Movo: Lessons from Growing a SaaS in Tough Industries – with Jason Radisson [409]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Jason, welcome to the show. Hey, Omer, thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:08] Jason: No, nothing. Nothing in particular at the moment. I think, I think there are enough quotes that are, that are coming out of the political cycle this time around.

[00:00:16] We'll, we'll, we'll see. I might answer that differently in a couple weeks.

[00:00:20] Omer: And moving on. So tell us about mobo. What does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:28] Jason: Movo is mobile first platform for frontline workers and the companies that employ them. The problem it solves is the age old.

[00:00:38] How do we digitize the frontline workforce? And 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'll work primarily with large enterprise clients anyone from sort of upper mid cap to the Fortune 10, Fortune 100.

[00:01:02] Omer: So, so Movo 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 you're focus, you, your, your, your kinda differentiator is, you're focused on a very specific type of end user. Right? Which is frontline workers.

[00:01:23] Jason: That's right.

[00:01:24] And the other thing is, you know, the, the world as it is today you know, we're, we're post pandemic, we're in this. Labor shortage and a lot of industries, it's a chronic labor shortage and birth rates are declining. You know, all across the developing rich world we're not really gonna go pack you know, to these, to these days when you could just hire your way out of everything.

[00:01:46] So Movo is, is trying to make the maximum productivity and efficiency out of the workers you already have. The main areas, you know, I mentioned scheduling automation. 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.

[00:02:08] And the platform is consistently, constantly making those matches between the worker preferences and and demand. And depending on the settings you know, for the most part the workforce feels very empowered 'cause they're getting the schedule that they wanted. They're picking up the extra hours that they wanted.

[00:02:24] They're getting the time off that they wanted and we're able to sort of power, empower the workforce and, and empower teams in a way that, that, you know, we were prior to having this kind of technology. Another big areas is task. And we, we distribute tasks in, in real time. We have a task dispatching technology that does that.

[00:02:44] So we're really about making people as maximally effective as possible, and that. It's such a win-win thing. It lifts all boats. The more productive you are, the more you get paid, the quicker you get promoted you know, the more that drops to the bottom line for your employer.

[00:02:58] Omer: Great. So give us a sense of the size of the business.

[00:03:00] Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team

[00:03:05] Jason: we're approaching? Sure thing. We're approaching a hundred 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 you know, growth prospects certainly of, of doubling and in some of our best quarters we've doubled and tripled in a quarter.

[00:03:29] Omer: And, and you've raised just shy of $10 million. That's right.

[00:03:32] Jason: That's right. So far.

[00:03:34] Omer: Okay, let's take a quick breather here. You know, I've come to realize that some tools can really change the game when it comes to building a business. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Lead Feeder, a tool that helps you cut through the data and turn those website visitors into solid leads.

[00:03:49] Lead feeder shows you which companies are checking out your site tracks their behavior. And integrates all this with your CRM, the result. It's your secret weapon for engaging leads and helping your team turn website visitors into sales. Head over to lead feeder.com/try for a free demo and get a free extended premium trial when you let them know that you're a listener of the SaaS podcast.

[00:04:12] That's lead feeder.com/try. Alright, let's get back to the show. I want to talk about where the idea came from and, 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 of worth talking about. Number one is tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you started Movova.

[00:04:37] Like what's your background?

[00:04:38] Jason: Sure. Well, going all the way back I grew up poor as, as, the first and only child of a 16-year-old single mom in a rural part of Massachusetts, a 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.

[00:05:00] 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. I, you know, was able to go and have an amazing college experience. I had a lot of teachers along the way that looked out for me.

[00:05:18] 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 a amazing program and, 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.

[00:05:37] Just all of these things I have to say, the system has, has really benefited me in the way that it's supposed to. I worked very, very hard. I always worked jobs to, to pay for school and everything else that was going on in my life. I saw my mom's example, she bootstrap herself. Through teachers college and got us ahead and got us into better living circumstances.

[00:05:59] Omer: And you, you and you were doing all kinds of jobs, right? Short order, cook, HVAC technician,

[00:06:03] Jason: everything possible. Yeah. Yeah. Tin knocking, short order cooking. I loved huge breakfast. I think our, our there, there are some founder skills in there trying to cook a couple hundred breakfasts at the same time.

[00:06:17] You know, just everything possible, picking fruit doing janitorial work. I did just about everything.

[00:06:23] Omer: And then tell us about your career. You, you worked at McKinsey and Uber. Just tell us a little bit about that journey.

[00:06:32] Jason: Yeah, I think I was always interested in kind of this, the ability to sort of apply math and tech to big business problems.

[00:06:40] To me, I. You know, that was a way to have tremendous impact and, 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 turnaround companies and, and, and such things. And, you know, 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.

[00:07:06] So, specifically telecoms. The rollup of telecoms the rollup of the casino industry. First at at and t with telecoms at Caesar's, at Harris Entertainment, and then Caesar's Entertainment and the rollup 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 would've been largely a curated experience to an algorithmic automated experience to compete with Amazon.

[00:07:36] So my projects were always, you know, massive scale generally involving change management with thousands of, of frontline workers and office workers, depending on, on the situation. And that's really, those were the corporate experiences I had. Along the way I started some smaller engineering companies where I saw there was an opportunity, particularly sort of in the space of algorithms for hire and kind of these you know, backend technologies that could be useful to different client sets.

[00:08:05] 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. And for those of you that have seen my bio, I, 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.

[00:08:36] To venture backed companies or whether you go into private equity or whatever, whatever the case those kind of business operation skills are, are just invaluable. And that's really been you know, the stamp of my whole career has been helping companies to really thrive.

[00:08:50] Omer: When I, when I was researching for this interview and I, I looked at what you were doing with Movo and then I looked at your background with, with Uber GM at Uber and McKinsey.

[00:09:03] You know, it's. It's understandable that you think, oh, this is somebody who, who, who kind of was born into a different life, had it kind of easier in terms of, you know, that, that, that path and getting to, you know, what you've done with your career, where you are today. 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.

[00:09:31] 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, I wanna talk more to Jason now than I did, you know, initially, because it was just like this whole interesting part of, you know, your, your background.

[00:09:52] That, that opened up for me. Let's, let's get into the Movo. Where did the idea come from? Like what were you doing at the time and, and how did you come up with this idea?

[00:10:02] Jason: I'd say the idea, the original idea came from somewhere in the 2015, 2016 timeframe. And, and you know, one of the things that I would say it, it 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, I.

[00:10:24] Is thinking about how to take a great technology and apply it to someplace that it's not being applied to now. And I think, you know, you come up with all kinds of business ideas and you know, ultimately these are win-wins because the technology is hopefully helping that industry, helping the people who work in it.

[00:10:40] Movo was this kind of thing where, you know, I saw in the ride sharing and delivery industry a much more advanced sort of. Operational software layer and, and talk about Movo first. You know, where, you know the experience fundamentally is you know, even, you know, a guy running a, a city or a small market or something in one of these companies might have 200,000, 300,000, 500,000 workers in the database and might on at any given point in time, be real time running.

[00:11:16] You know, a fleet of 50,000 cars, IE 50,000 people that are, that you're directly sort of managing how do you do that? You do that with robotics, right? And so, you know, 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.

[00:11:37] And that there would be all kinds of efficiencies that, that would flow from that. And it is, you know, we see with Mo as we. You know, we're not, there are similarities, there are differences to how you can run the workforce in a Fortune 100 company versus how you can run it in Uber. 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.

[00:12:06] So that really was sort of the genesis of the idea and it was bridging that gap. And I'd seen a number of times in my career, you know, a lot of my early career was, was B2C algorithms. So deploying these big consumer platforms largely what I did was. I sort of grew my library of algorithms. I had many, many, many different strategies for working with consumers and for, you know, 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 learned in consumer retail.

[00:12:42] And that was super applicable across multiple verticals. To begin with, we all started like. With sort of yield management that came out of American Airlines, that came out of petroleum you know, trading concepts from the seventies and the eighties flow kind of float into American Airlines, float into the consumer banking industry, float into hospitality, then flowed into Amazon, eBay, and the big eCommerce platform.

[00:13:10] 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 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 RD on something that's never been done in the world before, but more.

[00:13:35] Dealing with the adaptation and the messiness of bringing a technology to a different industry.

[00:13:40] Omer: 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.

[00:13:58] 'cause there's an opportunity on the other side you. Biggest competitor. Is probably the status quo, like them just continuing to keep doing what they're doing with on paper or some Excel spreadsheet or whatever. And many times I see founders struggle with this because they, they can see this 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.

[00:14:35] One, did you find that, and, and, you know, how did you go about validating what kind of demand there was?

[00:14:41] Jason: I, I love that question. I think it's a very, very perceptive one. And, and it's absolutely the case. And you know, I think, I think basically there are two types of customers for a company like Mo and, you know, for anyone that's, you know, attempting the same thing big systemic change with a new technology.

[00:15:00] 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, you know, because of a previous life, because they're, you know the leading light of an industry for any, any number of reasons that the industry is gonna go in that direction.

[00:15:22] They're trying to get ahead of it. And so, you know, much like some of my earlier experiences you know, I think the challenge is it's finding these right moments for the technology. That means we don't, we don't tend to work with late adopting customers. You know, that is a problem for way down the road.

[00:15:39] Right now we are just entirely focused on, on early adopting customers and, and their challenges.

[00:15:46] Omer: Okay. So those, 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, 10 years of my life doing?

[00:16:03] Jason: Absolutely. So we you know, and I, I had the idea for, for a while. You know, I got a, I got a little, a little tied up with some companies in, in Latin America with some, some important things. You know, we grew 99 taxis and, and sold that as you know, kind of a, one of the leading exits in the Brazilian and Latin American ecosystem.

[00:16:24] And with Robbie 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. The one thing that I could do. 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.

[00:16:49] 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. So CES for those of you that know the electronic space and what that show's like in Las Vegas, and we're talking pre pandemic and you know, with all the challenges that they had labor wise, otherwise.

[00:17:11] Cma, 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, and, and some of these big events in town. That was kind of our test kitchen. That was 2018. 2019. We did a few pilots.

[00:17:30] We cashed a few customer checks. Those first customers, I literally met with them all with 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's such a huge problem here. Of course, we'd be on board, you know?

[00:17:47] Absolutely. We'll, we'll work with you on that. And that's how we got the company started. And then…

[00:17:52] Omer: Did you have a product at the time?

[00:17:54] Jason: Barely. Barely. Okay. A mini kind of a, a mini version of of, of a V1. I, I wouldn't call it an MVP, it actually did some really functional things. It was like good enough to get going and you know, that was that was the very beginning.

[00:18:10] And then in 2020 you know, I made mobile my day job, as did a couple of the other guys on the team. We signed, we, we worked in Q1 of 2020. We did the deal with Amazon and then literally we were signing the deal in the first week or 2nd of March of 2020, the pandemic hit. We had all the disruption of, like, we actually had a physical office.

[00:18:32] We, it was a physical office. We had to lay people off. We all started to work, you know, 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.

[00:18:51] 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 is, 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.

[00:19:08] Omer: Okay. I just wanna get a clear about a few things. So you, 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, and trying to get these pilots up and running. The, before you started building this sort of basic V one, did you do any, any kind of customer interviews or did you feel like I.

[00:19:31] You, you had enough of an idea to be able to build something to show people?

[00:19:36] Jason: Definitely. I mean, the latter. And you could, I think our sales calls, I, 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.

[00:19:51] 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 gonna do anything about? 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.

[00:20:10] 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.

[00:20:34] And then, you know, the nuts and bolts of how the solution was going to work was entirely on us. What I would say too is I, I felt very confident in a way I sort of feel confident taking. You know, 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, I'll, you know, to use Bezos's Optimum, 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.

[00:21:09] And I think in our world, if you're looking at the first problem we were trying to solve during the pandemic, which is 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.

[00:21:27] And so engineering's job is to get out of the way. It's to engineer a way and automate a way. 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 Movo.

[00:21:46] We knew we would have a ton of backend automation to deal with all the legal requirements and documentation and everything. And that ultimately we were going for that in your just pristine mobile experience of a couple of clicks and you're hired. And that was literally the, you know, kind of. V1 of the product or almost V1, when it was still very un robust as we were, we were launching a bunch of these pilots.

[00:22:11] Omer: Had you, had you raised any money when you were building that v one of the product?

[00:22:15] Jason: No. No. None entirely bootstrapped and entirely all the early engineering, all the early r and d we funded from our client receipts.

[00:22:22] Omer: Got it. Okay. So you get this, this basic product, which you described as barely worked. You.

[00:22:31] You got these, 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. I know you described, 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 easily be focusing on people who have a huge amount of pain, or people who are the visionaries, the people who are the early adopters.

[00:23:02] I. But at that point you hadn't figured that out, right? You didn't know who those people were, how to find them, but most of these initial customers were just through, through friends and, and people you knew and you know, through your network, right? Is that how you got those first 10 customers?

[00:23:18] Jason: I think it, it was, and it was, they were our friends and they had huge amount of pain.

[00:23:23] They were our friends and they were visionary. You know, if you look at, at, you know, the two conventions I mentioned were. By, by visitor count the two biggest conventions in North America. So you know, with, with crazy labor challenges and, you know, how do you manage a workforce that you only see once a year?

[00:23:41] You know, these kinds of things. So, you know, we were, we were, we were sort of fishing in a, in a, you know, in a, in a barrel, more or less. And that's early cause. But that, you know, that was, that was what it took. And I think. You know, as you look, you know, if we had 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.

[00:24:06] 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, whatever the mechanism to get to those folks. I think it's just we were extremely focused on. You know, we know 4, 5, 6 people in the country who are right at the top of the list for having this problem.

[00:24:28] Very extremely. And so let's go talk to them.

[00:24:31] Omer: How did you figure out these were the people who had the pain? You said you had this list of people, but how, how do you figure out they have a pain that's not, it's not something you can search for on LinkedIn or, or, you know, by data. So what were you doing to figure that out?

[00:24:45] Jason: Yeah, I think, I think some of it was you know, we had experienced their pain for 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.

[00:25:09] The city of Las Vegas had been part of my region and, you know, we like a bunch of. The team members and I like, we, we, we sort of knew the dynamics the labor dynamics that, that were there, pardon me, pre pandemic. If you didn't have that kind of, you know, in-depth, personal experience. I think the other way that you would get to it is you could sort of, you know, you're looking for industries that are having inflection points.

[00:25:35] You're looking for industries that have just structurally. Are very variable. You know, 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 three pl and, and you know, 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.

[00:26:00] So we're sort of looking for these places that just, you know, like I said, personally we knew them, but otherwise it would've just been structurally predisposed the other way. And we've done, we've done quite a bit of this abroad. The other way is just sort of, you know, and it's less, the pain may or may not be evident because you might think there's a lot of pain.

[00:26:21] 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. 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 and L owners in Mexico who are the most ambitious, the most forward thinking, the most visionary, and go work with that. And I think both approaches are valid. You know, it just is, you know, sort of this organic thing of who can you get in contact from which of your board or, or cap table syndicate members can, can get you a warm intro.

[00:27:05] And kind of starting from there.

[00:27:06] Omer: I, I think that's super helpful, what you just described there. 'cause what I heard was, I mean, what you did. Was you, 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, you made sure that they, they fitted one of those categories we talked about either have a huge pain or, or sort of visionary.

[00:27:29] The other advantage you had was you are going into a market. You focused on in Vegas, we, you knew that market. You, you understood the dynamics and it wasn't like, let me just pick some random thing and I'll, I'll go and, you know, build a product there. So that was one, that's one way of doing it. The lesson is, if you know the market really well, you're gonna have a, you know, a greater chance of success than if you don't know the market.

[00:27:51] The, the other thing you talked about there was the, the, the bottling plant in Mexico, whatever, 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 and you think, I, I, there's probably like a hundred thousand companies that I could, my product could help.

[00:28:11] I. That creates a lot of analysis paralysis because you dunno where to start. And what you did was you said, okay, I have a hypothesis and we're gonna pick a very specific thing, a very specific, you know, a, a geography, a type of industry, a type of company, a type of problem, and then we're gonna go and test that.

[00:28:28] And I think you have to get to that level of specificity to be able to test something. Otherwise, you're just gonna have this vague. Group of potential customers that you could help, but you're just never gonna kind of get any traction.

[00:28:40] Jason: Very much. Very much so. And, and we really, we have this very strong bias towards, towards just really challenging problems.

[00:28:50] You know, we don't, we're, we're not down somewhere in the mid or long tail of things that would nice, be nice to eventually solve, you know a slightly better app for doing X or Y We're really trying to solve. Or for our customers is usually the number one strategic problem they have or the number two strategic problem they have.

[00:29:07] Omer: Okay. So you, you, you, you kind of got this business off the ground, you've 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 first a lot of companies, it was actually a pretty good time.

[00:29:29] Jason: Yeah, we definitely benefited. So our initial sort of lens on pain and visionary leaders in Las Vegas where we had sort of started commercially branched out and, you know, a, because of the work with Amazon branched us into all kinds of logistics and. You know, the logistics operations of large retailers.

[00:29:51] 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, you know, largely in the Midwest. And I would say production and food tends to be largely in the Midwest, closer to agriculture, and then distribution.

[00:30:12] They all have their own distribution arms also. Generally the large ones tend to be sort of 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 sort of demand unfolded. You know, and we got into that magic spot of the early adopter and visionary.

[00:30:32] 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. I mean, we're talking two or three week sales processes and you're often running with new clients in that vertical.

[00:30:50] So I would say the pandemic was, was an incredible sweet spot for us. And just, you know, sort of the problem we were working on the incredible product market fit. You know, we, we, we never bulked up on salespeople or anything like that. We were able to largely. You know, just just focus on delivering an excellent experience, delivering an excellent product.

[00:31:12] And, and really that was what we did for the duration of the pandemic.

[00:31:15] Omer: Well, in this early first couple of years, were you doing most of the sales or, or did you have somebody on your team?

[00:31:20] Jason: 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, we, 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, 'cause 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 most of the sales were the US and mostly were me.

[00:31:54] Although we did have other folks in some of our foreign markets in particular. You know, primarily dedicated to selling at that time.

[00:32:01] Omer: So when I asked you before we started recording, I said, Hey. Tell me more about all, all, 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 we did outbound, we did content marketing.

[00:32:21] We did X, Y, Z. And it was a, 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 and we just kept on doing that. One thing I. I was like, okay, we need to talk about that. So tell us what that one thing was.

[00:32:40] Jason: I mean, if you, you know, people call it different things. I, 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.

[00:33:01] 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. 'cause I think in particular in a product like ours, you know, we're fundamentally talking about a high level of automation in a part of a big company that hasn't been automated before.

[00:33:22] 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. 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 products sort of into the right workflows and help you with the change management.

[00:33:51] So we, 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, you know, what we've done. And it's not, I guess, Elmer, it's not that we haven't experimented with other things, but all those other things have never moved the needle.

[00:34:08] Omer: I know you have a playbook here and I think it's 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 are using warm intros as a way to get, get an introduction with somebody at a senior level.

[00:34:32] The way I've seen this play out is often if this, 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, right? Or they just ghost you after that first thing. The second thing is you get that introduction.

[00:34:53] They reply back and they'll say, go and talk to somebody in my organization at this level, I. What was your experience like with, with kind of going through and getting these introductions?

[00:35:07] Jason: Well, I think, you know, you've gotta be, you've gotta 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.

[00:35:19] So it's a strategic conversation. The topic has to be tip tip top of their agenda. And then you've just gotta be really focused on what it is you think you can do. And, you know, define that in a way that leads itself, lends itself to a pretty quick and easy POV or proof of value. And then off, off you go.

[00:35:40] And so…

[00:35:41] Omer: So gimme, give, gimme one example of that because I think people might listen to this would be, like you said, have a conversation at a strategic level. Maybe just gimme like 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?

[00:36:04] That's not where you were starting these conversations.

[00:36:06] Jason: 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 than we sell. We definitely don't sell features we sell.

[00:36:23] You know, our very unique value proposition in the form of a case study of somebody who looks just like them has, you know, the same kind of burning platform you know, may have been trying solutions out with the same sort of cast of characters, different, different SI firms and different other technologies out there in the market.

[00:36:44] It has really kind of stuck and you know, you'll know some things getting into it like we're doing. We're, 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, 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.

[00:37:06] Right? There's a lot of private equity investment in, in the hospitality industry. 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 mean, you kind of already largely know.

[00:37:35] 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. And so you can be very prescriptive. Nobody likes, you know, going to the dentist in these calls. It shouldn't, you know, it shouldn't be a sales meeting where you're rolling around and all the miserable things that are happening.

[00:37:57] That's why I think the case study is, is more effective. 'cause you can kind of point to the company across the street. You know, and talk about their pain and, and use that one degree of separation to really get to a fruitful place with the client quickly.

[00:38:10] Omer: What was one thing you learned from that experience of talking to these, these executives?

[00:38:16] I'm, I'm assuming you didn't have a hundred percent. Success rate. You, 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.

[00:38:41] Initial conversations that actually led to some kind of outcome, whether it was at least bringing in more people to to talk to you guys or getting closer to a pilot or whatever that next step was for you at the time.

[00:38:57] Jason: Sure. So I think, I think the, the, the dos are, I always look for, we always look for.

[00:39:05] Additional areas of differentiation and, and our fundamental differentiation is, is we are a win-win company. We're, we're selling productivity. And productivity makes workers lives better, and it makes employers lives better. And so that's fundamentally the differentiation. And those are algorithmic choices.

[00:39:25] Those are filters, those are rules that we implement that makes the world that way. I think it's important that if people, you know, AI and machine learning and all these fuzzy terms and, you know, the, the EU publishing white papers about things that you can and can't do, I, I think you've gotta, you've gotta make technology very real in these conversations.

[00:39:48] And, and involve the customer in the design process. And the way we do that is, 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.

[00:40:12] Do something that nobody else can do. Nobody else. 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 a sort of a, 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.

[00:40:33] You know, whatever the very specific additional thing is that would really make Movo, a unique solution for that client. Those are the types of things that we try to surface already in that first conversation and then implement throughout, you know, even when we finally get to kind of a deep demo and we get into implementation and into that initial pilot.

[00:40:54] Omer: How did you balance giving people that level of custom. Solution without ending up building custom solutions for every different, every, you know, every customer.

[00:41:09] Jason: Well, I think, you know, what I particularly like about the type of product that we have and, and sort of 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.

[00:41:28] 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.

[00:41:44] Omer: Can you gimme one example just so people can

[00:41:46] Jason: Yeah, yeah, sure.

[00:41:47] So I was just, I just mentioned healthcare a minute ago. So we built, we built a, 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.

[00:42:09] If they're in er, they're in 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, client discussion about it.

[00:42:29] Certainly already a bunch of our technology was, was very new to them and Is is new in the industry. And so, you know, this was just an additional request and we thought, Hey, why not? This will take us a couple days to do. We had some thoughts in the team about how to develop this specific additional.

[00:42:47] Filter and allocation and you know, if you've designed the products 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.

[00:43:05] Omer: So you were basically taking these, these use cases like surgery and you were putting in.

[00:43:13] The, 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 is just you are making you, 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, that da da, whatever.

[00:43:32] Jason: Very much, very much. And I think if you've designed your platform right you know, and I would say this just generally for a lot of automation and. AI is hackney, but you know, these kind, 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.

[00:44:01] And then the mundane stuff is all already sort of delegated to the, to the robots and you know, so the sort of the, the, the Tetris of which nurse is in which slot is something that robots solve. 'cause 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.

[00:44:22] But which particular nurse is going to go with which particular surgeon? On which particular seat 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.

[00:44:44] And that's the little additional bit of engineering that you need to be able to accommodate a feature like that. 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.

[00:45:07] 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. And, you know Amazon forever would talk about how they had sort of five or 600 homepage strategies for optimizing the homepage and those would all compete with each other.

[00:45:27] 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 and you know, there was a company called Rich Relevance run by a buddy of mine, Dave Ser, who came outta Amazon, who basically took that, productized it and then sold it to big retailers.

[00:45:54] 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 a hundred strategies. In Movo, we haven't, we don't, we're not selling algorithms you know, per se in that way.

[00:46:12] 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're, we are, we're looking for how to beat the competition in terms of differentiation anyway.

[00:46:36] And then we're looking for the things that, you know, my God, the big, you know, HR tech platforms, the big operations platforms. It's gonna be a long time before your ERP is gonna do that. It's gonna be a long time before your, your workday does that. Those are the kinds of things where we think we can put years ahead of our competition.

[00:46:54] With a couple days of engineering.

[00:46:55] Omer: Yeah. It, it sounds like that's the other way you're differentiating yourself now as, as I assume the, the market is more crowded than it was when you, you started out, is showing that you are, you are a lot more nimble that you can, you can basically adapt to these types of needs much faster.

[00:47:16] Than some of these bigger players.

[00:47:18] Jason: And I think never, you know, I would say also one of my learnings has been, you know, 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, you know, the difference between Instagram or the difference between TikTok and the difference between Facebook trying to do mobile.

[00:47:38] You know, it's just, it, if you've, if you've architected, engineered culturally are mobile from the ground up. It's a very, very different experience that they'll never be able to match. They'll never be able to match it. In the totality of the experience in the nimbleness and the way you solve things you know, the kinds of, of user experiences that you put out into the market are just gonna be so vastly different.

[00:48:01] And I think for us, you know, it was just so obvious that if you're going to work with frontline workers, it's gotta be the mobile phone. It's not gonna be smart glasses. It's not gonna be PCs or laptops or, or even tablets. It's gotta be the mobile phone as the way that you really drive technology into this place in the economy that hasn't had it.

[00:48:21] Omer: Great. We should wrap up, otherwise we're just gonna keep talking for. For a long time. Let's, let's let's move on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Great. All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:48:37] Jason: I think you know, for, for a kid that, that was very bootstrapped you know, a mentor of mine mentioned early on in my career to think about job transitions, role transitions.

[00:48:50] 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 a head hunter's call or whatever, think about the train that you would be getting on. And you know, I love the train metaphor because it's sort of that you have the choice to get on.

[00:49:12] You know, you have the choice of where you get off, but it's gonna be constrained. It sets up new constraints, it brings you new places, but sets up new constraints. And that's helped me a lot just to think about. You know, and, and starting from where I started from, I was really trying to accelerate, accelerate for the first 20 years of my career.

[00:49:30] I felt like I had a lot, a lot of make ground to make up. I had a lot I academically to make up. I had a lot just relationship wise. I didn't know anybody. I came from the back woods, you know? And I think just any. Any help in terms of career guidance, but particularly that one helped me a ton.

[00:49:47] Omer: I like that.

[00:49:48] What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:49:51] Jason: Well, I have just recently finished reading the Dutch House, I think probably years behind everybody else 'cause I think it came out in the pandemic by Anne Patchett. What I particular, so there's a business lesson in there. There's a real estate mogul who's extremely successful.

[00:50:06] 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. What I particularly loved about the book that aside and the business aspects and leadership learnings aside.

[00:50:27] Was that I mostly listened to it and it was narrated by Tom Hanks, who I thought did an amazing job narrating that book.

[00:50:34] Omer: 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?

[00:50:42] Jason: I think successful founders are just are just truffle hounds.

[00:50:47] I think you have, you have got to just keep, keep, keep, keep added and keep looking. And you know, as much as we talked a lot in this conversation about trying to pre-wire things so that, you know, it's more of a layup you know, there are moments where you get to do that. And then there are just those moments where things aren't working.

[00:51:10] You're running experiments, none of them are panning out. And you really just have to. Put your nose down and keep, keep looking until you find what it is you know, that's gonna be that next client or that, that product feature that you've been missing in a particular market. 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.

[00:51:39] It's a bad year this year or whatever. The reality is it takes five, 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.

[00:51:53] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:51:56] Jason: My favorite personal productivity.

[00:51:58] I think so much of our careers is writing and still, and yes, I wish that GPT could read my mind and write for me. But mine is, I, 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, I literally write from my list of priorities working backwards, the emails that I need to get my day organized.

[00:52:29] That's my email hack. People talk about inbox zero, all of that other stuff. 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 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.

[00:52:51] I. Sort of being too responsive or reactive is the word I'm looking for in email communication.

[00:52:57] Omer: I like that email clients should have that algorithmic feature built in, right? That would make it easier.

[00:53:03] Jason: Or people have worked with like these text editors that are, you know, just a blank sheet of Hey, what, whatever, whatever your, you know, text editor of choice, but making sure that you're essentially offline while you write your correspondence for the day.

[00:53:16] Omer: What's a, a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:53:20] Jason: Oh my God, I you know, I, I, I'm a big outdoors man. 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, there's early gist gen AI out there.

[00:53:39] 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. I.

[00:53:51] Omer: I think my father-in-law would love that.

[00:53:53] Jason: It saves so much time, you know? 'cause ultimately, eh, fish finder or not, or scouting or not.

[00:53:59] Although ultimately you're out there, it is part of it to be out there scouting around. But I'd love, as a founder, as a as and, and a busy parent, I. I'd love to be able to cut my scouting time dramatically.

[00:54:10] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people dunno?

[00:54:13] Jason: Well, I, I think family heritage, we talked a lot about you know, circumstances I grew up in we're descendants in my family of of, of voyagers, of the original Radisson who was you know, one of these woodsmen exploring the outer reaches in Canada.

[00:54:30] Which is, which is kind of fun. And the history's all a lot of fun and you know, the different experiences and I'm, I'm really kind of fascinated by this whole kind of early colonial period French and English sides. I think so much interesting stuff happened. So much dramatic and so much tragic stuff happened as well, particularly in relations with native peoples.

[00:54:49] But fascinating period of history.

[00:54:52] Omer: And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work? And you may have already answered that.

[00:54:56] Jason: Yeah, I think so. And, and I think in particular family. I have four kids and you know I think my wife and I, and just our home life it is wonderful.

[00:55:04] 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. So it's, it's nice to have come full circle and to be surrounded by love ones.

[00:55:24] Omer: I love that. That's that is full circle. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure talking about your story and, and how you've built Movo so far. If people want to check out Movo, they can go to Movo, that's movo.co, not .com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:55:46] Jason: Yeah, via the website or I'm on LinkedIn. Jason Radisson on LinkedIn as well.

[00:55:52] Omer: Awesome. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:55:57] Jason: Thanks so much, Omer. I really enjoyed being on the show.

[00:55:59] Omer: My pleasure. Cheers.