Flexport handled trucking manually for three years, spending 42 minutes per load, before building apps. Once they controlled 20-30% of some carriers' business, they could require vendors to adopt the new tools. The approach: solve the problem yourself first, then use your scale to change behavior.
Chapters
You know, how do you think about, you know, sequencing when it comes to, you know, solving some of those problems for the customers?
I think it's, well, the sequence is for me, it's demand-led. If you have customers that generally the vendors will show up and they'll be happy to follow your standards, the bigger and more important you are as a customer. So for example, with our trucking technology, we, we did that like fully manual for the first 3 years of our business or so where we would just email truckers and assign loads to them by email and then they'd, deliver them and they'd communicate back to us and our team would sort of update the app that kept the customers informed, but it was very expensive. I think the time study we did showed it was costing us 42 minutes of labor for each load that we dispatched in this way. And we just did that for like many years. We got pretty big. And then once we had some scale and we became 20 or 30% of the freight, or sometimes more for these trucking companies, Then we said, okay, then we developed software application for them with mobile app for their drivers and a dispatcher app that allows them to assign the loads to the drivers. And we said, hey, if you want to get business from Flexport, you have to use this software. And at that point they were happy to because one, they didn't want to lose all their revenue, but two, it was saving them time on these transactions too. And so it was demand, but it's always demand-led. Like if you have the, customer, I, the, the, the vendors will come. In fact, what do we say in freight forwarding? We say who, he who has the freight gets the rate. You know, like if you have the customer, then the supply, the vendor will come and get the price that you need to keep the customer.
