and then everything else. You can hand off the tasks to the AI or the actions to the AI, but you should be the one who's building the relationships. You should be the one who knows what's going on with the shipments, with the AI kind of giving you that information or taking the task off your hands, and I think that's why process matters so much. How do you make the and when do you make the decision of? Okay, now I can pass this off to the AI and I know exactly what the technology is going to do. We don't really think of ourselves as an AI company either. To be fair, we think of ourselves as a workflow product where we happen to use AI to simplify some of those tasks. But at the end of the day, you want your tools to be deterministic as opposed to probabilistic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting now as I think about. You brought up cradle to grave versus the pod or team model, the split model. I've never been a fan of cradle of the grave, or I've never started a business Well, I've only started one business, but I've never worked in a business that was cradle of the grave. At Coyote, we bought a business that had been largely cradle of the grave, which was Access America, and there are benefits to both, though, and there are benefits to both, though. The Cradle to the Grave model does create, or create, more opportunity for ownership and accountability.
Speaker 1:It lends to more of that because, frankly, as an individual rep, you just have to be more accountable and have more ownership if you're going to be successful. However, it also you know, I find that at the end of the day, you can find bad actors in any company. If you want to get rid of all the bad actors and you want to get rid of all the bad examples of carriers being lied to or carriers being taken advantage of or shippers being given loads back things like that it is easier to do that in a split model business because you have more control. It was one of the things and this could have been just a personal issue as I've learned about myself that control is something that's important for me. Yeah, so I'm hoping to you know mature out of, but having control is important and I would, you know, I would mine the Facebook groups and Reddit pages looking for people who were saying negative things about Molo, because I wanted to find examples of carriers or shippers being taken advantage of or screwed over, and then I just wanted to fix those problems.
Speaker 1:It was easier to do that in a split model brokerage than it would be in a cradle of the grave, because credit grave again. You give people a lot of autonomy to do whatever they want. You're kind of focused on the numbers they produce, and it's not always about how they produce those numbers, but as I think about a workflow business like yours or the implementation of ai tools that a company like yours supplies, and we talk about the importance of sops, we're, it feels like this is going to be a harder thing for the cradle to grave businesses to tackle than it will be for the split model businesses, because the split model businesses naturally have more of that. Have you run into any of that or engaged with any cradle to grave businesses yet and seen any kind of delineation? And it's hard to generalize because youize, because you can have various levels of quality on both ends of that spectrum. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on that position I just shared.
Speaker 2:I found cradle to grave businesses, leadership at cradle to grave businesses want more control. They want more process, and I think that's a good thing. It's almost a quality control kind of thing, right? I don't really care what you're doing day to day, but I need you to have a certain baseline and I need you to be reporting numbers back to me in a certain way so that I know what's going on with my business and I know you're treating your customers and carriers well. That's kind of what it comes down to, and I think that's a totally fair thing.
Speaker 2:So as a result of that, we've actually found that our software works really well for cradle-to-grave businesses, because they can go in and say look, this is how you use Drumkin. You start from here on. All your capacity management, all your capacity gets sent to this capacity management tool. All your quotes have to be done through this system so that we can capture it, all your loads have to be built through the system, et cetera, et cetera, and so that way the individual reps don't feel like they're being micromanaged because at the end of the day you know you're the one still driving the tool. They also feel like they're getting supported because they're getting new tooling from their leadership. But the flip side is that leadership gets analytics and metrics and they get visibility into what people are actually doing day to day at the task level, as opposed to just at the number of shipments booked and revenue brought in level.
Speaker 2:So I think that makes a pretty substantial difference. Like you'll have reps that I don't know what magic they do, but like they just don't track their shipments. You know they just have great relationships with carriers and like it just works all the time and if something goes wrong then they don't know. You know they're SOL, but like nine times out of 10, everything's fine. But if you tell them, hey, the process is that you have to use drum kit for tracking and then you start getting more visibility into what's going on, into the day to day. So the hard part is when. The hard part is, I think, less the cradle to grave versus the split model, and more when you have a business like a large business that has a bunch of agencies that all have their own processes and then at that point you just stop treating the large company as your customer. You have to start treating each individual agency as the customer.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Interesting yeah, I mean this is the other piece that is becoming very interesting to me is around the ability to report better and to have better understanding of so many different facets of your business as a result of tools like drum kit. And talk to me a little bit about that. You've kind of insinuated some and spoken to some of it already. But reporting, how deep can you go and you know how wide in in you know, one one example being uh quotes won and lost. That's something that very few companies historically have been able to capture. Uh, we certainly never did, you know. Granted, this was a year and a half ago and I know other solutions have come to the market that provide that. But talk a little bit about reporting and how Drumkit kind of plays in that realm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. Let's just start with quoting. I think one of the hardest things to do is to get anyone to do data entry. It just sucks. Nobody wants to do it, whether it's load building or whatever, and as a result of that I know I'm awful at managing our own CRM, let alone at the individual shipment level. You're getting sometimes like 100,000 quotes in your inbox collectively and maybe you're able to reach 10% of them 15% of them depending on the day you got to know who's sending at the top level, who is sending those in? Which ones are you actually able to reach? Which ones? Are you covering what your margin was, whether green screens gave you a better rate or DAT gave you a better rate or truck stop like somehow got the nail on the head. What was your margin relative to other loads that you booked?
Speaker 1:That felt like a shot at truck stop on accident.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally on intent. I love, I love the truck stop guys.
Speaker 1:Totally on intent. Somehow truck stop got it right.
Speaker 2:No, no, they're great they're great, they're gonna get you're gonna get me killed, no, but um, no, they're great folks. But uh, look like that, like all of all of those things are things that no one's actually going to do the data entry on. And because all of those tools are all spread out and all of the information for that is all spread out, to do it you'd have to dedicate time to sit down and go through your inbox and figure out how many quotes you had and then go through all of the analytics that you ran through, dat analytics that you ran through dat truck stop green screens and then plug those in somewhere. We just do that. It's just automatic and built in.
Speaker 2:We won't capture, obviously, loads that you aren't doing through us. Um, maybe you know, maybe you're doing things via edi or something like that. We won't, we won't capture that, but, um, we can at least figure out. Here's the loads that you quoted and the options that came through your inbox and here's all the numbers that we pulled for those shipments and here's the ones that actually got built into your TMS and fuzzy match against those and now you have a rough estimate of okay, cool, I won 18% of the quotes that I sent out and that encompasses 40% of the total quotes that I got in, and it looks like truck stop was the most accurate out of all of the rating engines that I had, but for some reason my average margin was 12%. Maybe I should bump that up.
Speaker 2:These are the kinds of things that, because we're plugged into your inbox and we're plugged into all your tools, they come for free. It's easy for us to do. Is there some fuzziness around it? Like matching loads in your TMS? Yeah, there can be some fuzziness around that. And would we claim to have the exact right win rate? Definitely not, because I know you're winning loads outside of your email or outside of that. But even just having some indication, or even just having the spreadsheet of here's all the loads that I want and the numbers that I pulled for them, that in itself is something that people don't have.
Speaker 1:Does it make sense to find a way to build in a solution that pairs against the EDI aspect of the business, for the bigger brokers enterprise can represent half of the business they manage, in which case it's fair to assume that EDI is driving a lot of those loads in and out of the system. And I would like to be able to evaluate my business as a whole and see my win rate and see which tools are whether it's green screens or DAT or truck stopper providing better pricing, whatever. Does it make sense for you to build a tool that can kind of a reporting tool that does both, or can create a more all-encompassing solution for reporting there?
Speaker 2:that should be out in february, um oh really okay yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you, you hit the nail on the head and the reason we can do that is we're plugged into your tms, so we can pull some of that information directly out from the tms. Tms is do a really good job of saying this, this the source of this was EDI and it actually got one, or it actually got moved forward. So absolutely, we can pull that information, and today we focused a little bit more on how are you using our tool, and then tomorrow we want to be more holistic in the entire business.
Speaker 1:Okay, and just to you know, I've appreciated that we've gone all over the place as we've tried to get through the functions that Junket supports. It's fine, it's all. This is all great conversation and hopefully the audience enjoys it, but something I never know. But in any case, getting off track Around rating one thing you didn't mention I'm just curious about is are you getting into the kind of API rating game for dynamic pricing and spot?
Speaker 2:What do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:So you know, for for the mostly enterprise shippers that want the immediate spot quoting sent back through API, Is that a solution that Drumkit provides, or is that not your forte?
Speaker 2:Got it Totally understood. I think there are other tools that are better suited for that. For now, it's possible we get into that. We've done a couple of integrations where we'll send data back up into like a shipper TMS, like a quote back into that. I think that's. It's a great roadmap suggestion, something that we can tackle a little bit further.
Speaker 1:But in terms of the pricing you're more focused on, you can provide both the rate someone should quote and the email back with a quote if it's an email quoted load.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. That's the focus for now.
Speaker 1:Cool, all right, let's move past the pricing and rating stuff. What else does Drunkid have?
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. So load building and load data entry, that one's straightforward. Then we go into the scheduling side, where we'll either send emails back and forth with the doc manager or we'll connect to the E2 opens of the world, the Retallix's of the world, and schedule loads with those. So that one's a little bit more straightforward. We try to just bring those portals into your sidebar, into your inbox or into your TMS, and then the last thing is around tracking and track and trace. So we'll do things like you know, schedule or milestone based check calls, whatsapp text message, integrations with text locate or emails back to dispatchers and things like that. So try to get those updates wherever, however, we can.
Speaker 1:Is that a voice AI tool that you have that's making phone calls, or is that something else?
Speaker 2:It's just, it's just text right now. So text message, email, you know messaging tools like WhatsApp. My hot take on voice is I think I think some of these voice companies do an incredible job, like big fans of the folks at Fleetworks and Happy Robot. I think some of these voice companies do an incredible job. Like big fans of the folks at Fleetworks and Happy Robot. I think they're really talented folks. But my personal take is that I think people still don't want to be disintermediated. I think you still want to be talking to a human on the other side, and I know there's been a lot of controversy on this on online and I and I don't get me wrong I think voice ai has its time and place, um, but it's not a priority for us to invest in right now yeah, yeah, interesting, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I mean I'm I think I'm on the other side on the voice AI stuff. Just in that. I think it can add value today. I don't know if it's a replacement tool. Well, I guess it is in some capacity and it's just like to what end does it replace? Can it replace 100% of a carrier rep, or can it replace 80% of what a carrier rep's doing and the other 20% the carrier rep still needs to do that part? I don't have answered yet, but I do know that a massive problem brokerages have is just answering enough phone calls and just being able to have something that can answer and deal with part of the problem. Even if it's not a perfect solution, is a solution that I think brokers will buy. But we'll see what that plays out to. So, okay, you mentioned scheduling, yep. I want to ask a direct kind of competitor question here, just because I'm curious.
Speaker 1:You went on stage at Technovations. I was a Shark Tank judge with Kevin Nolan and John Gamero and you were on stage. Happy Robelt was on stage and Cued was also on stage. Was there one more? I think there was one more, wasn't there? Front, yeah, front was also on stage. Sorry Front, they're not in consideration of winning. As we sat there deliberating and they didn't really give us a ton of time, it was between Drumkit and Qt, and Qt is the scheduling AI tool, and ultimately Drumkit won. Congratulations, thank you. That was a fun thing to be part of and you did very well. I'm curious when a company is looking at choosing someone like you, or choosing someone like yourself to handle their scheduling, why does it make sense to partner with Drumkit?
Speaker 2:Look. So let me start off by saying I think tom and team are absolutely fantastic. They're smart people and I think they, what they do, is they do it very well. Um, so this isn't a knock on, like their tech or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Um, I think, at the end of the day, it's a question of do you want another point solution or do you want an ecosystem product that plugs into everything else that you already do, like if you, if you build the load through us and you tell us hey, every time we build this customer's load, I just want you to automatically schedule the, you know the, the pickup and the drop off, while I'd prefer it to be, you know, a human in the loop, because I want you to be making those decisions. If you give us a, you give us something like that, we'll just do it, no problem, we can just do that and we're already plugged into your TMS. You don't have to deal with any other solution. The way that we price is we're not necessarily charging you more specifically to schedule that load it works out really seamlessly from the user perspective. You don't have to go out and have another tab open for your scheduling tools.
Speaker 2:It's still all in our sidebar, you know co-pilot ecosystem, and so I think that the reality is like if your business only wants to solve scheduling and you're confident, you're never going to have a problem with anything else, first of all, good luck. And second of all, good luck and, second of all, go for it. I think Qt won't be a bad solution for you, but if you have an inkling that you might want to use anything else or any other tool out there or simplify any other part of your process, that's when you want to start thinking about one of the platform tools, an ecosystem tool, because it'll probably cost you less. It'll probably be. You want to start thinking about one of the platform tools, an ecosystem tool, because it'll probably cost you less, it'll probably be a lot easier to use and it'll sync with all of your other functions.
Speaker 1:It's a good answer. It's a good answer. I won't argue with it. I will add on that.
Speaker 1:I think what's interesting that I've heard in challenges with some of these scheduling tools that are point solutions is managing exceptions is challenging and I think it lends to your and what I'll well to to further. That is, I've I've talked to company. I've talked to individuals who have partnered with, whose companies have partnered with various of these AI tools, scheduling tools, and I won't pick on any specifically. I don't want to do that, but what I've heard is the challenge is when there is an exception, when a PO is wrong or some other issue arises with scheduling the order, the team isn't the most responsive to navigate those challenges and the issues they run into is.
Speaker 1:It's typically a small team that's supporting your business and if you don't have the kind of human in the loop model where there's a person who's accountable to this business within your company and they have a co-pilot who's doing the work for them at their direction and they have a co-pilot who's doing the work for them at their direction, if you don't have that, it's a lot harder to react or respond quickly when the exceptions do come up. So I think when I heard that recently it made me believe a little bit more in kind of the model you're suggesting, the human-in-the-loop model, because then it's just another email that I see and I know. Okay, I got to deal with this personally. But for the 90% of the time where there's not an issue, it's the one click and it's taken care of. But it's way more natural workflow for me to manage when the 10% or 5% of issues do arise versus I've kind of become fully hands-off in scheduling, or so I think, but then these exceptions keep coming up and I'm having to jump back into navigating that workflow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's. I think that's a really salient, really thoughtful point and it also really matters. Like, let's say, you hired someone to to do your scheduling for you. Let's just say you had a, you hired a, you know someone in Columbia or whatever it is. You got a scheduling rep. What your normal workflow would be? Hey, like Bob, can you go schedule this for me? And then they'll ping back and say, cool, done. Or they'll ping back and say, hey, I couldn't figure this out. That's normally how you do it.
Speaker 2:That's the human way of interacting with something. That's also the way you interact with us. Instead of messaging someone in the firsthand, we've got that sidebar where you can just kind of select what you want. But if something goes wrong, we'll send you a Slack message, a Teams message, a carrier pigeon, whatever you need to notify you. Hey, something's gone wrong and we can't figure it out, but because it's already in your inbox, it's already happening, as if you were the one doing it. You can just jump in seamlessly.
Speaker 2:And I think exception management not just on the scheduling side, but also tracking and on the capacity management side, quoting and load building you're already involved in that anyway, so in those other three functions. That's why we built it the way that we built it built into your inbox and connected to your TMS. So we know what the source of truth is. We also know what your conversation looks like, and so we can have you parachute in and involve yourself in that process right when you need to take it over, as opposed to you know, as opposed to you having to go into some other system and trying to figure out where the issue was and go from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about sales for a minute. I'm curious what's been the biggest challenge for you in securing new business?
Speaker 2:A lot of it is just customer education. It's not like I don't go to anyone and basically shove you know the product down the throat by saying you got to catch up to AI, you got to use AI like that. Like not only is that kind of bullshit, like you don't have to catch up with AI, like, if your business is humming, like your business is humming, have to catch up with AI. If your business is humming, your business is humming. You should only be looking for new tools if you feel like you have a problem, if you're looking to change something, and so I think it's really important that we're not going around doing the hard sell, especially when you're looking for early adopters. But I think that has been the hardest problem for us being honest, with people that look like some of this is just not built yet, or some of this is not built with the level of polish that you'd expect, and that's okay, people don't mind. But you have to be very clear that it's about expectation setting that like, hey, give us another couple of months and this will be fantastic, but I need to work with you on this to make sure that it works for you. And I think that's one of the biggest issues Because, frankly, we're able to reach people.
Speaker 2:People are excited about not only our product but also the potentials of this type of technology, the workflow automation technology. The market's starting to pick back up, knock on wood, hopefully, and people are preparing themselves for the future technology. The market's starting to pick back up, knock on wood, hopefully, and you know, people are preparing themselves for the future. But we have to be honest with them as well and say, look, I'm going to give you, you're buying into the future of this, not necessarily the present of this. And I think, like if you talked to me, to me, you know, a month later, two months later, I think, you said this is go out late january. I think we're, I think we're already going to be at that point. So future prospects, listening to this like it's polished, I promise I mean.
Speaker 1:So I I love in in any sales process, especially in brokerage. It's it's just always had such a dirty connotation around it and a negative connotation around it, and I think when you're willing to be honest and humble about the shortcomings that exist today, it's just endearing, it is. It's just endearing, it is, and people are more. I think and this is just my opinion, but I am way more trusting of someone who comes in and tells me they don't have all the answers than someone who comes in and tells me they do. I just think that's. I don't know if that's a byproduct of being in an industry where lying is just so prevalent, but I can commend you for that kind of mindset and approaching it that way.
Speaker 1:It does probably slow some of the initial yeses, but the yeses that you get if you are able to follow through on the things that you commit to over time, they will become customers likely for the long run, and that's just a matter of and this is something that's just as important for your team to hear as it is anybody who's a leader and has people on their own team is one of the reasons that I think that I had success as a salesperson at Molo because I consider myself a salesperson from day one till the end of it is because I went and got in front of customers and told them how we were going to engage and how we were going to behave as a provider, and then the team knew to execute on those commitments and I made sure to communicate back to them.
Speaker 1:This is what we said we were going to do. If we do that, we will grow with them, and it's the ability to translate what you say to what you do as an organization that allows for a company to be successful and grow, and so I think it's really important that you stay dialed in with the team and they understand hey, these are the things that I'm telling our customers we'll be able to do in the next three, six months. There are people who are buying in on those promises. It's imperative we now get to work and deliver on those promises.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the hardest things in technology is timeline setting. I have 100% confidence, I have no doubt, that everything that we've committed to we will deliver on. I'm very confident in that, but I'm pretty bad at timeline setting and the way that we structure that is. We are just honest with our customers. Hey, this is what we think the timeline will be, and you've asked for these custom things or we're building this thing around you.
Speaker 2:We have to do this integration with XTMS or YTMS, whatever, and we think it's going to take us four weeks. It might take us five, it might take us six, I'm sorry, and if that takes us longer, it's going to push everything else back, and that's why you need to filter for early adopters. I think, in an industry where everybody's job is to sell, and sell hard, being willing to sell soft and maybe make a little bit less money along the way, on, on, on that is a long-term bet. And and I think that's uh, that's really important to us because because, frankly, if we deliver really well for it it's exactly what you said If we I just want to take it forward If we deliver really well for those customers and do a great job, we will never have better sales advocates than those guys.
Speaker 1:They'll be the ones going around.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, because the first thing that you do when you see a product and you see logos on their website is you're going to pick up the phone and you're going to call them. You're going to say, hey, what's your experience like with these guys? And if they say, yeah, well, you know it works, I guess Like I don't know Then that's not an endorsement. But if you say I've loved working with Dhruv Jain and the rest of the team and you know I got to meet this engineer and yeah, it took them longer, but like they really delivered and they helped us out, people listen to the good parts of that, not the bad parts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's such a perfect comment you just made, simply because I have the exact example in my head of a few weeks ago. You know I've been dealing with. There's a VC I've been talking to for a few months that has wanted me to get into this space, specifically on the scheduling. Well, actually almost more like a platform similar to yours and I'm, you know, I don't know if it's for me, it's, you know it's. I think there's benefit to being, you know, having freight experience jumping into this space. But just my, my brain isn't wired for building technology.
Speaker 1:If I had the right partners, maybe it makes sense, but, um, in any case, um, as I was doing some just general research and contemplating the concept, I went to Dave roaring. Of all people, people, um, and the only reason I really know dave is because I interviewed him on the show and I mean he was an exceptional interview. Talk about, like the hustle bro energy you mentioned around coal, dave has at times, you know, 100. He's got great energy. So, in any case, I reached out to him and said, hey, can I chat with you? And we chatted for an hour and a half and I was like I just want your take these AI businesses and he went through all the ones he's talked to and he raped about say great things about your team and yours, and so it's like exactly what you just said played out in real time.
Speaker 1:And that's that's how, especially in this industry, in the freight brokerage industry, like everyone always talks about the value of relationships, they think about them from the lens of, you know, my, my relationship to my customers. But like there are so many great internal relationships from broker to broker, and anytime one of us is making a big decision, there's a there's a general like high likelihood that we're calling a few of our competitors to get their perspective on it. It's just the way that that we've kind of grown up in the space, I think, and developed these kind of relationships where if we're thinking about doing something, we ask someone we know who might be considering a similar decision and they're not afraid to say, hey, yeah, I've used this tool or this company and it worked very well. So I think you're definitely thinking about it the right way in terms of how you bring these companies along.
Speaker 1:I think the challenge of predicting timelines and technology that is, you're not unique to having that problem. I think that's one of the things my father has said to me is, like you know, as he moved from building a brokerage that built his own technology to now strictly building technology for carriers and brokers, he's like everything costs more and takes longer than you expect. He's like that's rule number one with building technology. And I think, being honest with your customers about that on the front end and more of the soft selling to say, hey, this is how long we expect it to take, but I'm not sure and these are the potential risks of how much longer it could run, I think that's a very smart way of going about your approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it comes from experiences. We've made that mistake. We've told people it'll be done and then it wasn't, or it was half done in an unpolished way. And I think, like you ever read the lean startup, like Eric Rice, I think it's a great book the whole theory is that you don't need to build the whole product, build an MVP, and if people really want to use your product, then they'll use the shitty version of it. I think that's just not true anymore. I think that was true back when technology maturity wasn't that high and we didn't all have very polished iPhones and Androids in our pocket.
Speaker 2:You know, people expect things to work and they expect them to just work, and if they don't, then you know at some point your patience is going to wear thin. You can't treat all of your customers. At some point you have to graduate out of treating your customers as design partners, and the way to do that is to tell them hey, look like I'm not done yet. I know I said I'd be done. I'm not done yet. I'm sorry. Here's what it looks like right now, but I'm not going to ask you to use it until I feel like it's ready for you to use. And just to be totally honest with you. We learned that the hard way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. How do you think about scaling your team internally?
Speaker 2:And how many engineers are on the team today, At the time of recording, we're a team of four engineers, but I myself have an engineering background. My co-founder has an engineering background. Wait, I take that back.
Speaker 1:All eight of us have engineering backgrounds but only four of them actually co-did it. So you have a small team and I guess my question is you know, if you were to go raise another 5 million bucks and hire 10 more engineers and you know you could deliver a product I would think much faster, land more customers quicker. How do you think about that decision-making process of should I add more people? Should I keep going at the pace we're going? Help me think, help me understand how you're envisioning that for your own team.
Speaker 2:I don't think that's exactly like. Just because you have a larger team doesn't mean you go faster. In fact, larger teams can mean you go faster in the wrong direction sometimes, and larger teams can also mean that you're spending all your time managing the larger team, so you actually kind of go at the same pace. Right now our team is a little bit overwhelmed, a little bit underwater. It's just the classic startup thing, right, everybody's working really hard and everyone's really enjoying it. But they're working pretty hard and so we are. I don't know if at the time of release, but at the time of recording. We're hiring. So send me some resumes, but we're looking to take the pressure off a little bit from the team.
Speaker 2:But I think if you grow your team too big, too fast, you start to lose that sense of vision, like our engineers actually interact with customers directly on a day-to-day basis because they're either, you know, fixing an issue or they're talking, they're trying to train someone or they're talking through, you know, someone's new use case that we're looking to build out and design something around.
Speaker 2:As soon as we have a much larger team, it becomes really hard to do that, it becomes unwieldy and now you lose that sense of customer determinism and vision that goes into building a great product. I think we will only want to really grow our team when we feel like we have the foundation set of the fundamentals around our product and we need to expand into a larger scope of some sort. Maybe that's when we're thinking about tackling freight forwarding, or if we're starting to think about shippers or something like that. That's when you'd want a dedicated team to you know, think about like a particular customer segment and I think, like, as soon as you start throwing people at a problem, at least for technology and for software development, you're not necessarily solving the inherent problem, which is like what is the actual customer workflow that I'm trying to build? Because ultimately, like, the question is just like investment in time or dilution of vision.
Speaker 1:That makes sense and I remember at the TIA Technovation's Shark Tank deal. I think you said correct me if I'm wrong that you plan to bring on one customer per month maximum.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And talk to me about that thought process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one to two. As we feel a little bit more stable, I think we can handle two. But it goes back to what we said earlier. It's the consultative approach. I want to meet our customers where they are and give them a tailor-made experience. I'm not interested in saying here's what the product is, good luck. I want to make sure that you actually use it, and if it's already built for your use case, great, that's a win-win. Everybody succeeds with that. If it's not, then help us figure it out and I will try to give you a timeline, as opposed to charging an implementation fee or anything like that, unless it's totally out of box. We've got a couple over there like super out of pocket.
Speaker 1:And what do things look like in terms of your financial runway? Do you have plans to raise again in the near future, or what's the path to profitability look like? Help me understand how that kind of picture looks for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:Look, we're really early stage, so we've got a lot of cash in the bank, so we're not looking to do any of that and, just at this time, really just focused on let's build the platform before we aggressively try to scale.
Speaker 2:I think, like I don't know, there are companies like Highway and Greenscreen that did this really well. They said, look, we're going to be in stealth, people might hear about us, might know about us a little bit here and there, but we're going to work with a few marquee customers, give them a great experience and then, once we know that our experience works and that we can tailor it for different use cases as necessary, then we'll hit the go button and just accelerate. And I mean, these guys didn't exist in 2020 and now they're some of the most successful businesses in the space, right? So I think it's the same. I'm hoping that it's the same direction for us, where we can, you know, start with a few of those marquee folks, give them a great experience Even if it takes a little bit longer than we hope, we thankfully have the buffer to do that and then hit the go button and just try to help as many folks as we can.
Speaker 1:So what happens if we release this episode and 25 brokers hear this and they buy into your thoughtfulness, your approach to the customer journey, the products you're building, the platform concept, and they all reach out and say, hey, we want it. How do you manage that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've been having that problem a little bit already. To be honest with you, every time I go to my co-founder, jin, who runs our engineering team, and I'm like, hey, we're looking to bring on this new customer the death stare that I get. He's like dude. We're looking to bring on this new customer that the death stare that I get is like dude. I haven't slept in four days. I'm exaggerating a little bit.
Speaker 2:He hasn't slept in three days. No, we were just honest about it. Hey look, this is going to take us. We want to serve you. I want to give you a great experience. You might have to wait a couple months.
Speaker 1:Got it, yeah, okay, well, listen, I think I appreciate you coming on the show and I think we've gotten through a lot of your business and certainly gotten a good understanding for how you think about this industry, the business and what your team is building. Any kind of final thoughts or questions you have before we wrap?
Speaker 2:There was one thing I wanted to talk about, actually, which was a LinkedIn comment you made the other day about the commodification of AI, which I think is which I just wanted to give you props. I think it was a very thoughtful comment, Like the summary was sort of like you know what? I think there's a lot of competitors in this space and I think the AI part of it. If a team of three or four can build together an AI company, anyone can build an AI company and I think you were right, I really do, and I just wanted to comment that I've been doing this for a while. I don't think the hard part is actually the AI, and I just wanted to comment that I've been doing this for a while.
Speaker 2:I don't think the hard part is actually the AI. Everybody's using the same models. You're using the same, like you know, an API called a chat, GPT, or it's a cloud or whatever. It is right Like it's not like you're doing anything that special. Some of the voice folks, I think, are training a little bit more, but even that you know, at the end of the day, they're not doing it from the ground up.
Speaker 2:I think the hard parts are getting the just from a technology perspective. The hard parts are the workflows themselves, making sure you get those right, the integrations associated with those workflows, and then all of that leads to the holy grail, which is the data itself that you can have. The most effective tools in the space is by being able to use rags, which are like basically they're retrieval graphs, so they keep track of. They can help your model get smarter and pattern match more effectively, as well as just understanding where you actually wanna shove AI down someone's throat into a workflow, versus like, actually this is just an API call, and so I totally agree that the AI itself is already commodified or commoditized, and I don't think that matters. I think the point is like how can I give the customer or the user a really good experience so that it becomes sticky into their day-to-day and then they become addicted to it. They can't use anything else? That's the thing that matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I agree with you on a lot of that. I agree with you on the stickiness. I think that what I'd be worried about personally is if I was creating the point solution and I was focused on, say, scheduling, because that's a good example of one. There are going to be hundreds. I mean I've got three different ones that have reached out asking to come on the show. There are going to be hundreds that people will create and bring to market, and that's where I worry about just undercutting price on a consistent basis. It feels like that's just a recipe for what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:And something like what you're doing seems way more sticky because I'm tapped into six different parts of your business and, as long as they're going well, when someone comes in and offers me a specific scheduling tool that's 5 cents cheaper or whatever, it's a lot more challenging. I would think to unplug and get away from something that you've created versus is kind of a point solution. So I'm with you on that front for sure. I guess I'm curious on the data stuff. So I'm with you on that front for sure. I guess I'm curious on the data stuff. Is that maybe a challenge for someone like you as you think about keeping the lean small team, that your ability to get access to all this data. It takes longer versus if someone were to throw a bunch of money and engineers at the problem and try to bring in 50 customers in the first six months and then they have access to way more data. That gives them an advantage. Or am I thinking about that wrong?
Speaker 2:I don't think you're thinking about it wrong, but I think it all has to go hand in hand, right? If you throw it's kind of what we were talking about earlier if you throw 50 people at the problem, you're never going to have the depth of workflows that you need and the genuine understanding of someone's use case to get the data in the first place. So I just don't think that it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, and I think the only way to do it is methodically and slowly, and then eventually you'll build up the corpus of information, and I should be clear about this. I'm not interested in taking one of our customers' data and applying it to someone else. It's about getting deeper and deeper and getting better and better at your day to day.
Speaker 2:I should be able to start to predict okay, well, you know what. You quoted this guy this much last time. So I'm assuming you're going to use the dat rate as opposed to the green screens rate, and then maybe that accelerates something for you. That's maybe not a great example, but that's what I want to start diving more into. As opposed to my model is so much better because I'm taking all this data from big customer A and applying it to small customer B. That's disingenuous and seems frankly that violates our data policies. I agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my co-founder has a PhD in data privacy. This is the thing he does, so we won't fudge around with that at all.
Speaker 1:Great. Yeah Well, I appreciate you bringing that topic up. It is top of mind for me in all of these conversations because it seems like companies like yours are building great stuff and I'm hopeful to see you stick around and support a lot of great customers and not be undercut. And so, yeah Well, listen to our audience. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with the roof, and I certainly did. It was very genuine and I can tell that you've got a lot of humility and I think you're thinking about your business the right way. And as long as you stay kind of customer obsessed and focused on their journey, I think you'll you'll be in for a successful journey here. Thanks a lot, man. This was a lot of fun. 'll be in for a successful journey here.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, man. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you having me on here and I guess this doesn't apply to the listeners. But happy holidays.
Speaker 1:Happy holidays and happy end of January to our listeners, and hopefully it's not snowing wherever you are and if it is, go find some warm weather.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks so much.
