Flexport's founder explains how early customer acquisition and founder-led sales shaped the company's growth, then shifted as the business scaled and built a formal sales organization. The conversation covers marketplace challenges like supply-side procurement and pricing dynamics.
Could you kind of just, you know, walk us through, I guess, like from a high level, you know, the various stages of Flexport as you scaled and, you know, maybe some of the kind of key points in growth?
Yeah, the, well, I mentioned the first customer, the early days, getting that first funding in the beginning. You have a real chicken and egg problem in this business like any other, like any marketplace, because if you don't have any freight, you don't get good prices. And if you don't have good prices, you don't get any freight. And that's to say nothing of all the problems of global complex coordination of all these vendors. I'm just, even just on the port-to-port leg of the ocean freight piece was the original hard problem that we had to solve. We went, one thing we did was we just went and talked to users nonstop.
Yeah.
And I got a whiteboard and asked them, hey, what do you want your control panel to look like? Your control tower for your logistics, like your global freight. How do you want, how would you like to represent that data if you were to work with us? And we whiteboarded and we had the head of supply chain for one of the world's biggest watchmakers, kind of, we drew for him with him on the whiteboard. What that would look like. And, you know, anything that's late would turn red on this map. And there's my list of exceptions and work that I need to do. And then we came back a month later and we had built that software. And then he was like, wow, you got, I remember the line. He was like, you turned me into a computer programmer. I gotta, I gotta get, I gotta buy some freight from you. And then when we got His request, he was like, if you can hit this target price, then we'll move a bunch of volume with you. And that target price was half the price that we were buying freight for at that time because we were so small and we were nobodies. But at least we had a rate, that target, and we had a customer that if we could get this, and then we did, we went out and found it. He wasn't asking for crazy prices. We were just so small that we didn't have good offers or good supply-side procurement prices. So then we took that and over the course of like 60 days went and found a carrier or another vendor, I forgot, that would match that price. And we went back to him and we got the deal done. It was very helpful that it was sort of asynchronous. I didn't need to have instant liquidity. I didn't need to be able to match that price in that second. I had a couple months to go figure it out, which I don't know is the case in every marketplace business. But we had time and trust. But it really started with that conversation of understanding the customer problems and getting them to commit that it's a lot of if-then statements. Like if you could do this, then I would buy. And you should never, in the early days, I think I talk about this sometimes, like I call this entrepreneurial sales, founder-led sales. Like you should never get a no. ever. It's not acceptable. You get a yes if, and the if is something that is impossible, therefore it's effectively a no, but at least you're getting the if. And then that's driving your product roadmap because 1% of the time, 5% of the time, you'll sit down with your team and you go like, actually, we could pull this off. Like, here's what we'd have to do. We could build this tech, whatever. We could go out and find the carrier that would match that price. But it, that's very different than at scale when you have like now Flexport has a very relatively mature sales organization with probably almost 200 salespeople around the world. I don't want them out there going, yes, it, you know, I'm happy for them to get to no so that they can go find the next one and work on that deal and don't waste cycles. And like, we're not trying to modify our product based on an individual.
Yeah.
Like what this— we have teams of people that are out here talking to customers and figure out the customer feedback, but that's not my sales team. I want them selling. And sure, bring that, bring back the reasons why you lost the deal. But at the end of the day, I'm not trying to get that ex— the, it's the early days of a company really needs to be the founder. It's why it's very dangerous to hire a salesperson when you haven't yet got escape velocity of product market fit because you need to be using those cycles to improve your product and learn from the market.
