Focus on a Hesitant Customer

So your passion can not only help you kickstart in your startup, but it also gives you unique insights into the area that you're trying to solve. Our passion to solve this problem has led us to ask deeper questions, to get one step deeper into the whole problem and see how we can solve it at its core. For example, at a very beginning stage, we realized that doing digital marketing and getting customers or acquiring customers was a very cost prohibitive thing. If we had treated it as a wall that we cannot surmount, I would not be standing here today. Instead, we started asking, who else would be willing to pay for these rights? How can we subsidize these rights and acquire customers for cheaper? And in that discussion, we realized that kids go to school every single day and they commute from school at least twice every day, so they need at least two rides from school every single day. So we thought, why don't we go to school and find out if school would be willing to promote us? I still remember the cold call I had made to the assistant dean of Harker. It's a large private school in San Jose. I asked him, hey, would you be willing to promote Zoom to your parents? He said, sorry, I can't do that because we are a nonprofit. I said, okay, then how do you promote other services to the parents? He said, because school is using those services and they are paying for those services, so I'm allowed to do that. I said, okay, so how do you do your school transportation? That one question led us to an amazing $35 billion market which nobody was attacking using technology. It was an antiquated market which was stuck in 70 year old infrastructure and nobody was addressing it. So what we started doing was we pivoted our business model and started serving schools as part of our business model and signed multi year, multimillion dollar contract. That inside and unique insight actually led us to grow three times, year over year and led to a success that we have today.