Issue #21: Feedback Loop

Feedback from customers can make or break your product. Read on for a deep dive on early product feedback loops.

The beta version of our first product has been live for two weeks. We have eight customers already using the platform and anticipate adding more this week. The last two weeks are also the only two weeks I’ve ever sold a SaaS product so there’s been quite a ramp there. I’m learning all about the quoting, contracting, and invoicing process live!

It took us a little over four months to go from having Figma designs of our product to a live beta of the product. Rylan spearheaded the design while I provided a lot of the context for what makes our product work specifically for cross-border freight. The partnership has worked incredibly well because of our unique backgrounds and total alignment around what we’re building.

That run-up from design to launch also involved a serious amount of feedback from our future users and likely early adopters. We showed our designs to over fifty potential customers, brokers throughout North America, carriers and customs brokers at the border, transportation leaders who have experienced these pains day in and day out.

Our designs changed three meetings into our trip to Laredo back in December. It was still Day One, but we had heard the same feedback from three carriers and so we made a critical adjustment to the design before that fourth meeting. Nearly every meeting after that change, we heard a ton of positive feedback about the design we had adjusted, as if it had been there the whole time. This product came from the vision that Rylan and I have for what we’re building, but it was shaped heavily by a lot of our eventual users and by our talented engineering team, who walked in with years of freight tech experience and a ton of empathy for how drivers, carriers, brokers, and shippers feel about the way they interact with technology to do their jobs today.

Everyone has an opinion, how do you, as the founder, know which ones should shape a product?

I’ve gotten this question from a few people recently. Rylan and I feel strongly about how this product needs to work long-term but we’re not stupidly stubborn about it. We know where we’re going with this whole thing, but, as I just outlined, we’re not the ones who are going to be using this product. We need to build it with our customers in mind. We also understand that behavior change in this industry is an incredibly challenging thing to overcome. How dramatically can you possibly change one’s behavior? Especially when it’s rooted in a playbook that has worked for so long for so many of these companies.

We know our customers are used to doing business in a certain way and so we shape our conversations to support that existing way of life. Do I agree with how they’re doing it today? Sometimes, but when I don’t, I share my opinion. After all, I’ve brokered freight for seventeen years, the last decade focused purely on cross-border freight. I’ve seen a lot of the challenges that come with doing all that complex work and so the products we’re building are shaped with that experience baked into it. We take everyone’s feedback on our product and we use it to think about how to solve problems.

Sometimes, a user can ask for a button and we’ll ask them why they want the button. They’ll explain what they want the button to do and eventually, explain the actual problem they’re experiencing. Our goal isn’t to rebuild what people have used in the past, it’s to take these problem statements and build new solutions that could be done in a better way. Why ask a bunch of the same questions repeatedly via WhatsApp when you can use a form that ends up being pre-filled half the time? Just because it’s always been done a certain way doesn’t mean you should keep doing it that way. We take everyone’s feedback seriously, but it’s our jobs to translate those requests into scalable solutions.

My opinion on Teams

I’m a big believer in not being stubborn and meeting your customers where they are. I just wrote about this on X recently. We use Gmail, Slack, and Zoom to communicate at Cargado. I’ve used the Microsoft suite before, multiple times, and just don’t like it as much as the setup I just laid out. However, a lot of our customers use Microsoft Teams to chat and meet via video and, after weeks of seeing potential customers struggle for 3-5 minutes with how to connect to Zoom, and how to get the audio to work, I made an investment.

I decided to buy a couple Teams seat licenses. That ended up being beneficial for two reasons, it made the video meetings run so much smoother, especially if I proactively set up a Teams accounts and was making our customers feel more comfortable with how they join a meeting, and we’re now able to chat directly with our customers to provide them with instant customer support. We already have four of our customers set up on Teams and they can ask questions and share feedback instantly. We’re actively working on integrating Cargado into Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp so that we can continue moving closer to meeting our customers where they are.

As far as the Teams vs Zoom/Slack debate, I consider it over after using Teams again for the past week. The threading in Slack is substantially better. The ability to see who’s talking and what’s going on in Zoom, while screensharing in particular, is also far better than Teams. The only thing that’s been better about Teams, from my perspective, has been that it hasn’t been a struggle seeing customers join video meetings when they’re already using Teams all day.

What’s next for Cargado?

We have so much on our roadmap and there’s a ton of incredible feedback we’ve received from our early customers. Right now, the focus is on responding to that feedback by adding to our product and onboarding new customers. I’ve done more demos in the past month than I think I did at Forager and this has been more fun than I’ve ever had in my professional career. It’s my first time selling a true software product but I’m selling it to people I’ve known for a long time, and to people who’s problems I understand exceptionally well. We’re seeing amazing early adoption and just need to keep building.

If you’re actively moving cross-border freight and interested in getting a demo, join the waitlist at Cargado.com and I’ll reach out to schedule time, or send me a DM!