When marketplace operations get heavy, growth hits a wall unless you automate. Speaker B from Convoy and Belong explains how field teams and support staff can cap you at linear growth, but mobile apps and smart matching engines let you scale exponentially instead.
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On your past group chat, you actually mentioned sometimes, you know, growth can be at odds with ops. And since Convoy is an operationally complex marketplace, could you maybe share a little bit more about that? And, you know, I guess like, you know, if and when the right time to really be aggressive with growth is.
Been one of the most challenging questions to answer in my career, right? Working at operationally complex marketplaces, because when you have heavy operations like a Convoy, We had a support team, the brokers that when the, you know, automated matching system would not find a match, would step in and try and find a trucker because we still gotta fulfill every match. At Belong, you know, initially when we started, you had local inspectors, local field runners. Belong's a real estate marketplace, by the way. So when you have an operationally complex setup like that, if you don't find the right scalable way to scale those operations, you are sort of capped by your ability to build those teams to support the growth that you could drive with your sales and product, right? So it's really challenging. And at Convoy, the thing we did was obviously very quickly were leaders in the industry in terms of automating that matching system. We were the first ones to put mobile phones and a mobile app in the hands of every trucker at a time where truckers thought that would be crazy, right? Because then we could track where they are at all times, which is the first step to then automating this matching process, right? Finding the right trucker for the right job at the right time. And that took a lot of hard work. But then you pair that with then really sophisticated matching engine, which we built over time as we got more data and a great team. We really were able to automate a lot of those operations as we expanded from one market to the next, unlocking exponential growth as opposed to that linear growth if we were capped by the team of people. So that's just one example with Belong. When we dive into that, I can share more, but that was sort of the mindset, like how do you unlock exponential growth in a world where you're capped potentially by linear operational capacity?
