Issue #18: Our First Product Launch
We're days away from our very first product launch. I went into what it took to get here so far and what's next.
As we get closer to launching our first product, I reflect on what it’s taken to get to this point and what’s still to come. Forager started off in office but pivoted to distributed once the pandemic happened and so I’m used to building with a remote team but we’ve been more intentional about in-person work, and it still takes work to build a culture remotely. So far, we’ve had two team offsites, one in Laredo where the team had an opportunity to visit carriers, customs brokers, forwarders, and warehouses involved in cross-border freight. This quarter, we spent part of a week in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, where we visited a couple brokers who move cross-border freight, and a couple of us met with carriers later that week as well.
I first started working on Cargado in October 2024 and came up with a list of all the problems that I thought brokers, carriers, shippers, and customs brokers deal with on cross-border freight, but I had to organize that list of problems into actionable solutions. I landed on the first problem I wanted to solve and how I would solve it but needed funding and needed a technical co-founder. I began talking to investors about funding and started looking for a co-founder.
I had interviewed over a dozen potential technical co-founder candidates and was getting frustrated. I was reaching a level of frustration where I was about to try teaching myself how to code when I was first introduced to Rylan Hawkins, shortly before Convoy shut down. Rylan had built Convoy Go and Convoy for Brokers, two unique programs at Convoy that contributed meaningfully to the company’s numbers. We had a very strong shared view on what the industry could look like and how technology plays a role in the evolution of it. This evolved the initial product vision I had as we talked about what it could become.
We aligned quickly on a few things, we were never going to build a brokerage, we were going to build a real software company and generate revenue, and Meatball (as I write this on Sunday, he turned six today!) would be part of our logo. I’ve described how the team came together previously so I won’t rehash that, but I want to focus on a few key moments:
Use a prototype for customer feedback
Rylan built out an advanced V1 of what our product could look like in Figma and turned it into a prototype. That enabled us in Laredo, Monterrey, and on zoom to get feedback from eventual users before we started building it. We spent time with over fifty companies collecting feedback before we started building the product.
Establish a technical culture early
The team spent the first two weeks in mid-November on Zoom writing up how they wanted to structure the system, the data models, and technical lessons learned from their time at Convoy. There was a lot of intention in those conversations that has led to enabling the team to move quickly as they have so far as we approach our launch.
Domain expertise + focus on the customer
We’ve focused heavily on building a product that’s intuitive to all users. We’re freight people at heart and we understand what work goes into managing cross-border freight and we’ve spent a lot of time focused on even the smallest pieces of the product to make sure that it makes sense to people who need to use the product.
The work the past six months has been a lot of sales and a lot of doing all the random things that an early stage startup needs. I’m excited to start spending more time engaging with our early adopters and building based on their feedback. We have a deep roadmap that we think will continue to drive value for everyone in the process and are excited to build it. We’ll eventually share more about our roadmap publicly when the timing makes sense.
There’s a fine line when it comes to building in public and making sure it adds value for both the business and the viewers. While building in public isn’t for everyone, I don’t know that I could’ve done this while building Forager. I learned so much about the playbook for building a company while building Forager and now that I’m running that playbook, it feels a bit more feasible to manage both. We’re inching towards launch and that’s going to make for some interesting new content and new learnings. The past week, I’ve learned so much about how to price a product, putting together a commercial agreement, and organizing a pipeline beyond a simple spreadsheet.
Even as the waitlist gets longer, I’ll encourage you to sign up if you’re actively involved in or planning to get involved in cross-border freight. I’m currently walking people through the product and what it’s going to evolve into and am excited to launch this thing!