Omer Khan [00:00:00]:
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Jason Radisson, the founder and CEO of movo and a mobile first platform that helps large enterprises manage their frontline workforce more efficiently. Jason's story began in poverty. Raised by a 16 year old single mother in rural Massachusetts, he worked multiple jobs to pay for school.
Omer Khan [00:00:43]:
Despite these challenges, his determination led him to become a Fulbright Scholar, attend Harvard for grad school and land a job at McKinsey. His career spanned telecoms, casinos, E commerce and and eventually Uber, where he gained valuable insights into the gig economy. In 2015, Jason saw an opportunity to use his operational experience from Uber to solve workforce management problems, which led him to launch movo. But building the company from scratch wasn't easy. Jason initially bootstrapped the business, running early pilots on a shoestring budget and constantly facing the risk that he wouldn't be able to deliver.
Omer Khan [00:01:23]:
Securing early customers was even tougher. Getting into industries that were slow to adopt new technology wasn't easy. Every sale was a tough win. Jason and his team had to focus on early adopters with urgent needs and constantly tweaking their pitch and product just to gain some traction. As the company grew slowly, new challenges popped up. They had to juggle customer demands while keeping the product flexible. Jason had to figure out how to balance customization without turning Movo into a bunch of one off solutions.
Omer Khan [00:01:55]:
Then the COVID 19 pandemic hit which disrupted everything, but at the same time it created an urgent demand for movo's solution. Companies everywhere struggled to manage remote and essential workers and Jason and his team had to adapt quickly to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Today, Movo serves nearly 100 customers with around 700,000 workers on their platform. The company generates multiple seven figures in Arrival and has raised just under $10 million in funding. In this episode you'll learn how Jason fought to secure his first customers despite limited resources and resistance from traditional industries.
Omer Khan [00:02:34]:
Why bootstrapping and relentless resourcefulness were critical to keeping movo alive in the early days How Jason balanced customization requests from early clients while keeping movo's products scalable for long term growth. We talk about what makes founder led sales a powerful strategy for early stage startups and and how Jason used this approach to grow his business and how Jason turned the pandemic into a growth opportunity and the steps he took to navigate operational challenges during that time. So I hope you enjoy. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Radisson [00:03:09]:
Hey Omer, thanks for having me on.
Omer Khan [00:03:11]:
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Jason Radisson [00:03:17]:
No, nothing, Nothing in particular at the moment. I think there are enough quotes that are coming out of the political cycle this time around. We'll see. I might answer that differently in a
Omer Khan [00:03:29]:
couple of weeks and moving on. So tell us about movo. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem are you helping to solve?
Jason Radisson [00:03:37]:
Movo is a mobile first platform for frontline workers and the companies that employ them. The problem it solves is the age old. How do we digitize the frontline workforce? The areas of technology that we're investing in are largely around schedule utilization, so making sure that the right person is in the right place throughout the day all across the company. We will work primarily with large enterprise clients, anyone from upper mid cap to the Fortune 10, Fortune 100.
Omer Khan [00:04:15]:
So, so Mo is basically what's, it's a human capital management product. And you know, there are products out there, I guess like Workday or ukg. But your focus, your, your, your kind of differentiator is you're focused on a very specific type of end user. Right, which is frontline workers.
Jason Radisson [00:04:36]:
That's right. And the other thing is, you know, the, the world as it is today, we're post pandemic. We're in this labor shortage. In a lot of industries it's a chronic labor shortage and birth rates are declining all across the developing and rich world. We're not really going to go back to these days when you could just hire your way out of everything. So mobile is trying to make the maximum productivity and efficiency out of the workers you already have the main areas I mentioned scheduling automation.
Jason Radisson [00:05:12]:
We have a very unique kind of win win way of doing that, which is the worker puts in their preferences and then the employer is putting in their real time demand and the platform is consistently constantly making those matches between the worker preferences and demand and depending on the settings, for the most part the workforce feels very empowered because they're getting the schedule that they wanted, they're picking up the extra hours that they wanted, they're getting the time off that they wanted and we're able to sort of power empower the workforce and empower teams in a way that we weren't prior to having this kind of technology.
Jason Radisson [00:05:53]:
Another big area is task and we distribute tasks in real Time we have a task dispatching technology that does that. So we're really about making people as maximally effective as possible. And that is such a win win thing. It lifts all boats. The more productive you are, the more you get paid, the quicker you get promoted, the more that drops to the bottom line for your employer.
Omer Khan [00:06:18]:
Great. So give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team?
Jason Radisson [00:06:24]:
We're approaching. Sure thing. We're approaching 100 customers. We have about 700,000, 800,000 employees, workers on the platform. We are in the single digit millions of ARR and I would say growth prospects certainly of doubling in some of our best quarters. We've doubled and tripled in a quarter.
Omer Khan [00:06:55]:
And you've raised just shy of $10 million.
Jason Radisson [00:06:58]:
That's right. That's right. So far.
Omer Khan [00:07:00]:
I want to talk about where the idea came from and how you built that business. But I think before we get into that, there's a couple of things about your background that I think are worth talking about. Number one is tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you started movo. Like what's your background?
Jason Radisson [00:07:21]:
Sure. Well, going all the way back, I grew up poor as the first and only child of a 16 year old single mom in a rural part of Massachusetts, a rural county in a rural area of Massachusetts, literally on a dirt road. I had the experience of working just about every kind of job and I had this great experience. I think I was really privileged to grow up in an area of the country that really appreciated education and also for kids that were less well off. And the system just really helped me.
Jason Radisson [00:07:59]:
I was able to go and have an amazing college experience. I had a lot of teachers along the way that looked out for me. I was in these kinds of enrichment classes and things to kind of help accelerate, catch kids up and accelerate them. I was a Fulbright scholar, which was an amazing program and very sort of globally mind opening when I did it. And you know, that led to grad school at Harvard and I ended up working at McKinsey as my first job after grad school. Just all of these things.
Jason Radisson [00:08:30]:
I have to say the system has really benefited me in the way that it's supposed to. I worked very, very hard. I always worked jobs to pay for school and everything else that was going on in my life. I saw my mom's example. She bootstrapped herself through teachers college and got us ahead and got us into better living circumstances.
Omer Khan [00:08:53]:
And you were doing all kinds of jobs right Short order cook, H Vac technician, everything possible.
Jason Radisson [00:08:58]:
Yeah, yeah. Tin knocking. Short order cooking. I loved huge breakfasts. I think there are some founder skills in there, trying to cook a couple hundred breakfasts at the same time, you know, just everything possible. Picking fruit, doing janitorial work. I did just about everything.
Omer Khan [00:09:21]:
And then, tell us about your career. You worked at McKinsey and Uber. Just tell us a little bit about that journey.
Jason Radisson [00:09:31]:
Yeah, I think I was always interested in kind of the ability to sort of apply math and tech to big business problems. To me that was a way to have tremendous impact and I got a lot of just sort of job satisfaction and fulfillment from being able to help a lot of people and to really be able to help turn around companies and such things. And that led to a number of projects as a McKinsey consultant. But then I worked in post merger management of a couple of big US industries after that.
Jason Radisson [00:10:08]:
So specifically telecoms, the roll up of telecoms, the roll up of the casino industry. First at AT&T with telecoms, at Caesars, at Harrah's Entertainment and then Caesar's Entertainment in the roll up of of casino and then in E commerce. In particular, I spent a bunch of years at ebay, sort of helping to automate and sort of transition from what had been largely a curated experience to an algorithmic automated experience to compete with Amazon. So my projects were always massive scale, generally involving change management with thousands of frontline workers and office workers depending on the situation.
Jason Radisson [00:10:55]:
And those were the corporate experiences I had. Along the way I started some smaller engineering companies where I saw there was an opportunity, particularly in the space of algorithms for hire and kind of these, you know, backend technologies that could be useful to different client sets. And then I don't. About 12 years or so ago I was approached by Uber and I got into a very interesting early time in the ride sharing industry and ride sharing.
Jason Radisson [00:11:28]:
And for those of you that have seen my bio, I've done a lot in food delivery as well and built several companies there. And you know, it's just been, I think the experience of sort of scale and scale transitions that you get in big industry roll ups are super valuable skills. Whether you apply them to venture backed companies or whether you go into private equity or whatever, whatever the case, those kind of business operation skills are just invaluable.
Jason Radisson [00:11:58]:
And that's really been, you know, the stamp of my whole career has been helping companies to really thrive.
Omer Khan [00:12:04]:
When I was researching for this interview and I looked at what you were doing with Movo and then I looked at your background with Uber, GM at Uber and McKinsey. You know, it's understandable that you think, oh, this is somebody who kind of was born into a different life, had it kind of easier in terms of, you know, that path and getting to, you know, what you've done with your career, where you are today.
Omer Khan [00:12:34]:
And what I love about your story is that, you know, where you started out, raised by a single mom, basically in poverty, to where you've got today, it made the story a lot more real for me. Right. It was like, you know, this is something that I think a lot of people can relate to. And honestly, when I read that, I was like, I want to talk more to Jason now than I did initially because it was just like this whole interesting part of your background that opened up for me. Let's get into the movo.
Omer Khan [00:13:11]:
Where did the idea come from? What were you doing at the time and how did you come up with this idea?
Jason Radisson [00:13:17]:
I'd say the original idea came from somewhere in the 2015, 2016 time frame. And, you know, one of the things that I would say, just say, generally the way I think about the world is, you know, there are great technologies out there. And one of the, one of, one of the things entrepreneurs should be doing is thinking about how to take a great technology and apply it to some place that it's not being applied to now.
Jason Radisson [00:13:47]:
And I think, you know, you come up with all kinds of business ideas and ultimately these are win, wins because the technology is hopefully helping that industry, helping the people who work in it.
Jason Radisson [00:13:58]:
Mobile was this kind of thing where I saw in the ride sharing and delivery industry a much more advanced operational software layer and talk about mobile first, where the experience fundamentally is, know, even, you know, a guy running a city or a small market or something in one of these Companies might have 2000-003000-00500,000 workers in the database and might on at any given point in time be real time running, you know, a fleet of 50,000 cars, I. E. 50,000 people that are. That you're directly sort of managing. How do you do that?
Jason Radisson [00:14:45]:
You do that with robotics, right? And so I looked at this sort of as a technology layer that could dramatically improve our ability to sort of manage this kind of work in the economy and that there would be all kinds of efficiencies that would flow from that. And it is, you know, we see with movo as we, you know, we're not. There are similarities, there are differences to how you can run the workforce at a Fortune 100 company versus how you can run it in Uber.
Jason Radisson [00:15:14]:
But what I would say is Generally there's a 10, 20, 30% improvement in productivity and efficiency of your existing payroll when you can run your team in kind of a real time optimized environment. So that really was sort of the genesis of the idea and it was bridging that gap. And I'd seen it a number of times in my career. A lot of my early career was B2C algorithms. So deploying these big consumer platforms, largely what I did was I sort of grew my library of algorithms.
Jason Radisson [00:15:48]:
I had many, many, many different strategies for working with consumers and for increasing their wallet share and for retaining them and for cross selling them into new categories and all of the things that you sort of learn in consumer retail and that was super applicable across multiple verticals to begin with.
Jason Radisson [00:16:08]:
We all started like, you know, with sort of yield management that came out of American Airlines, that came out of petroleum, you know, trading concepts from the 70s and the 80s kind of flowed into American Airlines, flowed into the consumer banking industry, flowed into hospitality, then flowed into Amazon, eBay and the big E commerce platform. So there's just, there's kind of this growing body and I view, you know, the problem that we're trying to solve with the frontline worker the same way.
Jason Radisson [00:16:40]:
There are algorithms that we're applying that have been tried and true from other, other industries. So very different maybe approach to technology. You know, we're not out there doing deep foundational R and D on something that's never been done in the world before, but more dealing with the adaptation and the messiness of bringing a technology to a different industry.
Omer Khan [00:17:03]:
So you mentioned this idea of like going after an industry or market where technology isn't being used. You know, maybe there's, there's not a lot of competition in that space or you know, so that's, that's on one side that's good because there's an opportunity. On the other side, your biggest competitor is probably the status quo like them just continuing to keep doing what they're doing on paper or some Excel spreadsheet or whatever.
Omer Khan [00:17:40]:
And many times I see founders struggle with this because they can see how technology can help somebody, but convincing those prospective customers to change something there just doesn't seem to be enough of a drive or motivation. 1. Did you find that and how did you go about validating what kind of demand there was?
Jason Radisson [00:18:05]:
I love that question. I think it's a very perceptive one and it's absolutely the case. And I think basically There are two types of customers for a company like movo and for anyone that's attempting the same thing, big systemic change with a new technology.
Jason Radisson [00:18:26]:
You either have A, the customer who's in so much pain that they are evaluating any and all fixes for that pain, or B, you have the visionary customer who realizes because of a previous life, because they're the leading light of an industry for any number of reasons, that the industry is going to go in that direction, they're trying to get ahead of it. And so much like some of my earlier experiences, I think the challenge is, it's finding these right moments for the technology that means we don't tend to work with late adopting customers.
Jason Radisson [00:19:06]:
That is a problem for way down the road. Right now we are just entirely focused on early adopting customers and their challenges.
Omer Khan [00:19:16]:
Okay, so those are the types of customers, but did you go out and do customer interviews? Did you do research? Like, how did you get to a point where you felt confident enough that this is something I want to spend the next five, ten years of my life doing?
Jason Radisson [00:19:34]:
Absolutely. I had the idea for a while. I got a little tied up with some companies in Latin America with some, some, some important things. You know, we grew 99 taxis and sold that as, you know, kind of one of the leading exits in the Brazilian and Latin American ecosystem. And with Rappi, you know, the, the first few billion dollars of growth there, I was very involved with that team and I, I kept trying to sort of carve out enough time to get the company started.
Jason Radisson [00:20:12]:
And the one thing that I could do is with the time that I had available, was organize a few sales calls and a few pilots and some of my buddies that we started movo with and I, you know, we just, we would just all hands on deck, run some small pilots and particularly we're deploying movo at large conventions.
Jason Radisson [00:20:37]:
So ces, for those of you that know the electronic space and what that show is like in Las Vegas, and we're talking pre pandemic and with all the challenges that they had labor wise otherwise sema, which is the aftermarket auto parts industry, and they usually come into Las Vegas with almost a quarter million people and just a few of the other ones like NASCAR and some of these big events in town, that was kind of our test kitchen. That was 2018, 2019. We did a few pilots, we cashed a few customer checks.
Jason Radisson [00:21:16]:
Those first customers, I literally met with them all for coffee and said, hey, here's what we're thinking of doing. If we did this, would you guys Sign a contract with us and buy from us. Oh, yeah. Labor is such a huge problem here. Of course we'd be on board. Absolutely. We'll work with you on that. And that's how we got the company started.
Omer Khan [00:21:36]:
And then did you have a product at the time?
Jason Radisson [00:21:38]:
Barely. Barely.
Omer Khan [00:21:40]:
Okay.
Jason Radisson [00:21:42]:
Kind of a mini version of a V1. I wouldn't call it an MVP. It actually did some really functional things. It was good enough to get going, and that was the very beginning. And then in 2020, I made mobile my day job, as did a couple of the other guys on the team. We signed, we worked in Q1 of 2020. We did the deal with Amazon, and then literally we were signing the deal.
Jason Radisson [00:22:13]:
In the first week or two of March of 2020, the pandemic hit with all the disruption of, like, we actually had a physical office. We closed a physical office. We had to lay people off. We all started to work from our dining room tables and stuff, and the business just exploded. And it was, you know, all of the craziness of. Of the early pandemic. And we were very active in Minneapolis all through the social unrest in Minneapolis.
Jason Radisson [00:22:41]:
And we sort of got stamped in the early part of the pandemic as the team that could fix your labor problems, kind of no matter what happened. And, you know, the rest, as they say, is kind of history that led to us, you know, having an extremely successful seed and kind of the takeoff of our company.
Omer Khan [00:23:00]:
Okay, I just want to get clear about a few things. So you had the idea for a while. You weren't able to spend a huge amount of time on it. So you were doing some sales calls and trying to get these pilots up and running. Before you started building this sort of basic v1, did you do any kind of customer interviews or did you feel like you had enough of an idea to be able to build something to show people?
Jason Radisson [00:23:28]:
Definitely. I mean, the latter. You could. I think our sales calls, I don't really believe in customer interviews so much as I believe in sales calls. I believe in selling the product or selling the early product as the best way to get customer feedback. We knew. We knew the problem existed. And I think the people often in our industry focus on pain points. But the problem is everybody has pain points. It's just which of them are they going to do anything out?
Jason Radisson [00:23:54]:
And so the validation process was, you know, I had a two or three page slide deck. I went for coffee with these early clients who were people that, you know, we knew, we trusted. We'd worked with them at Uber Before Uber, we, we kind of knew the fabric of the city of Las Vegas in particular, where we, where we first got started commercially. And so, you know, we were more validating that if we could come up with a solution, they would buy it and that they were on board for our first orders.
Jason Radisson [00:24:28]:
And then the nuts and bolts of how the solution was going to work was entirely on us. What I would say too is I felt very confident in a way. I sort of feel confident taking a nice, robust machine learning technology from one industry and putting it in the next. I also feel very confident if you can work backwards from an optimum and, you know, all, you know, to use Bezos's optimum.
Jason Radisson [00:24:55]:
And I don't know if this is, you know, still the case, but it used to always be the case that Amazon was supposed to be the quickest way between the buyer's intent and actually getting the merchandise. And I think in our world, if you're looking at the first problem we were trying to solve during the pandemic, which was hiring automation, onboarding, automation, like get people working. If you look at the get people working problem, then hiring and onboarding is the shortest path between somebody and work.
Jason Radisson [00:25:25]:
And so engineering's job is to get out of the way. It's to engineer away and automate away all the BS around getting a job for these folks. And so we didn't know how much of that we would be able to shrink. We didn't know we'd be able to shrink hiring and onboarding to a minute or two, but we knew it would be mobile. We knew we would have a ton of backend automation to deal with all the legal requirements and documentation and everything.
Jason Radisson [00:25:52]:
And that ultimately we were going for that just pristine mobile experience of a couple of clicks and you're hired. And that was literally the kind of V1 of the product, or almost V1, when it was still very unrobust as we were launching a bunch of these pilots.
Omer Khan [00:26:11]:
Had you raised any money when you were building that V1 of the product?
Jason Radisson [00:26:14]:
No, no, none. Entirely bootstrapped and entirely. All the early engineering, all the early R and D we funded from our client receipts.
Omer Khan [00:26:22]:
Got it. Okay, so you get this basic product which you described as barely worked. You were doing these sales calls and with a very simple. I love the fact that you said it was a two or three slide slides versus some, you know, 50 slide thing and trying to sell these pilots.
Omer Khan [00:26:47]:
I know you describe, you said earlier, you said, hey, you know, when you're in that type of situation, to Selling to this type of industry, you should either be focusing on people who have a huge amount of pain or people who are the visionaries, the people who are the early adopters. But at that point you hadn't figured that out, right. You didn't know who those people were, how to find them. Most of these initial customers were just through friends and people you knew and through your network. Right?
Omer Khan [00:27:16]:
Is that how you got those first 10 customers?
Jason Radisson [00:27:18]:
I think it was. And they were our friends and they had huge amount of pain. They were our friends and they were visionary. If you look at the two conventions I mentioned were by visitor count, the two biggest conventions in North America. So with crazy labor challenges and how do you manage a workforce that you only see once a year, these kinds of things. So we were sort of fishing in a barrel, more or less. And that's early cause, but that was what it took.
Jason Radisson [00:27:57]:
And I think, you know, as you look, you know, if we engineered the process differently, you know, different products, different, different go to market or whatever. I think, you know, the only difference is maybe they're not friends. Maybe you need an introduction of a board member. Maybe, you know, it's an alumni association that you can get the, you know, slightly better than cold contact from whatever the mechanism to get to those folks.
Jason Radisson [00:28:24]:
I think it's just we were extremely focused on, you know, we know four, five, six people in the country who are right at the top of the list for having this problem. Very extremely. And so let's go talk to them.
Omer Khan [00:28:36]:
How did you figure out these were the people who had the pain? You said you had this list of people, but how do you figure out they have a pain? That's not, it's not something you can search for on LinkedIn or, you know, by data. So what were you doing to figure that out?
Jason Radisson [00:28:50]:
Yeah, I think, I think some of it was, you know, we had experienced their pain firsthand. So, you know, I think, you know, in absence of that, you could, you could get there through hypotheticals. Right. You know, and I'm saying what's very special about us, we were kind of coming from the ride sharing industry and gig economy and we sort of, we knew the people in North America that had an extreme amount of pain.
Jason Radisson [00:29:17]:
The city of Las Vegas had been part of my region and you know, we like a bunch of the team members and I, we sort of knew the dynamics, the labor dynamics that were there, pardon me, pre pandemic. If you didn't have that kind of in depth personal experience. I think the other way that you would get to. It is you could sort of. You're looking for industries that are having inflection points. You're looking for industries that have just structurally are very variable.
Jason Radisson [00:29:54]:
There's been a lot of focus on the labor side of logistics in the last few years. There you go. I mean the average 3 PL and these large logistics companies, they all have all kinds of scheduling challenges because demand is so variable and you'd like the supply of labor to be so variable as well. So we're sort of looking for these places that just like I said personally, we knew them, but otherwise it would have just been structurally predisposed the other way. And we've done quite a bit of this abroad.
Jason Radisson [00:30:25]:
The other way is just sort of. And it's less. The pain may or may not be evident because you might think there's a lot of pain. You might think you might have a hypothesis that there's a lot of pain around, oh, I don't know, bottling in the Mexican market, and particularly labor for bottling in the Mexican market, you'd have that hypothesis.
Jason Radisson [00:30:44]:
You could go and test it Another way that you could approach, say Mexico is look for who are the two or three or four P&L owners in Mexico who are the most ambitious, the most forward thinking, the most visionary and go work with them. And I think both approaches are valid. It just is sort of this organic thing of who can you get in contact from which of your board or cap table syndicate members can get you a warm intro in kind of starting from there.
Omer Khan [00:31:21]:
I think that's super helpful what you just described there. Because what I heard was, I mean what you did was you obviously found customers, you know, prospective customers or who became these pilot customers. They were either people you knew or through warm introductions and you made sure that they fitted one of those categories. We talked about either have a huge pain or sort of visionary.
Omer Khan [00:31:44]:
The other advantage you had was you were going into a market, you focused on Vegas where you knew that market, you understood the dynamics and it wasn't like, let me just pick some random thing and I'll go and build a product there. So that's one way of doing it. The lesson is if you know the market really well, you're going to have a big, you know, a greater chance of success than if you don't know the market. The other thing you talked about there was the, the, the bottling plant in Mexico or whatever.
Omer Khan [00:32:12]:
And the lesson I think there is if you have a product that is, has the potential to be horizontal and you could help. You know, you think about it, you think there's probably like 100,000 companies that I could, my product could help. That creates a lot of analysis paralysis because you don't know where to start. And what you did was you said, okay, I have a hypothesis. And we're going to pick a very specific thing, a very specific, you know, a geography, a type of industry, a type of company, a type of problem.
Omer Khan [00:32:41]:
And then we're going to go and test that. And I think you have to get to that level of specificity to be able to test something. Otherwise you're just going to have this vague group of potential customers that you could help, but you're just never going to kind of get any traction.
Jason Radisson [00:32:55]:
Very, very much so. And we really, we have this very strong bias towards, towards just really challenging problems. We're not down somewhere in the mid or long tail of things that would be nice to eventually solve. A slightly better app for doing X or Y. We're really trying to solve what for our customers is usually the number one strategic problem they have or the number two strategic problem they have.
Omer Khan [00:33:22]:
Okay, so you kind of got this business off the ground, you got these pilots, things are going well, you start working on the business full time. But you also launched in January 2020. How did the pandemic play out for you? Because for a lot of companies it was actually a pretty good time.
Jason Radisson [00:33:44]:
Yeah, we definitely benefited. So our initial sort of lens on pain and visionary leaders in Las Vegas, where we had sort of start commercially branched out and you know, A, because of the work with Amazon, branched us into all kinds of logistics and you know, logistics operations of large retailers, B, we got involved in all kinds of things, food related food manufacturing, food delivery, manufacturing of raw materials for food, all of these kinds of industries. And they were largely in the Midwest. And I would say production in food tends to be largely in the Midwest.
Jason Radisson [00:34:29]:
Closer to agriculture and then distribution, they all have their own distribution arms also generally the large ones tend to be on the coast in logistics hubs that we'd already started to be dealing with. So it just ended up being really synergistic the way demand unfolded, you know, and we got into that magic spot of the early adopter and visionary, you know, has four buddies who have exactly the same problem and the conversation comes up and then all of a sudden you're in sales processes that go extremely quickly for blue chip sales processes.
Jason Radisson [00:35:08]:
I mean we're talking two or three week sales processes and you're often running with new clients in that vertical. So I would say the pandemic was an incredible sweet spot for us and just sort of the problem we were working on the incredible product market fit. We never bulked up on salespeople or anything like that. We were able to largely just focus on delivering an excellent experience, delivering an excellent product. And really that was what we did for the duration of the pandemic.
Omer Khan [00:35:43]:
In this early first couple of years, were you doing most of the sales or did you have somebody on your team?
Jason Radisson [00:35:48]:
Yeah, we've had, you know, we had, and we've had a few different folks doing sales. We have tended towards the general manager model where, you know, we tend to hire people in the core team that are good at sales and good at operations. And, you know, that's really served us well, you know, because it is, it's, you know, you're in a small startup, you're trying to manage supply and demand in real time. It's good to have people that speak both languages. And so, you know, that was really in the early days.
Jason Radisson [00:36:22]:
Most of the sales were the US and mostly were me, although we did have other folks in some of our foreign markets in particular, you know, primarily dedicated to selling at that time.
Omer Khan [00:36:34]:
So when I asked you before we started recording, I said, hey, tell me more about all the different ways that you grew this business. You got to the first million in ARR. And often founders will tell me things like, well, actually, you know what we did outbound, we did content marketing, we did xyz. And there wasn't one thing that really helped us get there. There was a whole bunch of different things that we were doing. And I asked you and you were like, oh, we just did one thing.
Omer Khan [00:37:06]:
And we just kept on doing that one thing. I was like, okay, we need to talk about that. So tell us what that one thing was.
Jason Radisson [00:37:13]:
I mean, if you, you know, people call it different things, I think it goes broadly under the term founder led sales. But you know, founder led sales board sales. Different startups call it different things. But it's, it's the notion that you're always going, your pipeline is from warm intros from deep, deep insiders or the friends of deep, deep insiders. And you're primarily selling to people where that trust already exists. And that helps, you know, of course, shorten the sales cycle, but it also really helps with change management.
Jason Radisson [00:37:48]:
Because I think in particular in a product like ours, you know, we're fundamentally talking about a high level of automation and a part of a big company that hasn't been automated before, like that Just is change. And if we're able to sell in a very senior, on a very senior level with somebody who has extreme pain or you know, anyway has an extremely strong mandate, it just makes the whole process a lot easier.
Jason Radisson [00:38:13]:
It's a lot better than trying to sell at the mid level at volume and then hoping that some mid level people on the client side can get your product sort of into the right workflows and help you with the change management. So we definitely think like large enterprise product with a lot of displacement and change management, you have to go senior. And that's just been what we've done. And it's not, I guess, Homer, it's not that we haven't experimented with other things, but all those other things have never moved the needle.
Omer Khan [00:38:44]:
I know you have a playbook here and I think it just would be good to dive into that and hopefully we can help other founders, you know, learn maybe some, some things from your, your experience. You, you were so you had this list of target companies and you, you're
Jason Radisson [00:39:03]:
using
Omer Khan [00:39:05]:
warm intros as a way to get, get an introduction with somebody at a senior level. The way I've seen this play out is often if this C level person or somebody on the board gives you their time, it's kind of like a nice initial conversation and then you never hear from them again or they just ghost you after that first thing. The second thing is you get that introduction, they reply back and they'll say, go and talk to somebody in my organization at this level.
Omer Khan [00:39:42]:
What was your experience like with kind of going through and getting these introductions?
Jason Radisson [00:39:47]:
Well, I think you've got to be strategic. It's a strategic conversation. If you're talking to the regional president with a couple of billion dollar P and L, which is sort of ricp. So it's a strategic conversation. The topic has to be tip top of their agenda. And then you've just got to be really focused on what it is you think you can do and define that in a way that leads itself, lends itself to a pretty quick and easy POV or proof of value and then off you go.
Omer Khan [00:40:26]:
So give me one example of that because I think people might listening to this would be like you said, have a conversation at a strategic level. Maybe just give me one example of what that might look like because you weren't going into these guys and saying, hey, we have this product with X, Y, Z feature that lets you do this and whatever, right? That's not where you were starting these conversations.
Jason Radisson [00:40:51]:
I mean fundamentally you show them what you've done for a company like theirs and you ask them if it would be any different with them. So I, you know, it's, it's more, we more sell case studies than we definitely don't sell features. We sell our very unique value proposition in the form of a case study of somebody who looks just like them, has the same kind of burning platform, may have been trying solutions out with the same sort of cast of characters, different SI firms and different other technologies out there in the market.
Jason Radisson [00:41:33]:
It has really kind of stuck. And you know, you'll know some things getting into it like we're doing, we've sort of come full circle and I think in particular on scheduling automation. We're doing a lot of work in hospitality companies now and it's fairly recent. And I would say, you know, if you want a commonality, you know, a hospitality company that's, that's under some duress is, is, is just run very differently, right? There's a lot of private equity investment in the hospitality industry.
Jason Radisson [00:42:02]:
The other thing is they were early adopters on a number of technology platforms. So a lot of hospitality companies are out there with 20, 30, 40 year old technology that, by the way, workers hate. So, you know, there are things about that situation where, you know, if you've had a conversation with a peer or two of the person you're about to meet, you kind of already largely know.
Jason Radisson [00:42:27]:
And if you've done your homework, you'll know the specifics, you know the generalities of their pain, and then if you've done additional homework, you'll know some real specifics about their pain. You can be very prescriptive. Nobody likes going to the dentist in these calls. It shouldn't be a sales meeting where you're rolling around and all the miserable things that are happening.
Jason Radisson [00:42:49]:
That's why I think the case study is more effective, because you can point to the company across the street and talk about their pain and use that one degree of separation to really get to a fruitful place with the client quickly.
Omer Khan [00:43:04]:
What was one thing you learned from that experience of talking to these, these executives? I'm assuming you didn't have 100% success rate. You had a lot of, you know, conversations that didn't go anywhere. You probably talked to some people who told you it was a priority, but didn't act like it was a priority or a follow up. So what, what did you learn from that experience that helped you to get better at having these types of initial conversations that actually led to some kind of outcome?
Omer Khan [00:43:40]:
Whether it was at least bringing in more people to talk to you guys or getting closer to a pilot or whatever that next step was for you at the time.
Jason Radisson [00:43:51]:
Sure. So I think the do's are, I always look for. We always look for additional areas of differentiation. Our fundamental differentiation is we are a win win company. We're selling productivity and productivity makes workers lives better and it makes employers lives better. That's fundamentally the differentiation. And those are algorithmic choices, those are filters, those are rules that we implement that makes the world that way. I think it's important that AI and machine learning and all these fuzzy terms and the EU publishing white papers about things that you can and can't do.
Jason Radisson [00:44:41]:
I think you've got to make technology very real in these conversations and involve the customer in the design process. And the way we do that is it's a dialogue. And we get, you know, if we've sort of established that there would be a lot of value if we could do X, then we get into some of the things that are two or three levels deeper where we have the ability to come in, in the first couple of weeks with working that, with that client, do something that nobody else can do. Nobody else.
Jason Radisson [00:45:13]:
Maybe the starting place was already what nobody else is doing, but nobody else is going to give them the time of day and, you know, develop sort of a named feature for them, put an extra filter on, put an extra twist on the way that they do substitutions on their nursing floors, whatever the very specific additional thing is that would really make Moho a unique solution for that client.
Jason Radisson [00:45:38]:
Those are the types of things that we try to surface already in that first conversation and then implement throughout, even when we finally get to a deep demo and we get into implementation and into that initial pilot.
Omer Khan [00:45:52]:
How did you balance giving people that level of custom solution without ending up building custom solutions for every different, every customer?
Jason Radisson [00:46:06]:
Well, I think what I particularly like about the type of product that we have and this class of products in general, let's say mobile applications that are heavily algorithmic, is it's a relatively light lift to take something very interesting that's happening in the world and develop a unique algorithm or a unique filter for it. And those are the kinds of things we look for. We look for the kinds of things that in a day or two of engineering time, a week of engineering time, we've done something the industry has never seen before.
Omer Khan [00:46:41]:
Can you give me one example, just so people can.
Jason Radisson [00:46:43]:
Yeah, yeah, sure. So I just mentioned healthcare a minute ago. So we built an additional filter for a client which allows them to manually override on the assignment of surgical nurses. Nurses in general are in a pod, a pool based on the type of roles that they're playing and the type of team that they're on.
Jason Radisson [00:47:07]:
If they're in er, they're in people, pediatrics, if they're in geriatrics and if they're in something else, surgery and some specific procedures where you really want a specific individual paired to a team as a part of that team for that particular procedure. And that was the kind of thing we had a client discussion about it certainly already a bunch of our technology was very new to them and is new in the industry. And so, you know, this was just an additional request and we thought, hey, why not?
Jason Radisson [00:47:39]:
This will take us a couple of days to do. We had some thoughts in the team about how to develop this specific additional filter and allocation. And you know, if you've designed the product right, you're sort of thinking about it in this way. The product needs to be applied, able to apply multiple, multiple rules. And so a lot of the last minute, last mile customization is just spinning up a new rule or two for a customer.
Omer Khan [00:48:06]:
So you were basically taking these use cases like surgery and you were putting in the relevant rules to be able to match the right type of nurse to the right type of surgery. So it's not exactly a new feature, it's just you are making, you're doing what's something that probably a human would have to do to figure out who's the right person, the best fit. Da, da, da, whatever.
Jason Radisson [00:48:34]:
Very much, very much. And I think if you've designed your platform right, and I would say this just generally for a lot of automation and AI is hackney, but you know, these kinds of systems, these smart systems, then you sort of, you'll have business processes where a human still is going to do something, but the very mundane and something very specific and something very high end requiring our higher level thinking. And then the mundane stuff is all already sort of delegated to the robots.
Jason Radisson [00:49:10]:
So the tetris of which nurse is in which slot is something that robots solve. Because once you've got a general pool and you've got general demand and they just need to be on the schedule on this particular floor, that's not very hard.
Jason Radisson [00:49:25]:
But which particular nurse is going to go with which particular surgeon on which particular procedure is something that's still very manual and there's a bit of that that you can automate and then it gets a little tricky because oftentimes you're pulling specific Resources in hospitals that are anyway constrained out of pools where they would be needed otherwise. And that's the little additional bit of engineering that you need to be able to accommodate a feature like that.
Jason Radisson [00:49:56]:
And those are the kinds of things we look for, you know, frankly, where it's a relatively light lift, as said, and you know, you've got an entirely new approach the industry's never had before. And it just docks very well with the rest of what the platform is already doing. I think, you know, there are lots of examples. I'm old enough, you know, to have been a part of sort of E commerce and algorithmic approaches there.
Jason Radisson [00:50:21]:
And, you know, Amazon forever would talk about how they had sort of five or six hundred homepage strategies for optimizing the homepage, and those would all compete with each other. And, you know, what's the strategy? It's some creative, it's probably some copy, it's some business logic. You know, there might be a couple of different algorithms underneath that for generating and refreshing that business logic. And then you do that several hundred times.
Jason Radisson [00:50:51]:
And, you know, there was a company called Rish Relevance, run by a buddy of mine, Dave Sellinger, who came out of Amazon who basically took that, productized it and then sold it to big retailers. And I think the process, you know, kind of similar throughout, Rich Relevance. You know, they would come out in quarter after quarter, they would report that they had another 50 strategies, they had another 100 strategies in mobile. We haven't, we don't, we're not selling algorithms, you know, per se in that way.
Jason Radisson [00:51:21]:
But, but these kind of customizations, labor strategies, automated labor strategies is, I would say that's the, the bid, if I could put my finger on it, that we're doing in, in most of these conversations. And that's, you know, it starts in maybe even the very first chat that we have with the client, you know. Cause we, we are, we're looking for how to beat the competition in terms of differentiation anyway.
Jason Radisson [00:51:46]:
And then we're looking for the things that, my God, the big HR tech platforms, the big operations platforms, it's gonna be a long time before your ERP is going to do that. It's going to be a long time before your workday does that. Those are the kinds of things where we think we can put years ahead of our competition with a couple days of engineering.
Omer Khan [00:52:06]:
Yeah, it sounds like that's the other where you're differentiating yourself now, as I assume the market is more crowded than it was when you started out, is showing that you're A lot more nimble, that you can basically adapt to these types of needs much faster than some of these bigger players.
Jason Radisson [00:52:30]:
And I think never, I would say also one of my learnings has been never underestimate the value of starting out fresh with a fresh team on a problem. And I think in our particular case, it's sort of the difference between Instagram or the difference between TikTok and the difference between Facebook trying to do mobile. If you've architected, engineered, culturally, our mobile from the ground up, it's a very, very different experience that they'll never be able to match.
Jason Radisson [00:53:02]:
They'll never be able to match it in the totality of the experience, in the nimbleness, in the way you solve things. The kinds of user experiences that you put out into the market are just going to be so vastly different. And I think for us it was just so obvious that if you're going to work with frontline workers, it's got to be the mobile phone. It's not going to be smart glasses, it's not going to be PCs or laptops or even tablets.
Jason Radisson [00:53:29]:
It's got to be the mobile phone as the way that you really drive technology into this place in the economy that hasn't had it.
Omer Khan [00:53:36]:
Great, we should wrap up, otherwise we're just going to keep talking for a long time. Let's move on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Jason Radisson [00:53:49]:
Great.
Omer Khan [00:53:50]:
All right, what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Jason Radisson [00:53:54]:
I think for a kid that was very bootstrapped. You know, a mentor of mine mentioned early on in my career to think about job transitions, role transitions, as basically a train. And the metaphor being that before making a decision about that new internal role to take, or whether to go return to a headhunter's call or whatever, think about the train that you would be getting on.
Jason Radisson [00:54:24]:
And I love the train metaphor because it's sort of that you have the choice to get on, you have the choice of where you get off, but it's going to be constrained. It sets up new constraints, it brings you new places, but sets up new constraints. That's helped me a lot just to think about in starting from where I started from. I was really trying to accelerate, accelerate for the first 20 years of my career. I felt like I had a lot, a lot of ground to make up.
Jason Radisson [00:54:52]:
I had a lot academically to make up. I had a lot just relationship wise. I didn't know anybody, I came from the backwoods and I think just any help in terms of career guidance, but particularly that one helped me a ton.
Omer Khan [00:55:06]:
I like that. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jason Radisson [00:55:11]:
Well, I have just recently finished reading the Dutch House. I think probably years behind everybody else because I think it came out in the Pandemic by Ann Patchett. So there's a business lesson in there. There's real estate mogul who's extremely successful, comes from a little bit of a background like mine. There's kind of some interesting twists and turns and basically this particular house ends up being sort of the albatross. And you know what? What it eventually really changes his fortunes.
Jason Radisson [00:55:46]:
What I particularly loved about the book, that aside and the business aspects and leadership learnings aside from, was that I mostly listened to it and it was narrated by Tom Hanks, who I thought did an amazing job narrating that book.
Omer Khan [00:55:59]:
Cool. I haven't had that recommendation before. So you're a first. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Jason Radisson [00:56:08]:
I think successful founders are just truffle hounds. I think you have got to just keep, keep, keep, keep at it and keep looking. And as much as we talked a lot in this conversation about trying to pre wire things so that it's more of a layup, there are moments where you get to do that and then there are just those moments where things aren't working.
Jason Radisson [00:56:40]:
You're running experiments, none of them are panning out and you really just have to put your nose down and keep looking until you find what it is, you know that's going to be that next client or that, that product feature that you've been missing in a particular market.
Jason Radisson [00:56:57]:
I think, you know, the other thing is just the, the, the longevity of everything we talk about and we focus on and I think it comes from VCs and family offices and their sort of cycles of capital and oh my God, it's a good year this year, it's a bad year this year or whatever. The reality is it takes 5, 10 years to put together a good company and a lot of that time is really challenging. It'll be really lonely and you just have to be somebody that sticks with it.
Omer Khan [00:57:27]:
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jason Radisson [00:57:30]:
My favorite personal productivity. I think so much of our careers is writing and still and yes, I wish ChatGPT could read my mind and write for me. But mine is and people do this different ways. I literally open a Google Doc and I, I write, I don't, I look at my email to see who I have to respond to on what. But I literally write from my list of priorities, working backwards the emails that I need to get my day organized. That's my email hack. People talk about Inbox zero, all of that other stuff.
Jason Radisson [00:58:08]:
None of that works for me as long as I am sitting there and for whatever time I have budgeted a half hour, an hour and, and I'm writing all of the things that I need that are top of my company's agenda. That's the way that I've managed to sort of stay on top of communications and avoid sort of being too responsive or reactive is the word I'm looking for in email communication.
Omer Khan [00:58:33]:
I like that email clients should have that algorithmic feature built in. Right. That would make it easier.
Jason Radisson [00:58:39]:
Or people have worked with like these text editors that are, you know, just a blank sheet of paper. Whatever, whatever your know, text editor of choice. But making sure that you're essentially offline while you write your correspondence for the day.
Omer Khan [00:58:53]:
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Jason Radisson [00:58:57]:
Oh my God. I, you know, I, I, I'm a big outdoorsman. I love fishing and hunting. I would love to see essentially a gen AI for finding a hunting or fishing spot. There's great, you know, there's early gis gen AI out there. There are great kind of mapping softwares for hunters and fishermen. I'd love to combine the two and be able to, you know, get a list of three recommendations that exactly meet my criteria.
Omer Khan [00:59:32]:
I think my father in law would love that.
Jason Radisson [00:59:34]:
It saves so much time, you know, because ultimately fish finder or not, or scouting or not, although ultimately you're out there, it's part of it to be out there scouting around. But I'd love, as a founder and a busy parent, I'd love to be able to cut my scouting time dramatically.
Omer Khan [00:59:53]:
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jason Radisson [00:59:56]:
Well, I think family heritage. We talked a lot about the circumstances I grew up in. We're descendants in my family of voyageurs of the original Radisson who was, you know, one of these woodsmen exploring the outer reaches in Canada, which is, which is kind of fun and the history is all a lot of fun and you know, the different experiences and I'm really kind of fascinated by this whole kind of early colonial period, French and English sides.
Jason Radisson [01:00:30]:
I think so much interesting stuff happened, so much dramatic and so much tragic stuff happened as well, particularly in relations with native peoples. But fascinating period of history.
Omer Khan [01:00:40]:
And finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work. And you may have already answered that.
Jason Radisson [01:00:45]:
Yeah, I think so. And I think in particular family. I have four kids and, you know, I think my wife and I and just our home life is wonderful. It's, it's, it's, you know, I have to pinch myself. I feel so fortunate to have that kind of family life. And I think it's a big part of what has motivated me also throughout my life, particularly growing up. You can feel very alone when you grow up in kind of the way that I did.
Jason Radisson [01:01:12]:
So it's nice to have come full circle and to be surrounded by loved ones.
Omer Khan [01:01:17]:
I love that. That is full circle. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure talking about your story and how you've built movo so far. If people want to check out movo, they can go to movo. That's M o v O co not dot com. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jason Radisson [01:01:42]:
Yeah, via the website or. I'm on LinkedIn. Jason Radisson on LinkedIn as well.
Omer Khan [01:01:49]:
Awesome. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And I wish you and the team the best of success.
Jason Radisson [01:01:54]:
Thanks so much, Elmer. I really enjoyed being on the show.
Omer Khan [01:01:56]:
My pleasure. Cheers.
