Issue #27: Sixty Days Post-Launch
We've been live for two months and have twenty-two brokers using our software. This one is a review of those last two months and an update about a couple new hires we made.
We are sixty days post-launch. We have twenty-two brokers/3PLs who are paying to use our software today. What a fun first two months launching a product. Rylan and the engineering team have been incredibly fast to respond to customer feedback and quick to squash bugs. Customers don’t hold back when it comes to feedback. Is every single one happy? No, not yet, we have some work to do. But most are happy and finding value early.
It’s interesting - this software we’re building is technology I wish I had over the past decade at Coyote, Forager, and Arrive. This would have made my job easier and enabled us to grow a lot faster. We built tech at Forager but we weren’t operating like a pure technology company. We were both a brokerage and a tech company and that culture divide showed at different times. At Cargado, we’re purely focused on building software and don’t have to worry about 2am phone calls about a truck breaking down or the never-ending email threads about a load being crossed with the wrong paperwork.
Do I miss those headaches? No. I hope we can help reduce them for everyone over time with what we’re building. Will we have our own headaches? Definitely. You have them with any company, whether it’s a startup or mature business, tech company or freight brokerage. We’ve been doing bi-weekly syncs with most of our customers to get feedback, product requests, and update them on new features. We also have direct chat set up with most of our customers, meeting them in Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp.
This is also the first time I’ve ever sold software. I’m selling into an industry I’ve long been a part of, and selling to people in roles that I’ve previously occupied, so it feels familiar yet a bit foreign. It’s been an interesting ramp so far, learning how to navigate a commercial agreement, selling seats versus capacity and rates.
I’ve generally felt pretty confident in what I do and have been able to pull from experience but, this was the first time that I couldn’t pull from my own experience as I had never worked at an enterprise SaaS business before. So, we decided to hire someone to take over some of this work. It will enable me to focus on selling and doing everything else a CEO is supposed to be doing. Candidly, my schedule has also been packed. Who knew how many brokers existed that have a cross-border service or are trying to expand into Mexico!?
When you reach an inflection point where you’re seeing the traction that we’re seeing, you have to take advice seriously from your investors. In this case, mine were telling me that I needed to bring on support to take on a lot of the operations that support the business, and to start looking at scaling our GTM function. And so we made two incredible hires who started today, Caroline Celis (CC) as our Head of Go-To-Market and Julie Castelbaum as our Head of Operations. They both bring incredible experience that you can see more about in the image below! I’m relieved and excited to have the two of them on board and to spend the next few days with them in Atlanta at the FreightWaves Future of Supply Chain conference.
