Ep. #55: 9 Founders in 90 Minutes: Manifest 2025 Rapid-fire Interviews

On this episode, recorded live from Manifest: The Future of Supply Chain & Logistics, Andrew interviews nine founders about their budding startups:

1. Ed Burns with TruSygnal, a connection platform for shippers and carriers
2. Tom Curee with Qued, automated appointment scheduling through AI
3. Omar Singh with Get Real Rates, an API pricing tool
4. Chip Reeves with Enablers, logistics human and AI staffing
5. Alex Bezzubets with myMechanic Inc., a roadside assistance platform
6. Shan Wu with Forward Labs, a brokerage sales prospecting tool
7. Sadie Frank with N4EA, predictive intelligence tools for climate risk
8. Thomas Mella with TrackFlo, a track-and-trace optimization platform
9. Annalise Sandhu with Chain, AI-powered freight booking and visibility

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. ***

Chapters

• 2:43 Ed Burns with TruSygnal
• 13:15 Tom Curee with Qued
• 24:15 Omar Singh with Get Real Rates
• 34:32 Chip Reeves with Enablers
• 44:13 Alex Bezzubets with myMechanic Inc.
• 53:57 Shan Wu with Forward Labs
• 1:03:55 Sadie Frank with N4EA
• 1:14:15 Thomas Mella with TrackFlo
• 1:24:46 Annalise Sandhu with Chain

Transcript

Andrew Silver: 0:00

Hey FreightPod listeners. Before we get started today, let's do a quick shout out to our sponsor, Rapido Solutions Group. Rapido connects logistics and supply chain organizations in North America with the best near shore talent to scale efficiently and deliver superior customer service. Rapido works with businesses from all sides of the logistics industry. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. This includes brokers, carriers and logistics software companies. Rapido builds out teams with roles across customer and carrier sales and support, back office administration and technology services.

Andrew Silver: 0:33

The team at Rapido knows logistics and people. It's what sets them apart. Rapido is driven by an inside knowledge of how to recruit, hire and train within the industry and a passion to build better solutions for success. The team is led by CEO Danny Frisco and COO Roberto Lacazza, two guys I've worked with from my earliest days in the industry at Coyote. I have a long history with them and I trust them. I've even been a customer of theirs at Molo and let me tell you they made our business better. In the current market, where everyone's trying to do more with less and save money, solutions like Rapido are a great place to start To learn more. Check them out at gorapidocom. That's gorapidocom. Thanks for being a sponsor. And before we get this show on the road, we have one more promotion for our old friend, paul Estrada, who's now launching his own podcast, let's Ride. Let's give him a second to show you what he's all about.

Paul Estrada: 1:36

What's up? Freight Pod listeners? Long time no talk. It's your good old friend, Paul Estrada, here to tell you about my new podcast, let's Ride with Paul Estrada, the podcast where a dad tackles the big questions of life, career and everything in between by talking to interesting people that have the answers. Our guests include a 5 million mile long haul truck driver, 1993 Rookie of the Year and World Series champion, a school custodian, a 30 year veteran with the LA County Sheriff's Department, and many more. Join me each week as my six and a half year old son, adrian, throws out a thought-provoking question or idea, and I invite a guest to help me sufficiently respond to him. From learning about money and investing to finding a passion in life and exploring careers that can be meaningful for you, we cover it all with a dose of humor and some soundbites of wisdom. The let's Ride Podcast with Paul Estrada, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Andrew Silver: 2:43

Welcome back to another episode of the Freight Pod. I'm your host, Andrew Silver, and we are live from Manifest the Future of Logistics, the most intense conference I've ever been to, the busiest, the most people. We're in Vegas, of all places Shocking, it's crazy here and we're doing rapid-fire interviews. We've got our first guest, mr Ed Burns. Let's start with something simple. Just give us a quick introduction where you're from, your business, when you started. We'll go from there.

Ed Burns: 3:15

Awesome, andrew. Thanks for having me on here. Ed Burns, out of eastern Pennsylvania, near Allentown, the freight mecca of the northeast, have a business with my father. We do outsource carrier sales, so we connect the carriers with the shippers and we're very excited to be bringing a new company to market where we do something very similar but in a digital way.

Andrew Silver: 3:39

What's the new company?

Ed Burns: 3:40

It's called Tru Sygnal.

Andrew Silver: 3:43

And what problem are you solving?

Ed Burns: 3:44

See, carriers don't have a very high trust level with a lot of the technologies out there that let's say they're digital freight networks, because at the end of the day, it's a tech-enabled brokerage right. So what we're solving is we have a broker-free platform and we focus on the contract side of the business, not the spot market side of the business, not the spot market. So it's a way for shippers to find good asset carriers and for carriers to find shippers who want to work with an asset carrier.

Andrew Silver: 4:12

So you're not a brokerage.

Ed Burns: 4:13

Not a brokerage.

Andrew Silver: 4:15

Is this? What is the unique kind of solution here?

Ed Burns: 4:19

I mean I think having that broker-free platform enables a lot of trust, so we're able to get a lot of carrier interest pretty quickly. That trust factor is really important, especially in the tech space. I think carriers are reputationally tech-averse. They're just not comfortable with it a lot of times, and so bringing that trust there, I think, is going to allow a lot of people to come on and put a lot of capacity, and so bringing that trust there, I think, is going to allow a lot of people to come on and put a lot of capacity on the platform.

Andrew Silver: 4:48

So is it similar to a brokerage, in that your team has to be selling to the shippers to get them onto the platform and then you also have to sell to the carriers to get them on the platform.

Ed Burns: 4:57

Yeah, but at the end, once they're on, it's a marketplace for them to find one another. It's a dating application for shippers and carriers to find one another.

Andrew Silver: 5:07

Where is the business right now in its journey?

Ed Burns: 5:10

This is the first time I'm talking about it publicly. Yeah, so we've done a six-month test with some shippers and carriers. It's cooking, it's working, and so we're ready to start talking about it.

Andrew Silver: 5:20

This is the public launch, so you're going to make the episode, given you're the first guest and I said this was going to be competitive and the top interviews would make it Well, you're the first guest and since it's a public launch, we will make sure you're in the episode. What does your ideal customer look like?

Ed Burns: 5:37

We're looking for fleets that have 50 to say 1,000 trucks. They can offer some capacity to say a thousand trucks, they can offer some capacity. Fleets that work with shippers directly and have a lot of their trucks moving on contract freight and want more, and shippers who want to work with carriers directly. So the size and scope of that we can do drive-in, reefer and flatbed in the domestic US right now. So people who are moving freight and looking for fleets to do that for them and are willing to do it not in a transactional way but lock in for six or 12 or more months.

Andrew Silver: 6:13

What is the revenue model?

Ed Burns: 6:15

Great question. We do not want to get in the middle of the transaction, so we're going to have a very simple subscription fee and people sign up for access to the platform. And, because we don't want to tell people that they have to do business together or influence the pricing, we want to have complete transparency and pricing between the carrier and the shipper and allow them to negotiate with one another for what makes sense.

Andrew Silver: 6:36

And what about your team? Positions you to win in this space?

Ed Burns: 6:43

We have a lot of old guys who've been in freight for a long time, so we have a great network of people and we're able to talk to a lot of people who wouldn't typically talk to a company that hasn't launched yet. We're able to show this to people and get people on the platform, because my dad's been doing this for 30 years plus. I've learned a lot from him along the way and people know us, so we're leaning into that.

Andrew Silver: 7:10

So I know your dad. I've met him a couple times. I'm going off script here. I've got these questions I was planning to stick with, but I want to get into this a little bit. Your dad's one of the nicer guys I think I've ever met in the space and someone who just kind of has this aura about him, a, and someone who just kind of has this aura about him, a light about him that resonates. I met him at Food Shippers, I think, a few years ago. So tell me about the best lessons you've learned from him that you apply in your daily life.

Ed Burns: 7:34

Yeah, andrew, part of the aura is the bald head. It just kind of you get the sheen going and it looks like a halo. When I was a kid, he always brought us with him. He was doing LTL sales for a trucking company called Carolina Freight, and then Pjacks and then Jebik these are old brands and he'd bring us with him as kids and I think it was a ploy to get more freight honestly, like, bring some cute little kids. But we were able to walk around on manufacturers' floors and stand in the wheel wells of trucks and crawl around in trucks and just be around the industry and he would always say freight gets in your blood and I was always like what does that mean? And now here I am and it's in my blood and it's not. It's not getting out and once you're in, there's no getting out.

Ed Burns: 8:15

Um, the other thing is his his uh ethos has always been help people. Um, since we were kids as well, I'm here to help people, you're here to help people, we're here to help people, that's it. It's about helping people. It's not about transactions, it's not about making money, it's about helping people. And he just instilled in us a belief that if you help enough people get what they want. You'll get what you want. You help people. You do the right thing. Money will figure itself out.

Andrew Silver: 8:43

You don't need to lead with the sale that's a great, great, very wise words and, uh, clearly you've learned some great lessons there, so let's go back. What is, what do you say, is the kind of biggest competitive advantage that the true signal team has?

Ed Burns: 8:59

I think that it's. It's the experience, um, it's the industry knowledge and I think it's also that detachment from the outcome. You know the platform inherently in it. If there's a match and people don't transact, we're not going to have a heart attack about it. We're not financially incentivized to make people do business together. We want to allow people to do business together when it makes sense and I think that lack of pressure and not being beholden to somebody for a lot of money. Right now we're self-funded, we can take our time to bring this to market. We can iterate and change very quickly. We're small. It's a simple platform. Changes are fast and inexpensive, so we don't have pressure and I think that's going to help us.

Andrew Silver: 9:49

Definitely. I agree with that. I'm curious if I'm a shipper and I commit to use when I think about. I've spent a lot of time selling to shippers and one of the most important things they want from me as a broker is knowing that I'm going to execute on whatever commitments I make. So if I commit to a six-month deal or a 12-month deal, they want to make sure that I'm going to follow through and execute. How do you navigate that as the kind of detached, non-committed party? If you sell to a shipper and say, hey, come on to our platform, and then they contract with one of your carriers and the carrier bails? What does that kind of look like? Is that a stain for you guys? How do you navigate that? Or how are you thinking about that as you go to market?

Ed Burns: 10:35

Yeah, we're not afraid to kick a carrier off the platform if they're misbehaving right. If they're doing things that they shouldn't be doing, then they're not a fit for the platform. Right now, the fleets that are on and the fleets that we are continuing to onboard we've got a list of people who we know still and know how they operate. We have an integration with a tool called eCarrierCheck to do some simple background check. We're still asking the shipper to onboard as they normally would, whatever their vetting process is. If it's to go through the RMIS, that's great. If it's to go through the RMIS, that's great. If it's something different, that's fine too. Right now, we can vouch for the carriers on the platform. I think as we scale, this could potentially become an issue and I hope I solve it before then.

Andrew Silver: 11:15

So it feels like you know, my perspective has always been like as the broker, it's my job to understand the shippers kind of rules of the game and then play by them. To understand the shippers kind of rules of the game and then play by them. And it sounds like what you're asking. You're going to give the care, you're going to give them the leash to set their own rules and the carriers have to agree to play by them. I'm curious if it makes sense for you also to kind of have your own kind of code of conduct for the platform that you say to a carrier hey, you know, here are our 10 commandments for you to participate in our bit or on our platform. You have to follow these things. Is that how you guys are thinking about the business?

Ed Burns: 11:49

Yeah, I mean I think that's a beautiful way of putting it Absolutely, I mean, we were, we're looking for people who will honor their word and do what they say they're going to do on both sides, right and in our legacy business. This is how we work. We work with shippers who honor the commitments and carriers that honor their commitments. So it's like you might win six months worth of business, but they wind up doing business for 15 years or more. So that's what we're looking to replicate here as well.

Andrew Silver: 12:15

All right. Last question, as we're coming up on our 10 minutes what are the biggest challenges you're currently facing as you get this business off the ground?

Ed Burns: 12:23

This is new territory for me, right? I don't consider myself a tech guy by any means, so coming in and pitching this and making sure the messaging is right, it's a little quirky, it's a little bit different. Carrier interest is excellent. Shippers move a little slower and for us it's like going through the contracting process and getting them to sign a license agreements. Um, it takes a long time and it's like oh, we're sending it to legal. You know that's a new thing for me to navigate, but we're getting through it.

Andrew Silver: 12:53

Yeah, that part's never fun. Um, but listen, man, I think with your genuine nature, I think I think you'll find some success here. Just keeping yourself and uh keeping, keep kind of doing what you can to support the carriers and shippers, and I think you'll find a winning strategy. So with that, thank you. That wraps up our first interview. Our first rapid fire, ed burns, thank you. Okay, round two we've got mr tom curie is that right nailed it yeah absolutely, tom curie.

Andrew Silver: 13:23

President Curie, president of QD. Founder of QD. We have had your partner Prasad on the show for an in-depth look at QD, but that was a while ago, so we've got you now. Let's start with your story. Introduce yourself where you're from. When did you start the business? Why did you start the business?

Tom Curee: 13:41

Yeah, so I've been in. I've been in transportation for about 18 years, spent the majority of my time out there, living the 3PL life, the carrier life, lived on both sides of the spectrum, and my good friend, prasad Galapoli, had really come to me as we started talking about challenges that existed in supply chain that hadn't properly been really solved at this point, right, and so we came together to say, hey, look, how could we address appointment scheduling and what we need to do in this space? So we launched out. In April of 23 was when I officially said, hey, we're going to start doing this. We worked together, started assembling the team and now we've got 75 different customers and 3PLs that are actively using us for appointment scheduling and finally to kind of fix that old beast. I mean, you've scheduled appointments right.

Andrew Silver: 14:29

I have scheduled appointments.

Tom Curee: 14:30

Yeah, yeah, many More than one, I bet too.

Andrew Silver: 14:32

More than one. Explain exactly what the problem is that you're solving.

Tom Curee: 14:36

Yeah, so the reality is we are in a world of connectivity, but the problem is there are so many different systems that exist out there and different ways to connect to these different locations that exist out there. I mean, you're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of locations that exist out there that require appointments of some sort, and so the problem has been this has been a project that a lot of people have tried to solve. We have seen that. We talked to very large companies that have said, hey, this was a project, we tried it, it failed. Why are you any different?

Tom Curee: 15:09

And the reality is we live appointments. It is all that we do as an organization, and so our team you know Prasad has several decades of experience in this industry, understanding how to serve, understanding how to bring these different organizations together, and that is really what we are we're a connector. I think a lot of my history and my experience in the industry has been one of being a connector, from things that I've done with TIA and other associations, and so it's really given us an opportunity to say, hey, we've got a path to bring these systems together and create one unified experience for the end user, and that's really the focus for us is the end user. How do we make sure that their life gets better and they get to really reap the benefits of the speed of these appointments, as opposed to someone out there trying to do this all manually by themselves?

Andrew Silver: 15:58

Describe the solution. What does it look like? What is it?

Tom Curee: 16:02

Yeah. So the interesting thing about our product is we're a product that we hope that you never see. We're not trying to give you another widget, another Outlook plugin, another extension, another web portal. What we do is we build into the workflow of what the users are already doing in your TMS, so we go directly into TMS. A lot of people say, well, what TMS? It really doesn't matter. So we go directly into TMS. A lot of people say, well, what TMS? It really doesn't matter.

Tom Curee: 16:26

We've built with anything from the AS400, mccloud software, new API, proprietary TMSs that have come to us. We've built with Excel sheets. I mean, we've literally built this connection through various different ways. But we allow as soon as the stop is created in your system, whatever that system is, we can immediately identify, based off of our tens of thousands of locations, where it needs to be scheduled, how it needs to be scheduled. We can immediately go out, process that appointment and push it back. So users don't have to do anything, they don't have to be involved in the process. We can allow them to be. But reality is we use all of that historical data to be able to know what your preferences are and go after those prime appointments as soon as they're available.

Andrew Silver: 17:07

And where is the business right now in its journey? What key milestones have been reached thus far?

Tom Curee: 17:12

Yeah. So you know key milestones for us. There's been a couple of big ones. First off, reaching 75 different customers. That's a big deal for us and you know we're talking about 75 diverse customers. You know we're talking about some of the largest logistics companies that are out there largest cares are out there to some of the smaller, I mean I can remember we had a smaller care that came to us and they said, hey, we want to do this, we want to fix appointment scheduling, but you're going to have to work with Donna and, to be honest, donna hates everything. She hates every new piece of technology. She doesn't like anything. So good luck, right. And so, fortunately, donna loves it and it worked great. And so those are the moments Right.

Tom Curee: 17:56

And like, I can remember one, one significant milestone for us we were at the McLeod user conference and there were customers there that I had sold, but I wasn't involved in onboarding at that point. We had brought on Carrie Hodnett. She's our customer success director. She does a phenomenal job with our customer and that team, and it was the first time that I had a customer walk up to me that we had sold to and they said Tom, I just want you to know we love this. This has been the easiest integration we've ever done. We've absolutely loved it. Your team has been phenomenal and that was to me that was a real milestone because you heard it directly from a customer. I wasn't involved in that, I didn't do any of that. It was literally the team building that. So to me, those are the more important milestones. Are there revenue milestones, absolutely All those things that matter in terms of the business, but at the end of the day, it's that customer coming to you that says, hey, this has been really impactful for the way that we run our business.

Andrew Silver: 18:51

I mean, nothing feels better than having a customer tell you that you've solved a problem for them. So I can definitely appreciate that. Talk to me about what your ideal customer profile looks like.

Tom Curee: 19:01

Yeah, so in our world a lot of times we're looking at logistics companies, carriers, even shippers, who are scheduling their own appointments, okay. So we run in a lot of these scenarios where the appointments have to be manually intervened at some point. We built the full cycle of appointment scheduling so it's not just, hey, I need to schedule an appointment, it's I need to schedule, I need to reschedule, I need to change dates, I need to change time, I need to schedule an appointment. It's I need to schedule, I need to reschedule, I need to change dates, I need to change time, I need to do PO changes, any of the back and forth that exists around that appointment and you're involved with it.

Tom Curee: 19:32

What's interesting about that for us is we run into some companies that if I looked on paper and I said here's a target account, I would look at that and I would say they're too small. But then we find out that 95% of their business is in two of the most heavily used scheduling platforms that exist. So they're actually a better client than some of the big clients that you might see. So anyone who has this opportunity where you've got users that are actively going and schedule, same thing If you've got your sales team responsible for scheduling appointments. I mean, I don't know, I kind of like my sales team selling and not scheduling appointments, but. But you know, everyone's got their own way of doing business. But any of those scenarios where you've got users tied up doing these same manual, repetitive tasks around appointments, they're a good fit for us.

Andrew Silver: 20:16

Yeah, I mean, you know, in my I don't know 15 plus years of brokering freight scheduling appointments was the thing that we always looked at and we're like why can't we automate this? And it feels like we're finally reaching that point. Talk to me about what? About your team positions, you guys, your team, to be like the winners in this space.

Tom Curee: 20:39

So I think there's a couple of things. First off, our team has over 70 years of transportation experience. Okay, so we're not, we're not coming in from some coast and saying, hey, we're going to fix transportation because they don't know what they're doing and we've got a bunch of really strong nerds that are that are smarter. That's not it. I mean, we, we come with industry background. We've experienced it. I've scheduled several appointments in my life, several, several, at least. At least five, at least five. Well, I always tell people you know, I started in this business scheduling appointments, I'm just going to die scheduling appointments.

Andrew Silver: 21:09

That's just what I've decided.

Tom Curee: 21:11

But in that same thing, our process is what makes it different. We aren't trying to send your users to a new place. We're not trying to teach them a new tool and a lot of times when people hear that, they struggle with that because they want to touch and see. And of course, we've got back-end visibility. We can show them some deeper layer of what's happening behind the scenes. But our user adoption is over 90 plus percent. So when you can talk about a new solution, a brand new technology, we're not teaching someone something that, oh, we had a previous vendor and now we're switching to Qt. This is brand new to them. To have over 90% user adoption as quickly as we do with customers, that is a huge, huge differentiator. I believe in what we're bringing to the industry for appointment scheduling.

Andrew Silver: 21:58

Yeah, I mean, that's a big number. Talk to me about your top priorities for 2025.

Tom Curee: 22:03

Our top priority right now is additional connections. So we are going after every scheduling type that exists. We don't want you to use us for 3% of your appointments or 80% of your appointments. We want to handle 100% of your appointments. So it doesn't matter which connection it is, it doesn't matter how it exists in the marketplace, we're going after it. We have over 100 platforms that we are aggressively reaching out to right now to work with to begin scheduling, because what we've learned is they don't want 150, 250, 300 different carriers and brokers coming to them saying please, let me connect with you. They love the idea of going to a single source, letting that be queued, us bringing that connection to all of the other partners that exist in the place.

Andrew Silver: 22:47

Last question what are the biggest challenges you're currently facing in the business?

Tom Curee: 22:51

I think the biggest challenges that we face in this business is continuing to open up more connectivity. Right, like, because we want to be as aggressive as we are, as we have been, with our customers, about adding new connections. There are still some obscure small connections that we may not know about yet, right, and so you're going to run into, you know, abcdschedulingcom that maybe we haven't heard about yet. The nice thing that's helping as our customer base continues to expand, we start uncovering more of those different types of connections so that we truly can get to 100% of every appointment that ever comes into their TMS today.

Andrew Silver: 23:26

Last one, I just thought of this, I just want to hear it because I like you and I'm curious your leadership style. What's the most important element to leadership in your mind?

Tom Curee: 23:36

To me it's authenticity. I have always been very big on that for team members that I've worked with, the team that we've brought around. I believe that if they're going to be authentic, you're going to get a more honest approach to everything that they're dealing with, every problem they deal with, and it just brings a level of transparency. I think when people are forced into these environments where they have to look a certain way or act a certain way or fit with this certain crowd, I just don't believe that they're going to be as effective as they would be if they were their authentic self.

Andrew Silver: 24:08

I love it. Thank you, that's your 10 minutes, well done, good job, all right. Next man up, mr Omar Singh. Returning guest. Returning guest second time, this time for a new business, though. Returning guest, second time, this time for a new business, though we're going to talk about Get Real Rates, so why don't we start with Omar kind?

Omar Singh: 24:37

of where you're from, the business you've started, when did you start it and what does it do? Thanks for having me on. It's good to see you, andrew. So Get Real Rates is a spin-off, sort of like what you're seeing in the industry with some other brokers who built some tech that create all of Surge's integrations and business opportunities and make it available to really every logistician, every broker, every carrier. For you know just the tech that we've got. I'll tell you more about it in the next few minutes but that's what we're doing is commercializing multi-tenant SaaS model of the tech that we've built, similar to you know, transfix got rid of their brokerage. They're focusing on their tech. Flexport's taking over the convoy platform. I think Freightvana and Loadsmith are doing something with their tech to focus on that. So what I decided to do was make this available to everybody and hope that the entire industry benefits from it. What is the problem you're solving.

Andrew Silver: 25:42

Entire industry benefits from it. What is the?

Omar Singh: 25:43

problem you're solving. I'm enabling small and medium-sized brokerages and motor carriers to participate in any what any shipper TMS is going to call dynamic rate discovery, dynamic pricing, dynamic rate tree, dynamic routing guide, whatever they call it. There's usually a high barrier to entry in order to be a partner with the TMSs and to build the tech that's capable of providing those real-time API prices to the shippers within whatever the TMS is, and there's a very high barrier to entry to building that, and so we're making it. Just buy it and make it super affordable at the level of each customer or each bot we have bots also, um so that small, medium-sized businesses don't have to invest, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in this tech what makes your solution unique?

Omar Singh: 26:38

well, from an onboarding perspective, we're going to have the fastest onboarding in the industry. Most, most people who are sort of doing what we're doing do what you would call back-end accounting. You sign all the paperwork, you become the customer and then you get invoiced monthly and that all contributes to a longer onboarding process. So we set it up for front-end accounting. So literally even though I don't expect people to do it in the very beginning up for front-end accounting so literally, even though I don't expect people to do it in the very beginning you can self-service on board. Go to the website, make a payment, sign up for monthly, sign up for annual. You'll immediately get a link to your login page and, like, there's a couple things you have to do. You'd have to put in your rate engine credentials. You'd have to put in your tms credentials, whether it's louisiana or mercury Gate or Uber Freight or whatever. There's a few things you have to learn, but literally you can be onboarded in five minutes.

Omar Singh: 27:29

That's one of the exciting things I hope that people will find In terms of the uniqueness. I've spent six years already building this. So we have TMS integrations with all of the major TMSs that are participating in any kind of dynamic price discovery program and then it's also super scalable. So very, very low barrier to entry from a pricing standpoint, from an onboarding standpoint, the most, I think, robust list of TMS integrations that are out there, and it comes with years of experience as my experience with search, transportation and building all of the variables that work and make sense.

Andrew Silver: 28:10

Where is the business right now in its journey?

Omar Singh: 28:14

So this is sort of, I guess, what I would call a soft launch. We're probably two or three weeks from going live. We're finishing rate integrations with green screens and truck stop and the cloud and sonar, and so we're polishing those up. We have TMS integrations with green screens and truck stop and the cloud and sonar, and so we're polishing those up. We have TMS integrations in place already with some of the large shipper TMSs. We just finished the whole payment gateway onboarding, sort of self-serve automatic like tenant creation. Once a payment is made it takes a couple of minutes to get your logging credentials emailed. So, yeah, two, three weeks from going live in full production.

Andrew Silver: 28:48

What does your ideal?

Omar Singh: 28:48

customer look like. I think it's going to be small and medium-sized businesses. Certainly we can, you know, compete at the enterprise level if you have enough customers. But it can be any small, medium-sized broker carrier who wants single lane quoting, multi-lane quoting, bots, you know, and then, of course, api integrations. So you could have literally just two customers, three customers who have spot bid board. You could have two or three customers that are using dynamic pricing, with whatever their tms is, whether it's an on-prem TMS or it's one of the enterprise level ones. But you don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build it or to be a partner with those TMS organizations, because some of them require that.

Andrew Silver: 29:36

What is the revenue model?

Omar Singh: 29:38

So the revenue is going to be subscription-based for me. There'll be a super small setup fee for each bot, super small setup fee for each customer, tms integration and then just a monthly subscription. You can pay annual at a 15% discount on, like the tier one, which is single lane pricing $250 a month. In my mind that's just like giving it away $500 a month for multi-lane pricing, which is also you could get an annual discount for that. But then the bots and the APIs and the carrier TMS integrations for setting automatic buy rates are going to just be monthly and I don't think and those would be $1,000, $500 for bots, $1,000 for TMS integrations and I think at that price point people aren't going to leave. I don't need to lock in multi-year contract. I don't need to lock in long-term pricing. I think you're going to see value every single month and you'll just stay our customer every single month.

Andrew Silver: 30:34

What about your team? Positions you to win in this space?

Omar Singh: 30:38

I mean I think that we have the integrations built. We have a product that has been, you know, tried and tested by me and and my team for the last six years. It was built, you know, I remember I come from the agent background. I was at some of the large national firms for a while, so it's built for scale. It really, like legacy, has been built for, you know, different agents. It's been built for, uh, multi-user within the tenant, so a large brokerage could enable it for 25 of their broker agents or just sort of smaller organizations can just have one user. But it has all of the tools for enterprise level scale while also being just super easily accessible to smaller, medium-sized companies that just want to dip their feet in or have a customer that says I would like for you to participate in this.

Andrew Silver: 31:34

What are your top priorities for 2025?

Omar Singh: 31:37

Well, I want to get the word out, you know about Get Real Rates. I want to be able to gain the confidence of brokers and carriers to try out the product, learn that it's good and then also help the large shipper, TMSs. I want to be able to gain the confidence of brokers and carriers to try out the product, learn that it's good and then also help the large shipper, tmss. I mean, one of the reasons that we're able to build these partnerships is that they tell us they have a lot of customers who want to participate in whatever they call their dynamic freight marketplace, dynamic price discovery, digital freight matching they all have a a different name for it, but some shippers are reluctant to turn it on because they only have about 50 people who can participate, right?

Omar Singh: 32:13

So the large cms's have customers saying we want, we want hundreds of people to be able to participate and those cms's don't have the bandwidth to onboard everybody. The smaller, medium-sized companies don't have the bandwidth to onboard everybody. The smaller, medium-sized companies don't have the resources, the financial resources, to pay for those partnership alliances. So I want to get the whole shipper community benefiting from hundreds of brokers and carriers being able to do this. I want those hundreds of brokers and carriers. To be able to get an easy ROI at our price point, I think you just have to win a couple loads a month and it pays for itself. So everybody should really, I think, move the industry forward.

Andrew Silver: 32:52

What are the biggest challenges you're currently facing?

Omar Singh: 32:57

I thought that this was unique to me, but as I talk to people I've learned that it just takes a little longer for these integrations to get built, for the partnership agreements to get put in place, for the different rate engine integrations to sort of also get put in place. So it's taken a little bit longer than I thought it would, but I mean we're very close. We're very close. I'm happy about that.

Andrew Silver: 33:22

What lessons are you taking from your experience with Surge and applying to this new business venture and Get Real Race?

Omar Singh: 33:31

Well, I think the industry has probably seen that an over-reliance on tech didn't go well for us in terms of making it the ultimate strategy. It didn't go well for some of the larger firms and some of the medium-sized firms Of course, we know some of their names. I think being able to bring balance to where we're assisting a traditional, existing business model that's successful and enabling them with tech that doesn't have to disrupt the way they're doing things, but just enable them to do things with their customers that they weren't able to do before, I think is going to be the right balance for the industry. So don't change your business model, but let's give you a tool that is going to maximize ROI for you very quickly and give you a much more sticky relationship with your shipper customers.

Andrew Silver: 34:26

All right, your 10 minutes is up, well done, thank you. Thanks for having me Next man up. We got Mr Chip Reeves. Start with something easy when you're from, what's your business? When did you start it?

Chip Reeves: 34:45

Currently live in Nashville, Tennessee. Lived all over North Carolina, Atlanta, Chicago for a long time. Made it down south back to Nashville. Started the company Enablers officially in November. Soft launch happened back in August, but using Manifest as a good event to really launch our name and start pushing.

Andrew Silver: 35:03

What problem are you solving really?

Chip Reeves: 35:04

launch our name and start pushing. What problem are you solving Right now? Logistics companies, freight brokers, third-party logistics companies. They go through higher fire cycles. When the market's bad, they fire everybody. When it kicks back up, they hire everybody. I think in this upcoming swing that we're going to get the market's going to pick up. It's inevitable at some point. I think hiring managers is going to be a little bit more smarter. They're not going to want to hire a ton of people, but they are going to need that extra help to help the influx of business. So that's where we come in, offering our highly trained offshore logistics folks. We have offshore and nearshore, but it's really blending, taking operational processes that are long, complex, a lot of clicks. Put some AI on top of it, what the AI cannot do. That's where we put our human intelligence, our AGI, to fill in those operational gaps.

Andrew Silver: 35:55

So what is the unique solution you're providing?

Chip Reeves: 35:58

Offshore staffing and then automated custom workflows. So we can build a workflow. You answer two questions, upload one example document or file a lot of different formats, then you have a workflow that you can run by as many different users as you want, as many times as you want. So the custom AI really comes in handy to eliminate some of those mundane tasks billing, tracking requests, quoting requests from shippers. It can do it all.

Andrew Silver: 36:26

Where is the business right now in its journey? What key milestones have been reached?

Chip Reeves: 36:31

Yeah, so officially launching in November. So we have just shy of 30 people placed right now. We had a three-month goal to do that and we did it in two months, so we're ahead of schedule. Long way to go. We want to place 300 this year. So throughout the course of the year we're going to have some different milestones to help get us there, but 300 by the end of the year is our goal.

Andrew Silver: 36:55

What is your ideal customer look like?

Chip Reeves: 36:57

Yeah, small, mid-sized brokers who have good business, constant business, and they are starting to ramp, but they don't necessarily want to hire a ton of people to operate the tasks that can be operated more cheaply, a little bit more smartly. So we're planning on doing that. What is the revenue model? Subscription-based for the AI and then for the humans, just a monthly price.

Andrew Silver: 37:26

What about your team? Positions you to win in the space.

Chip Reeves: 37:30

Yeah, so right now it's myself and one counterpart here in the US, but we have a huge team over in Pakistan. That's where the bulk of our operational workers are going to be, and I've actually worked with these individuals at two different employers in the past worked for Keep Truck and Motive Technologies in the past and they have a huge operation in Islamabad and Lahore. So I was able to make a lot of connections. I trained all those folks over there about five years ago and stayed in touch with them. So those folks have stayed in the industry working for different freight brokerages, fuel cards, factoring companies. So they have touched a lot of different aspects of the business. So it's not just, you know, experience from a Western call center. These come, these reps come heavily armed with training and at least one year logistics experience.

Andrew Silver: 38:20

What is unique about the Pakistani culture that you've learned? That has added value to the business you're building.

Chip Reeves: 38:29

Yeah, humble society. They're grateful for the work. They love the type of work that we're having them do, highly trained workforce over there. Lahore has about nine million people and there are over 20 universities in Lahore, so everybody has college degrees that we hire. So these folks are hungry and they are the most hospitable people in the world. I've gone to lots of different places and these people are willing to bend over backwards for customers and logistics. That's what we need.

Andrew Silver: 39:00

What is your biggest competitive advantage?

Chip Reeves: 39:03

Competitive advantage is our speed to market. If you need somebody, we have people that are already trained, they've already gone through our certification program and we can deploy people in days, not weeks or even months, so we can get there very quickly, very cost competitive. We're new, so we're not ingrained in our ways, so I'm willing to get creative on the solution side and the deal side.

Andrew Silver: 39:26

What are your top priorities for 2025?

Chip Reeves: 39:29

Top priorities grow revenue, get our name brand out there. Those are our two biggest things. So, since we're new, people don't know who Enablers is, so we've got to make a name for ourselves, put it out there and make sure people understand. You know the type of work that we do. And then, obviously, just getting more organic customers outside of just kind of our friends and family network and, you know, start getting some organic customers.

Andrew Silver: 39:51

What are the biggest challenges you're currently facing?

Chip Reeves: 39:54

I mean, ai is coming in hot and heavy I think we've all heard that term, at least you know, 20 times in the past hour but it's not going to solve everything right, like there's still need for human intuition intervention. The bots aren't going to do everything, so, but that's something we're up against. You know. There's, you know, voice agents out there. There's, you know, automated workflows, you know, similar to the ones that we offer. So I would say AI is our biggest competitor, but nothing's ever going to take away a relationship or that human intuition.

Andrew Silver: 40:22

So AI is your biggest competitor. How do you think about AI within your business? What, where, when, why? Explain how you're thinking about using it.

Chip Reeves: 40:33

Yeah, so we want to partner with AI companies that are solving some of these tough problems, because humans can't do it all. Robots can't do it all either, so we're actually looking to partner with folks. We have a couple partnerships in place already where we're reselling each other's products, so we want to do more of the same.

Andrew Silver: 40:51

And what about your own background? Talk a little bit about what you've learned that's helped kind of get you to this place and what lessons you've brought with you into this business yeah, of got, get you to this place and why you, what lessons you've brought with you into this business.

Chip Reeves: 41:02

Yeah, you know it started out like like a lot of us in traditional brokerage house, you know, floor with hundreds and hundreds of carrier reps, customer reps, ops, reps um, I think those days where you literally have a floor of hundreds of people are kind of gone. Um, but I've been at other freight tech startups that have kind of opened my eyes. There are smart solutions out there where you can have people and you can have great technology and a fine balance there. But, like I said before, you know I worked with Motive for a while. I met all these people over in Pakistan, realized that there's an opportunity to really do something special over there. So, between my traditional freight background and then all my freight tech startup experience, I think Between my traditional freight background and then all my freight tech startup experience, I think meshing kind of these two solutions.

Andrew Silver: 41:47

It's a perfect time, as the market's going to swing up here pretty soon. There's something I've always been curious about as someone who's a big believer in having a very intentional culture and wanting people the more bought in you can get your employees to your own culture, your values, what you stand for, I think, the better product you'll have. One of the challenges of a business like yours is you hire these employees who they do kind of work for you, but they also are more directly working for your customer, for the company that you place them with. So how do you think about building culture in an organization where your employees don't really work for you as much as they, or they do work for you, but they also work for another company? How do you think about that?

Chip Reeves: 42:33

Yeah, I think we're very selective on the types of customers that we bring on. If it's a customer that just wants to grind these people 200 phone calls, they don't incorporate them into their own culture. That's not something that we want. We want a customer that's going to embrace these individuals, embrace our team into their teams, because I mean, they're managers, they're coworkers. They're not gonna be with my company, they're gonna be, like you said, they're gonna be with our clients. So we vet people, make sure they're going to treat them properly. We look at their social media presence, see what type of activities they do outside of the office, how they incorporate culture outside of just T-shirts and raises every quarter.

Andrew Silver: 43:16

And how are you thinking about this? Is this is your first business that you're? It's your business, and how are you thinking about your leadership style? What are you doing intentionally to try to build the best organization you can?

Chip Reeves: 43:28

Yeah, it's interesting. So I've been on the operations side. I've been an operator since day one so I've never had to sell. I guess you're never not selling but it's never been, you know, my top priority. So this sales motion is new for me. So it's stretching me a little bit there and I like it. It's forcing me to do stuff that I absolutely would not do in the past. But I'm a people person. I understand that operations is tough, it can be frustrating, so I always take care of people, make sure that people are happy in the work that they do. If they're not, see what levers we can pull to either change the situation or find a different type of opportunity to make that individual a little bit happier. So always looking out for the individual and after that business comes second.

Andrew Silver: 44:10

All right, thank you. Our 10 minutes is up. Well done. Next man up, alex Bezubitz. Did I get that right? Yes, you did. Welcome to the show. Let's start with a quick introduction where you're from the name of your business when you started.

Alex Bezzubets: 44:26

Hey guys. So Alex, founder and CEO of my Mechanic, we founded the company almost three years ago and, yeah, what problem are you solving? So, essentially, we are bringing every roadside incident online. We are a pure SaaS platform that connects the mechanic with the service provider, with the fleet or the owner-operator that has broken down, and so we want to replace the phone calls and be pure SaaS that connects the parties together in real-time updates, tracking, messaging, photo uploads, invoicing.

Andrew Silver: 44:57

What is the actual problem? What does that look like in the market today?

Alex Bezzubets: 45:00

So let's say, a company like Warner. They have 10,000 trucks, they have about 65 dispatchers sitting in one office in three shifts and they're playing phone tag with the driver and then with the mechanic and the mechanic's mechanic for status updates. And so somebody like a Warner what with value prop we want to offer to them is be able to from the driver submitting a breakdown VR platform to the dispatcher, getting notification of the driver's location, messaging, photo sharing, what have you. And then the mechanics on the other side, the service providers, them too. They get status updates, they get notifications. They have a management software as well, and now we're eliminating the need for wondering and replacing it with data-driven analytics and stuff.

Andrew Silver: 45:43

Where is the business right now in its journey? What key milestones have been reached?

Alex Bezzubets: 45:47

Yeah, so we launched last year Q4. We have a little over 8,000 trucks in the pipeline and then an additional almost 20,000 in pilots. We're talking to some of the biggest service providers to be featured on our platform. But we started breaking revenue last Q4 and just been growing ever since.

Andrew Silver: 46:06

What does your ideal customer look like?

Alex Bezzubets: 46:08

On the trucking side, any fleets owner-operators and, on the service side, service providers, roadside assistance companies, dealerships that have shops, towing companies and parts distribution as well.

Andrew Silver: 46:21

What is the revenue model?

Alex Bezzubets: 46:23

So on one side, we are charging either a successful road call fee or the bigger fleets are wanting to pay per asset. If you use our platform to facilitate the payment, we charge 1% for the convenience fee. And on the service side, we are charging per technician to be featured on the platform or per lead.

Andrew Silver: 46:41

What about your team? Positions you to win in the space.

Alex Bezzubets: 46:45

I think, starting with our leadership, we just brought on James Lovecamp, who had a significant role at FleetNet, and he brought his expertise 22 years of experience in the industry. We have a great advisory board and then we got a couple other people that are about to be released and announced that are coming on board as well. But we did a really, really good job of listening to the industry and the industry problems and we took those questions, problems, concerns and we put together a SaaS platform that has good UI and are offering that solution back to them.

Andrew Silver: 47:16

So this is a space that is pretty unfamiliar to me. I mean, obviously, as a as a broker, we had trucks break down all the time, but we never. I mean, we did occasionally have to get involved, but it wasn't certainly a core competency. Can you talk a little bit more about what that problem really looks like Without your product? If I'm a truck driver and I break down, what does that look like in terms of?

Alex Bezzubets: 47:41

getting a solution. So I'll give you a prime example. I was two weeks ago. I posted this on LinkedIn.

Alex Bezzubets: 47:46

I was driving to a meeting and there's a truck on the side of the road with his hazards on. So I pulled over, I recorded the incident and asked the driver how long have you been here? And he said two hours. And so I was like call your dispatch. He calls his dispatch and they have not even started looking for a mechanic at that time. And I was like I can have somebody out within 20 minutes. And then I called one of our customers. They were there within 15 minutes. So just in a MVP quote-unquote, this is what it looks like, what it looked manually right, but drivers will sit on the phone average up to four hours waiting for someone to come by. And that's not because the dispatch was able to find the closest mechanic. It's because they found someone that said yes first. So they didn't know that Mike was down the road with qualified experience to be able to get that truck off the road. But we, having that marketplace data, are able to help people make those decisions and get those trucks off the road as quickly as possible.

Andrew Silver: 48:32

What are the biggest challenges in building a marketplace?

Alex Bezzubets: 48:36

I think the biggest challenge obviously is the chicken or the egg problem, right, like how do you bring on all the drivers and all the mechanics? What have you? So what we did really well was we created two SaaS management softwares that they can't live without, and they can also operate without having the other party online. For example, if you're a trucking company that is on board with my mechanic and you're using our software the mechanic you can still call them off Google, ntts, truck down, et cetera, but then you email them the road call ticket without them having to download an app or register. They will be brought on for that road ticket online and vice versa. So we created in a way that the marketplace is being built by our customers, and we've been having great success doing so.

Andrew Silver: 49:15

What has been the biggest competitive advantage for your team?

Alex Bezzubets: 49:19

I think, just industry knowledge and being very, very open to listening to what our customer wants, customer needs. If our customers respond with a request, what have you? If it's something that we see, that's general, we jump on top of it. And even if we can't, I think the most important thing is responding and setting and being responsive and communicative with our customers and I think us listening and being truly agnostic is what's helped us kind of grow and talk with some of the bigger customers that we have right now what is the competitive landscape look like?

Alex Bezzubets: 49:49

so the beauty of it is and I know everybody like we don't what we're doing nobody has is doing. For example, loves connect has a great platform, but loves is not going to bring on TA on their platform because they're competitors. But we can bring on LUVs, ta and so forth and our fleets will have the convenience of using one seamless platform to connect. And on the flip side, we drive traffic to all those customers and they're competing by their own against themselves. Right, they're doing a great job. The customers are always going to come back, they're getting great reviews, the pricing is great and they're driving their own business, and so we're just bringing that exposure and allowing smaller businesses as well to come on board and compete with them.

Andrew Silver: 50:27

What are the top priorities you have for 2025?

Alex Bezzubets: 50:30

Top priorities. Number one is team. We want to keep growing our team. We have a great team right now. Number two is make sure that customer support is always there.

Andrew Silver: 50:46

We're hoping to close a round of funding, I think next month, and besides that, just growth at all costs. And what are the biggest hurdles you're dealing with right now in the business in general, not just, you know, I asked about a marketplace already but just in this startup business that you've got going. What are the biggest problems you're dealing with?

Alex Bezzubets: 51:04

You know, I think the first problem I experienced as a first-time founder was funding, and I thought that you can't do anything without funding and I did things to get funding and then we just turned around and said screw it. And we started building a platform that's enterprise level ready and said, hey look, if funding comes along, it'll come along, but we're going to get obsessed with our customers. We're going to start focusing on revenue as quickly and as passionately as possible, and we started doing that and it turned around really quickly. But I think that incident in the beginning was the funding part was what's really screwed us up.

Andrew Silver: 51:27

So have you secured funding at this point, or are you still bootstrapping? What does that look like?

Alex Bezzubets: 51:31

We're still bootstrapping. Right now we're at a point where we're talking to some serious conversations with some VCs to close our seed funding, but we're still opening. That round is still open.

Andrew Silver: 51:41

So if someone wanted to invest right now, what would you tell them?

Alex Bezzubets: 51:45

I would tell them this would be the best investment they've ever made and we would love to give them a pitch, a demo, and share some of the progress with the pipeline that we have. We have some very, very exciting stuff that's going to start coming out in the next coming weeks of the customers that are coming on board, some of the bigger fleets that are going to start using us, some of the bigger dealerships that are going to start using us as well. So I'm very, very excited for 2025. And why are you the right guy? I would say our team is the right guy. Our team is right. The problem, the solution that we're offering, is right.

Andrew Silver: 52:16

I would hate to put it all on myself because I would disappoint anybody, but I would say the solution we have and the team we have, those two put together it's prime. And how do you think about your role as the CEO, as a leader? What are the most important things for you?

Alex Bezzubets: 52:36

to be successful in your role. I live by leading from behind as much as leading from the front. Day to day, we're in the gutters with the team, with the trenches, I'm knocking doors, I'm driving around, you know, visiting trucking companies, pulling over on the interstate, talking to drivers that have been sitting for a while. I think it's important to be scrappy to earn the respect of the industry as well.

Alex Bezzubets: 52:59

I'm 30, coming into an industry that's extremely outdated and extremely you know. You got these guys that have been in there for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and so for me to come in as a know-it-all would be extremely deceptive, and so I came in trying to learn, and aggressively, you know, learning the industry, asking people questions, never being the smartest guy in the room, and I think that helped us create credibility in the industry. And I guess the last thing is surrounding our team with people that have been in the industry and allowing them to guide the platform. Listening to our customers, which you know you get on a demo. They're like this is what we've been looking for. I'm like, yeah, it's because it's we built it for you, you know.

Andrew Silver: 53:35

It's a great feeling. I think having that kind of humility will go a long way and you pair that with the right curiosity to go ask the questions, understand what your customers need, and I think that's how you get to a place where, when you show a potential customer something, they look at it and go like holy cow, this is what we've been looking for, this is what we need. So with that, that's our 10 minutes. Your time is up. Well done, thank you. Thank you for having me All right. Next one up let's do a quick introduction. Your name where?

Shan Wu: 54:07

you're from your business and when you started it. Hi, this is Shine here when I'm from. What are you asking? Are you talking about where my mother's from, where my business is from?

Andrew Silver: 54:16

Where were you born and where are you from now?

Shan Wu: 54:21

What do you look like? I'm born in China, shenzhen, china, big poor city, and I live in Canada right now. I've been, you know, snowing Montreal, my business.

Thomas Mella: 54:29

Your business.

Shan Wu: 54:30

Four Labs. We build precise shipper prospecting tool for brokers, carriers, 3PLs as well.

Andrew Silver: 54:38

When did you start the company?

Shan Wu: 54:39

We've been almost two years now, so two years ago.

Andrew Silver: 54:43

And why did you start the company?

Shan Wu: 54:45

Honest answer. I started the company because I don't want to be an employee anymore and I believe so. I met my co-founder in a previous startup. Luckily, the startup now is a billion dollar company. We were like you know what? Why don't we make that for ourselves and give it a try? That's why we started.

Andrew Silver: 55:04

And what problem are you solving?

Shan Wu: 55:07

We are helping sales teams sell the problem I'm trying to solve right now. And, Andrew, I don't know if you relate, but a lot of broker sales reps tell me they're stuck in prospecting hell. Have you been there?

Andrew Silver: 55:22

Yes, tell me what prospecting hell looks like.

Shan Wu: 55:25

This is what prospecting hell looks like. You got a quota. You need to hit your 2550, right, whatever your target is, and you know you need to pick up the phone. But you can't get to it because you need to find new shippers. How do you know who got free right? Where do you search Google Maps? Some folks I heard walk down the aisle in the grocery store do all that. That's not your job. Your job is sales rep, not prospecting rep. So our tool is get them out of there as quick as possible and pick up the phone as quick as possible. I love that.

Andrew Silver: 55:55

So tell me about your because I've done that. I I love that. So tell me about your cause. I, I've done that. I've walked the grocery store. I've been a sales rep for most of my life or most of my professional career. There's there's some level that's kind of fun about, like the the prospecting journey of the creativity, but I actually, like you, know what I. Just I don't like having to find the customer. I love the creative. From once I know who I'm reaching out to, like the process of how do I get them interested. But I agree it's a huge pain in the rear end to try to find who I should call. Talk to me about what is your unique solution that you're bringing to the market.

Shan Wu: 56:33

Our unique solution is we. First let me tell you what we're not. Not because there's a lot of tools out there. We are not a data provider. There's a lot of data providers that tell you you have a huge list of 10,000 shippers. We're not that. We're not an AISDR, one of those which I think really is automating spam. We don't do that. Our unique solution is, at the end of the day, andrew, you tell me tomorrow I want to find local LTL reefer white wine producers in my area, and tomorrow you wake up with a list of 50. That's what we do.

Andrew Silver: 57:10

So is it like a transactional thing where I have a consistent relationship with you, where so, okay, let's say, my new brokerage wants to work with 4Labs, and is it every day I send you a message that says, hey, I want to find 20 companies that ship heaters, and I'm hoping to find them in the southern half of the United States, and then you go do that.

Shan Wu: 57:35

Yes, that's what we do In the back. We build a tech tool that allows for that Right, but we actually limit it to a daily list because my experience as a sales rep I've been selling not free, unfortunately, but I sold donation, which means I sold nothing for money, I sold payments, consulting, and what I learned is that a sales rep actually doesn't want a list of 100 or 1,000 prospects. I want my daily 10 and 20, and I want to focus on that. Everything else is noise, so that's what we do.

Andrew Silver: 58:05

Where is the business right now in its journey? What key milestones have you reached?

Shan Wu: 58:11

We are two years old, but we are also new again, because this product is new. We spent the last year automating operations for brokers. The brokers tell us great, now you free up our rep so they can sell more, but why don't you just help me sell more? So this product is new. We are now in the testing process. We have a beta test where we have these innovative brokers who are willing to try new solutions, to test it out. So that's where we're at.

Andrew Silver: 58:38

What does your ideal customer look like?

Shan Wu: 58:42

Right now our ideal customers. They're a domestic broker doing full truck load LTL, and they are aiming to grow double digit, even in today's weather. It's those who want to grow that are who we are helping.

Andrew Silver: 58:59

What is your ideal? I'm sorry, I just asked that. What is the revenue model?

Shan Wu: 59:04

The revenue model is we are providing you something that's better than ZomaInfo for cheaper, so similar to ZomaInfo or PoloDees. There's a seat, there's a transactional fee, but right now we're giving out free trials, so right now it's free.

Andrew Silver: 59:18

Free is good. What about your team? Positions you to win in this space?

Shan Wu: 59:25

uh, if I give myself credit, uh, I'll say I've been selling a lot and I love sales. I just hate the tools. Well, luckily, I got a co-founder who loves building tools, so I think we got we got something going on to make this. We want to make sales brandlessly easy for folks, right? So I think we got the right team to get it done.

Andrew Silver: 59:45

What is your biggest competitive advantage?

Shan Wu: 59:49

I think our advantage is we understand sales reps don't want to be data reps. We understand that more data is actually more noise, right. I think that's a unique contrarian hopefully right approach. But that's the risk we're taking to say we're actually not giving people 10,000 leads and that will help people. So that's our advantage.

Andrew Silver: 1:00:15

What are your top priorities for 2025?

Shan Wu: 1:00:18

2025,. We want to get our product to a place where it's amazing, where people want to shelf money in our hands to use it. That's why I gave it all for free, because I believe I can. We've been charging last year, we've been charging and we can do that right now. But what's the point of having people pay us but not love it? So our one goal is to make something so good people love it.

Andrew Silver: 1:00:41

What are the biggest challenges you're currently facing?

Shan Wu: 1:00:45

This premise of cutting through the noise sounds good. It's hard to execute. There's so much niche tech we have to build in the back to make this a technology play, not another rep doing this overnight type of thing right, and so that's hard. So, for example, something as specific as we got a user who want to find construction roofing material shippers. Now if you go on Zonminfo and all that you search for construction, maybe you're lucky to get to construction production, but you get a lot of engineering from design firms, stuff like that, people who don't got freight right, so just building out that qualification to make sure you don't get noise, you get shippers. It's actually a lot of hard work that luckily, not me but my co-founder and our engineering team are working hard to solve every day.

Andrew Silver: 1:01:37

How does a small team like yours provide a better solution than ZoomInfo that's had hundreds of millions, or however much, invested, with hundreds of, if not thousands of people to build it out Like it feels like they have such a leg up and advantage, how do you create a better solution than what they have?

Shan Wu: 1:02:01

Two things. Number one we use them. They're in our back. So Minfo is in our back, Apollo is in our back, Seamless AI is in our back. We don't want to replace or compete with them. What we do is we say they have a great team, they are large, but they don't care about logistics providers, Because they want to sell to everybody. But if you sell to everybody, you sell to nobody. What we say is let's aggregate all these amazing data sources but cut through the noise. And we got the right team to do that, specifically for logistics providers, for freight brokers, for truckload, for LTL.

Andrew Silver: 1:02:37

Given you're in the sales and prospecting business, I want to spend a minute here before we wrap up. What advice do you have for people about prospecting in freight?

Shan Wu: 1:02:47

Number one I want people to not listen to my advice, because I believe in this principle called believability-weighted advice, which means if me and my mother give you advice about giving birth, you should listen to my mother. Now, I never sold freight. I learned everything from our users customers. That's my experience. So, with that, my advice is don't spam people. That's my advice. There's a lot of tools today that can help you send 100, 1,000 emails a day. You can automate. You don't even need to write anything. There's AI, there's this, and that my read is more noise and more touch doesn't mean more conversion. Focus on creating genuine relationship and actually, with more spam happening today, the person who does the hard work, who pick up the phone, who actually write that message that is handwritten, will stand out. That's my advice.

Andrew Silver: 1:03:48

Great advice, and with that your 10 minutes is up.

Shan Wu: 1:03:52

Thank you, Sean, Thank you Andrew.

Andrew Silver: 1:03:53

This has my advice Great advice and with that your 10 minutes is up. Thank you, sean. Thank you, andrew. This has been fun. Well done, all right, we're back. Another guest. Let's start with a quick introduction Name where you're from, the name of your business and when you started it.

Sadie Frank: 1:04:06

Sure, my name is Sadie Frank. I work at N4EA. We are from New York, I'm from New York, I live in Portland, oregon, and we've been in business for about a year now, mostly in stealth mode, but preparing to launch some new products in the next couple of months.

Andrew Silver: 1:04:21

What problem are you solving?

Sadie Frank: 1:04:23

We are solving for the climate risk gap in supply chain analytics. So we're a predictive analytics company developing global disruption models for climate weather and any other supply chain risk anywhere. So we're a predictive analytics company developing global disruption models for climate weather and any other supply chain risk anywhere in the world at any time.

Andrew Silver: 1:04:36

Explain it to me like I'm five.

Sadie Frank: 1:04:37

We will tell you where your shit is and when it's going to get there. Doesn't matter if it's two weeks from now or 30 years from now.

Andrew Silver: 1:04:45

Okay, that's different than what I was hearing. What's the climate element of that?

Sadie Frank: 1:04:49

Sure Well, my background's in climate-related financial risk, which is basically the risk that the global economy crashes because of climate change, which is shocking news. It probably will. So what we do is basically take weather data. We look at how the supply chain reacts to weather data, but we're also able to look longer term and use projections of drought chain reacts to weather data, but we're also able to look longer term and use projections of drought rainfall in the Panama Canal, in the EU canal system. Basically, any waterway in the world is going to be disrupted by climatic changes and we'll tell you how and why and how you can get ahead of that.

Andrew Silver: 1:05:22

What is your unique solution?

Sadie Frank: 1:05:24

We have a very cool proprietary geospatial database that enables us to run simulations of how the supply chain interacts with weather really, really quickly. That allows us to look across any time period. So we're looking operationally two weeks into the future, or 30 years into the future if you want to know what happens when, say, two massive hurricanes hit the Gulf of Mexico back to back.

Andrew Silver: 1:05:47

But like what's? I mean it's 30 years in the future. I mean that seems hyperbolic. But like what is the what is the value of knowing what's going to happen in two years? Is there anything actionable to do with that?

Sadie Frank: 1:05:59

Yeah, sure. So strategic planning right, like if you want to have a plan in place when disaster occurs, you need to know what the impact will be on your operation. So it's not necessarily like 30 years, here's a crystal ball of what's going to happen, but it's when the climate changes, when these disruptions occur. What do you do then? So we're talking to VPs of intermodal, we're talking to folks that are thinking at the CFO level about how they can build better operational plans when disaster strikes.

Andrew Silver: 1:06:24

Where is the business right now in its journey?

Sadie Frank: 1:06:27

So we are like I said. We've been about stealth mode for about a year. We're preparing to launch our first API, which is global congestion risk ports, routes, choke points anywhere in the world, assessing route congestion. We're preparing to launch that in three months.

Andrew Silver: 1:06:42

And what will that look like? Global congestion Like? Help me, help me visualize for a customer what that solution looks like.

Sadie Frank: 1:06:48

Sure, so picture a heat map. So we're familiar with heat maps, weather heat maps. But what we have a heat map of is vessel congestion. So how many vessels are in one place at one time. It's super dynamic. We can look historically. We can also look into the future. So if you want to know what port congestion really accurately looks like, in two weeks we'll be able to tell you.

Andrew Silver: 1:07:06

What is the revenue model?

Sadie Frank: 1:07:09

So we are developing a platform that is an enterprise software solution. We're also developing APIs, as I mentioned. We're going to surface those APIs for about subscription annual subscription fee for clients that want to access the data.

Andrew Silver: 1:07:21

What does your ideal customer look like?

Sadie Frank: 1:07:23

Right now our ICP, our BP is intermodal.

Andrew Silver: 1:07:33

So if you're a train company, if you're rail, if you're freight, if you're drayage anybody that's paying attention to stuff coming off of a boat we want to talk to you, why not trucking companies?

Sadie Frank: 1:07:38

Trucking companies as well. But what's interesting about rail is that they're asset-based right. So they're dealing with rail lines, rail cards that are fixed into the ground, highly exposed to weather, and climate risk.

Andrew Silver: 1:07:48

What about your team? Positions you to win in this space?

Sadie Frank: 1:07:52

We are both dorks in the exact places that we need to be so. But the team is actually a brother sister team. My brother is a supply chain quant, so he was working at a top 20 global importer during COVID trying to develop their optimization algorithms and watch the whole thing go to shit. And my background's in climate and as climate related financial risk. So I've spent my career thinking about how climate and weather data impact Fortune 500 companies, how that impacts the global economy. So we're sitting right at that intersection and we also have an awesome supply chain team that are really focused on understanding supply chain operators. We're not trying to be those young kids on the block that come in and tell you how to do your job. We want to work with you to help you do your job better.

Andrew Silver: 1:08:27

What are the biggest challenges to working with your brother?

Sadie Frank: 1:08:32

Oh man, if he watches this I'm going to keep my mouth shut. Not very many. You know he's my younger brother, so it's hard for me to admit that he's really smart, but I've had to really get my head under my ass about that a little bit and recognize that he's a really smart guy.

Andrew Silver: 1:08:47

What are your top priorities for 2025?

Sadie Frank: 1:08:49

Sleeping, I would say, personally trying to get more sleep. But no, we're looking for clients, we're looking for partners. You know, we're looking to get out there and solve real world problems because really the supply chain is about as grounded in terms of the earth as it possibly gets.

Andrew Silver: 1:09:03

Do you have active customers on the platform today?

Sadie Frank: 1:09:06

So we are working in partnership with some big clients, but the platform is coming soon. We do have clients for the API data solutions.

Andrew Silver: 1:09:14

And what has been the reception? What are you hearing when you reach out to customers, like prospects, and say, hey, we're this climate company or risk prevention company? It feels like this is a very niche or kind of unique potential solution which can be a good thing, but also not something that anyone is used to being sold to, I imagine. So what like does you know? I'm sure there are challenges with that. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience has been like?

Sadie Frank: 1:09:46

Yeah, it's a great question. You know climate maybe people's eyes glaze over a little bit, but weather, you know, the supply chain operators have been dealing with weather since the birth of this industry, right, and people are starting to see the impacts of changes in weather patterns affecting their operations day to day. So you know, maybe we're not talking about climate, but we're talking about hurricanes, we're talking about what just happened in Los Angeles with the wildfires, and you know. Also, I just want to say our solution is climate focused, but we capture any risk. If something is happening in the global supply chain, our model will pick up on it and be able to model that disruption as well. So, you know, we try to frame it more as an enterprise risk management solution, less so as like a climate specific thing. Climate comes into it when we're really thinking about, like, explaining the tech, explaining the unique value proposition. But we try to meet people where they're at and try to understand their risks.

Andrew Silver: 1:10:32

What are some of the other types of risk or exposure that you guys are covering or that these companies are running into?

Sadie Frank: 1:10:41

Yeah, well, I mean, obviously geopolitics is huge right now. You know you're looking at the impact of tariffs, impact of labor strikes, all of that. You know the supply chain is one giant network. That's the approach that we take from a tech perspective is looking at this sort of network analysis, and what happens in the Suez Canal impacts what happens in Los Angeles. So you have to be able to model all of that at once. We do that, but then we just interact it with weather data, which allows us to be more accurate than pretty much anything that's on the market today.

Andrew Silver: 1:11:18

I'm just curious because you led with climate as you were describing it. If that's not the only kind of part of the solution, why lead with that as the in kind of like the?

Sadie Frank: 1:11:22

description of the business. Yeah, it's a good question. We try to frame it like I said, because it's the novel hook that we're bringing and it's really where we want to grow. From my background, you can't walk into an insurance conference or a mortgage market conference without climate being top of the list in supply chain a little bit less so, even though the supply chain is being affected by climate. So we frame it as a climate solution and then once you sort of start to hear from people how they're thinking about their risk, then we'll adjust a little bit.

Andrew Silver: 1:11:52

You mentioned, like in a modal provide the provider. Seems like it's more of the, the, the ICP. Did you also mention shippers themselves? Are you selling directly to shippers?

Sadie Frank: 1:11:59

We would like to you know, um, their needs are a little bit more specific, sort of, to their own network and are what the advantage of what we're doing is. We're tracking uh, we're not sort of like locked into one single provider, so not at this point. But we're really interested in talking to more shippers to understand what their risks would be as we sort of grow and strategize about the longer term vision.

Andrew Silver: 1:12:20

Makes sense. What are the biggest challenges you're currently facing?

Sadie Frank: 1:12:24

What are the biggest challenges we're currently facing? Capacity, our team capacity. So you know, like we're a tech company, we're a tech team, but software engineers are expensive, and so, as we think about capital planning from our end, that's what I'm thinking about as a CEO every morning is how are we going to get the team to unblock us to achieve our mission?

Andrew Silver: 1:12:46

How do you think about? Have you raised capital or are you bootstrapped?

Sadie Frank: 1:12:49

We have raised a small amount of capital, but we're mostly bootstrapped. My brother is currently probably eating ramen and Shane to his desk as he's coding. I have a wife who kind of requires me to bring some more money to the table, so we're scraping by, but we're looking to raise a seed round in the next year.

Andrew Silver: 1:13:05

And what do you think is like the hook to get people you people, if they're potential investors sitting here watching right now, how do you get them hooked?

Sadie Frank: 1:13:13

So we are a data-first company. The data that we have is extremely valuable and, as we think about expanding, one of the huge markets that I'm really interested in tackling is finance. So, supply chain folks, you have a lot of great data at the tips of your fingers that is interesting to hedge funds, that is interesting to insurance companies, that is interesting to anybody who's tracking anything on the water, and the supply chain could benefit from thinking more strategically about finance.

Andrew Silver: 1:13:38

Last question what have you learned as you've started to engage with the supply chain industry, these providers that you're prospecting with? What have you learned about our industry?

Sadie Frank: 1:13:48

A lot of things. It's a really cool industry. Two things that come to mind it's relationship based, so you need to understand who the main people are that you need to talk to and you need to talk to them and get in front of them. And then the second one is that nobody wants another software platform shoved down their throats. So you know if you're using Excel, that's great. We'll send you a CSV at 9 am in the morning and that'll be on your desk when you wake up.

Andrew Silver: 1:14:10

Boom, your 10 minutes are up. Well done.

Sadie Frank: 1:14:12

Thank you.

Andrew Silver: 1:14:15

Next man up. Here we are. Let's start with some quick introductions. Name where you're from, your business's name and when you started.

Thomas Mella: 1:14:24

So, Thomas Mella, I'm born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, but I live in Chicago now and I have founded two companies. The first one is Sightline Freight Partners does consulting and integrations and implementations for 3PLs and freight brokers. And then we have a spinoff, a sister company called TrackFlow that is a track and trace platform for BPOs and freight brokers.

Andrew Silver: 1:14:47

I was not prepared for a double business approach. Which one are we going on?

Thomas Mella: 1:14:51

I don't think we can do both we were talking about track flow.

Andrew Silver: 1:14:54

Okay, track flow it is. So what is the problem you're solving?

Thomas Mella: 1:14:57

Sure. So if you are a freight broker and you have a tracking team, or even if you're cradle to grave, knowing what an exception is on a load and then being able to action it in one platform is not typically possible in a TMS. And in order to automate using things like text, ai voice, you have to know what the issue is, and this platform tells you what the issue is, assigns it to a user and then helps you automate and resolve the issue on a particular load.

Andrew Silver: 1:15:25

What is the unique solution there?

Thomas Mella: 1:15:27

Sure, so it is basically taking the data, integrates with the TMS and articulates a specific problem on a load. So if you have a load that is four hours to delivery and does not have an update, it will bubble that up with an assigned user. So I'll say this user is responsible for getting an update on this load that currently does not exist in the market.

Andrew Silver: 1:15:46

Where is the business right now in its journey?

Thomas Mella: 1:15:49

Sure, we started building it two years ago because a consulting customer asked us to build it, because we went to market to find something, and today we have about a half dozen customers, and so we are fairly early stage. But we're breakeven profitability and we're excited to have opportunities like this to go into the market.

Andrew Silver: 1:16:08

What is your ideal customer look like?

Thomas Mella: 1:16:09

this to go into the market. What does your ideal customer look like? So ideally is a call it 50 to $250 million freight brokerage with a BPO that they're using for track and trace and they do not want that BPO accessing their TMS or getting into the TMS, because the TMS is built for many different things and so they want to optimize that track and trace team.

Andrew Silver: 1:16:29

Is that a thing where brokerages don't want their BPO to have access to the TMS? I've never heard of that.

Thomas Mella: 1:16:36

Sure. So I would say there's two elements to that. One is if you have a BPO getting into the TMS, I would agree there's nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with that, but a TMS is built to do a hundred different things. One of those things is partially solving track and trace. This tool is built to only work on track and trace, and so if you have a tracking team, they do not need access to TMS, and so you can have them have a standardized workflow and a separate solution.

Andrew Silver: 1:17:02

What is the revenue model?

Thomas Mella: 1:17:04

So the revenue model right now is well. One thing I learned about consulting and helping select and integrate freight tech providers is we do month-to-month contracts, no fee for an implementation, and it's based on load volume. So really, that reason we're focused on load volume is so that that is typically how the ROI is based. What we see with folks using TrackFlow is they're able to double the number of loads that their track and trace team can track without any automation. And then we layer on automation and they get even more than that.

Andrew Silver: 1:17:34

Talk to me a little bit about the team. What's the makeup of the team and what does it look like, and what are the special talents that everyone has?

Thomas Mella: 1:17:43

Yeah, so that's my favorite part. So the team is all from Forkites, including myself, and the reason that is, I think, a really important part is when we go into a consulting client, we help them implement Forkites, project 44, macropoint, trucker Tools, and typically we see them top out at about 80% tracking. Then the question becomes what about that 20%? And so that is what this solution solves for. But I think the reason we're able to solve that final 20% is because the team's background and combined 25, 30 years experience just in real-time transportation visibility.

Andrew Silver: 1:18:16

So I didn't. Okay. Fork Heights is an interesting company, one of the leaders in the tracking space and a company that's been implemented by a lot of shippers had a lot of success there. What I'm curious about is, as a broker we've seen, seen, and I guess I haven't been in the business for a year and a half or almost long, to almost two years, but the challenges we had, and I think they still have, is that we could get to a very high percentage of loads tracked but the consistency percentage could never get that to a really high number that shippers were happy about, unless, frankly, I know brokers that lied about it and manipulated the system. But does your solution address that piece, the consistency piece?

Thomas Mella: 1:18:58

Yeah. So there's two components to that. You want to have a strong integration into the visibility platform that your shippers are using, but then, in addition to that, you need to say okay, this load has not had an update on the middle third of a shipment, which is how I get super tracking on fork guides for my shipper. What tool is going to bubble that up and say this person is accountable to getting an update on this load where the driver has disabled the macro point app as an example? That is what track flow solves. It says this load has not been updated in six hours. Here's the person responsible for solving it, and I'm also going to automate a text or phone call or an email to the dispatcher to get that information before a user has to get engaged. But there's clear articulation on who is responsible and what needs to be done to improve your tracking metrics on shippers systems and is your solution more of a notification system or it actually executes the you know?

Andrew Silver: 1:19:52

okay, so the notification is this order needs to be exception managed. There's a tracking issue here. You need to get involved. Does your solution actually follow through and take or like execute that, or is that not part of it?

Thomas Mella: 1:20:07

Yeah. So today there's big numbers on when a user logs in. Let's say they're on the schedule from 7 am to 4 pm it will assign them loads. Typically we see tracking folks manage 100 to 150 loads. It'll assign them all those loads and they'll say, hey, these 10 loads are the eta is late, so you need to go and manage them.

Thomas Mella: 1:20:26

Now what we're doing is today we have a simple set of ai phone calls, texts like text for location, text to drivers to make sure they're empty, and emails to dispatchers. We're layering on more and more AI so that the AI can call and say I don't just want to know a location, you've been at the receiver for 90 minutes. I need the AI to call before a human manages it and say, hey, we noticed you've been at the receiver for 90 minutes, are you unloaded yet? And the AI to call before a human manages it and say hey, we noticed, you've been at the receiver for 90 minutes, are you unloaded yet? And the AI is only able to have a human-like conversation with that context and it is a clear description of what the issue is. And so in order to do that, you have to have a platform that says here's the exception that needs to be managed.

Andrew Silver: 1:21:09

What is your? Biggest competitive advantage that says here's the exception that needs to be managed. What is?

Thomas Mella: 1:21:11

your biggest competitive advantage. It is our 25 years combined working on track and trace automation in the space. There's a lot of great providers out there who are working on things like this. We have, unfortunately, the scars to prove how challenging these problems are. And the other thing I will add on is there are a lot of good solutions out there that require integrations Sightline Freight Partners. That is, 80% of what we do is integrations, and so we really excel on the integration into the platform to make sure that it is a two-way, effective integration. Your tracking team only needs to log into TrackFlow.

Andrew Silver: 1:21:48

So, in essence, one business can feed the other. That's correct yeah, I like that. What are your top priorities for 2025?

Thomas Mella: 1:21:57

Yeah, so today I mentioned we have about a half dozen customers. We would like to double that. Things that are different about us is, again I mentioned, we're pretty much break even. We want to build a healthy business. We don't do a lot of marketing. These things are pretty much our marketing effort and we want our marketing engine to be happy customers. That's how we want to grow. We have some mutual connections who are happy customers. They refer customers to us. That's how we want to be our growth engine and I think if we continue to grow with Fnatic fans as our customers, we should be able to double in size and customers and really gain the most market share out of anyone doing this.

Andrew Silver: 1:22:36

What are you hearing when you're soliciting, because I know it's becoming a very crowded space. So when you send an email and it's a needed solution I mean the tracking has been a problem forever and it seems like a lot of the solutions that have shown up in the last 30 years or so they kind of fix it but don't get you all the way there. And now the company is showing up seems to be focusing more on trying to get the whole solution. But it's competitive. There's a lot of companies doing it. So when you're reaching out soliciting new opportunities, what's kind of the reception you're getting from brokers in the space?

Thomas Mella: 1:23:12

Yeah. So I think when we talk to folks at the top of the market so billion plus in revenue they are working on this themselves. They have a solution like this and we met with one and they're like we showed them the platform, like, oh, that's actually a really good exception, we're going to steal those ideas, that's fine, we're happy to do that. I think the most pushback we get is if they're cradle to grave. It is challenging for those folks to have to go and manage out of two systems. I think the solution is really best fit for someone with a tracking team and you're able to get hyper efficiency out of someone managing automation and managing a set of exceptions where their only job is track and trace. So I would say those are the two things we hear is I have folks who need to do other things on load than track and trace, or we're building this solution ourself.

Andrew Silver: 1:23:59

What are the biggest challenges you're facing as you build a business?

Thomas Mella: 1:24:05

One of the challenges I have is I want to make sure on the consulting side this is a personal problem, Andrew. On the consulting side I remain impartial, right. So my job there is to recommend the best technology, integrate and implement the best technology for 3PLs and freight brokers. The only reason this business exists is because there wasn't anything that solved this problem. That may change and so that's a personal challenge, but I think when you look at other businesses raising outside capital, I'm happy we don't have to do that, because then you start to do other things. We just want to do track and trace and be the best provider for solving those problems.

Andrew Silver: 1:24:39

I like that If you want to get something done. Sometimes you got to do it yourself and with that your 10 minutes is up. Thank you, sir. All right, we're back. Another interview. We're live, joined by Annalise. Let's start with a quick introduction. Give me your name, where you're from, the name of your business and when you started it.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:25:00

Yeah, so my name's Annalise, I'm from Chain, I'm from San Jose, california, and so we got started in 2019. And I can kind of give you the backstory.

Andrew Silver: 1:25:12

Let me ask it first what problem are you solving?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:25:15

Yeah, so in terms of the problem that we're solving, we have AI automation that works across freight broker and carrier workflows. So there's a lot of manual work on the carrier procurement side, on the visibility side, manual check calls, carrier procurement side, on the visibility side, manual check calls. So we have essentially AI that kind of works across these different workflows and alleviates some of the manual work for freight brokers.

Andrew Silver: 1:25:37

What is your unique solution?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:25:40

So the unique solution is really that today, both in terms of the freight brokers and carriers, they're having to hop between a bunch of different platforms to do work. So the carrier will come on to DAT to book a load, then after that they're tracking on a different tool. Communication might take place on email, gchat kind of whatever the carrier is using. So we kind of combine the different workflows into one tool and it allows us to automate the work, really have omni-channel communication. That works a lot better both for the carrier and also the freight broker where is the business right now in its journey?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:26:20

um, so you know we've been. Uh, so my husband and I co-founded it. Uh, we're both software developers. Uh, so the first few years we were actually like heads down in our garage writing code and then, more recently, I would say, we're focused on the go-to-market. So past year so a lot of you guys have probably seen us out at conferences so we're in, we're in growth mode right now, getting the brand out there what are the best and worst things about partnering with your husband?

Andrew Silver: 1:26:47

so?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:26:48

I would say the the best things is best things is like you're just on the same page with, like, the other person, right, like we're both going towards the common goal which is to grow the business, um, and it just makes it a lot easier from that angle that your co-founder is also your partner. Um, I would say like the worst part is like sometimes you get tired of each other. You know we're sitting in the same office all day, um, but it's both pros and cons to it, so we get to spend time with each other it's tough.

Andrew Silver: 1:27:16

You get tired of each other being in the same office all day, because then you're are home together after that too exactly it's like oh, let's go to work.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:27:23

Okay, yeah, you're still here by me.

Andrew Silver: 1:27:24

So what are some of the key milestones the business has reached thus far?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:27:30

Key milestones. I mean like we spent like a lot of time iTrading with our customer base. So we like built out like a full-on, you know, enterprise-ready platform that works from businesses that are small like all the way to businesses that are large. I would say like now, like a lot of the initial part is built out. We're focused on milestones, like you know increasing the daily active users for carriers on the platform and really like doubling down on some of like the AI functionality.

Andrew Silver: 1:28:01

What does the ideal customer look like?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:28:03

The ideal customer. I mean, we focus like we have a lot of midsize freight brokers. I think like it works very well for them to kind of gain that operational efficiency and be able to compete with some of the larger freight brokers that have like in-house tech teams to build out a lot of this stuff themselves. You know, we give those freight brokers like the tools to be able to compete and to be able to operate like you know they're a larger freight broker.

Andrew Silver: 1:28:30

What is the revenue model?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:28:32

The revenue model, so we charge. We have tiered pricing that's based on load volume.

Andrew Silver: 1:28:38

And what about your team positions? What are the kind of unique characteristics of your team that put you in a position to be successful here?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:28:48

Unique characteristics of the team. I would say it's just like complete customer obsession. One of the unique things about Chain in general is that, like we've been bootstrapped since day one. All of our growth has come from, like our customers loving our product and recommending us to others. So, like we do like have a very heavy like customer success process where during the implementation, we make sure that it's successful, we act as like tech partners for the freight brokers, rather than just like customer success process where during the implementation, we make sure that it's successful. We act as like tech partners for the freight brokers, rather than just like implement something and then it's done. So I would say customer obsession.

Andrew Silver: 1:29:19

So this is a really becoming a really competitive space Like and there are big, there are now companies raising lots of money to build similar solutions. How do you stand out from the crowd in this environment where everyone now is talking about AI, everyone is trying to automate as many of the workflows and brokerages as possible. It's becoming very crowded. How do you stand out there?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:29:48

Yeah, definitely, ai is a hot topic right now. Audit how do you stand out there? Yeah, definitely, like, ai is a hot topic right now. I think our approach is a little bit different because we have some of those core like feature sets, like, for example, if I take the visibility side, we have like a full visibility platform where we have, like ELD tracking and mobile app tracking. I think what's powerful from that side is now, when you combine that with AI automation, you have all the data there that's needed to make decisions, know exactly what needs to be done. So I would say that's kind of the differentiator is like you can piece together these tools, like you can have like a visibility provider for your visibility and then like you piece on, maybe like a voice provider for like the, for the check call part, or you can use a platform like chain that has all of that in one and really kind of you know, go that route.

Andrew Silver: 1:30:33

What is the team makeup Like? What does the organization look like as a whole? I mean, I'm just curious, given you're talking about building such a kind of robust product but you bootstrap it, I feel like that would be hard to have enough of the staff you need to get it all built in a timely fashion.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:30:54

Yeah, so I think we have our sales. Our core team is based out of the United States, and then we do have a team of developers that are based out of India as well. I think where we have the advantage is when both co-founders can code. Then we have a lot of superpower there. So, also, we've just spent a lot of superpower there. Also, we've just spent a ton of time heads down in the beginning, not focused as much on the marketing side, which allowed us to really build out something cool.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:31:23

What are your top priorities for 2025? I would say our top priority is we're right now heads down, focused on making the visibility aspect extremely robust and on the AI side in particular. Our approach to AI is taking one piece of the workflow at a time and automating that, working with our customers and make sure it's successful. And then now what is the next step? What is that next piece? That's manual, so we're doubled down really on like the user experience and making sure that, like the AI is like collecting like X percentage of milestones. I think right now we're, with our visibility platform implemented with the AI, we're able to collect 85% of milestones. I think we're trying to get that to like 90, 95%, so Wow.

Andrew Silver: 1:32:09

What are the biggest challenges you're currently facing in the business?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:32:13

I would say it's just like we. Sometimes it's hard, like in terms of resources from, like the engineering side. I think we're looking to hire more developers soon to kind of be able to move faster on that side. I think it's always comes down to like resources. But, that being said, I think we're focused.

Andrew Silver: 1:32:32

So is it your plan to raise capital at some point?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:32:36

um, I think at some point we might explore raising capital. Right now it's not something that like we need to do. Uh, we've been able to grow and be profitable without taking any funding. Um, what that's allowed us to do is like, really, you know, grow this business how we know. We have background in the industry. My husband and I used to have our own trucking company, so I think it's unique from that standpoint. We know what needs to be done. So I think at some point we'll probably take funding to go a lot faster, but not right now.

Andrew Silver: 1:33:06

Congrats on being a profitable business. That's not what you hear about in freight often, especially in freight tech. So congrats on being a profitable business. That's not what you hear about in freight often, especially in freight tech. So congrats on that. I'm curious about the trucking business piece. You guys owned a trucking business. Why did you pivot to this? What was the kind of initiation for that or catalyst for that?

Annalise Sandhu: 1:33:24

Yeah, so my husband and I like have interesting backgrounds. So, like he was actually, he had his master's in chemical engineering.

Andrew Silver: 1:33:37

I was on my way to medical school, um, so this is a pivot chemical engineering and you were going to be okay, keep going, yeah.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:33:40

Yeah, I actually was in medical school, um, but he has a lot of family members that are in trucking. He was just tired of, like you know, having a nine to five so he wanted to do something a little bit different and get into entrepreneurship. So, yeah, he had that I was helping him to dispatch, even into medical school, and I think that really kind of opened our eyes to some of the inefficiencies, especially like the you know, the process of freight brokers and carriers. Their interactions today and like the way they collaborate, is extremely, extremely manual and that was really like the kind of inspiration, uh, behind chain initially.

Andrew Silver: 1:34:14

So it's funny because I've heard this story before. I mean your story is very unique in in kind of your both of your backgrounds. But I just last week was interviewing uh kreenar kimoni from tithe um and asked him you know his origin story for getting into this was same thing. He had family members that were in trucking and he just saw all the manual stuff they were doing all the time and it was like I think I can fix that. So it's cool how family and seeing them in trucking can lead to this kind of I don't know opportunity for you.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:34:46

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I think like it helps, like we had, it helps coming from that you know, transportation background, like you get to face the problems yourself and then afterwards, like we had to, you know, teach ourselves to code and get that background. So now we have like the industry expertise and then also the technical expertise.

Andrew Silver: 1:35:04

Well, our time is up and that's our last interview of the day, so thank you so much.

Annalise Sandhu: 1:35:11

You did great, all right, thanks, guys you.