Mark Ang, Founder of GoBolt | How to Pivot to Product Market Fit

00:33:48 · MarkPlay from here

[00:33:48] S1: Yeah, it's terrible. In short and honestly, Pablo, and I need to get that as a testimonial later, but we use technology. We do our own route algorithm and machine learning and big data evaluation internally. We make predictions because you and me as a team might deliver faster or slower than the next team, and that impacts the chain of events that happen throughout the day. Let's say we assume an appointment's going to take 9 minutes, but it takes 15, well, that has a downstream impact on all the other appointments for the day, but you don't want to keep updating the customer on that happening at every single appointment. What if you're doing 20 stops and stops 1 through 19 go terribly, and stop 20 is like, "Oh, sorry dude, you're being rescheduled to tomorrow." That's not a good experience. We use ML and data to plan in advance and assign drivers in an intelligent way. When we say we're a tech-enabled logistics company, it's not because we're using iPhones to run our driver's app and we have everything digitized, that's very table stakes. There's more to it to manage. Now that we've implemented an EV fleet, there's even more variables to manage around battery range and weather and traffic patterns, et cetera. Are you on a highway or a city street? All this impacts battery range. Again, another pivot in our software is now managing that new reality and adapting to the change. I think that's probably just been a very consistent theme over this conversation and over our business is that you have to be able to adapt to change quickly driven by the market. It's great that we move from $0 moving fees to $90 an hour moving fees, helped us grow and scale a logistics division. It's great that we really execute every single time because then, these consumers use it for their business. Then now, we started to store, fulfill, ship, and deliver product at scale for big brands, whether it's an IKEA, or a Rove Concepts, or a Lululemon. These are now the businesses that we are fortunate to be able to handle their logistics in some capacity. We take that very seriously because we were a consumer-facing business before. We still view ourselves as one today. We just happen to do it in partnership with these fantastic businesses. That culture has always stayed the same.

00:35:54 · Pablo SrugoPlay from here

[00:35:54] S0: The details matter, right? Even in your case of how you're predicting, it's because you're going down to the team-level unit and all these other things. I have to share the story. <laugh> I think a lot of big brands don't actually get that, I forget who said this to me, but the experience doesn't until the item gets into your door, right? They feel like the experience ends. I go to the store, I buy a couch, they treat me well, shipping date's set up, and okay, sale done, but I don't have my couch yet. My experience is not done yet. I had a couch delivered, <laugh> so it was one of these, right? Oh, it'll be tomorrow between seven and seven, right? 7:00 AM 7:00 PM, okay cool. It's like 6:30 PM, they're not there. I'm like, what's going on? I call them, like, "Oh, sorry, things got delayed." They didn't call me, "Things are delayed. We're going to be there at 9:00 PM. Is that still fine?" "Fine, okay, let's do 9:00 PM." 9:00 PM rolls around, they're not there. I ended up getting my couch at 11:30 at night and it was like, if you don't take the 11:30, it's going to be Tuesday. It all reflects bad, I don't know who the delivery company is. It just reflects bad on the brand as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to buy from them again because they just didn't serve me as a customer properly.

00:37:01 · MarkPlay from here

[00:37:01] S1: It's so true. A very powerful example of how we've tried to be very boutique but at scale is whenever we're doing reverse logistics for one of our box mattress companies, and we were still doing the deliveries in those days, we'd always ask the customer like, "Why are you returning your mattress? What did you not like about it? Why are you returning this piece of furniture? What did you not like? What could we have done differently as a team?" We would feed that info back to our customer, and it was incredibly valuable to them because, as you say, they're selling digitally, how do we be their eyes and ears on the ground and feedback info and data that is valuable for them to do product development or market better or target the right customer. I think it's just about being extremely customer-obsessed and driven to provide value, and caring enough to sweat the small stuff, and doing that in the way that exemplifies the most amount of ownership possible. Those coincidentally are three of our six values. Customer-obsessed, sweat the small stuff, and to act like an owner. I was someone that would dismiss the need for values and vision back in the day. It's like, you come to work, you know what you're doing. If you're a CS, provide incredible service, but you need to clearly articulate values to your people so that they know how to react in specific moments and that they can self-police each other when they're not acting in the right way. An example of this today that makes me proud, and really understand that it's working is, when we're making big decisions that impact our merchant or the shopper, it's like, is this the most customer-obsessed way we can do it? Are we over-indexing on acting like an owner and seeking cost reduction, and we're not balancing these other realities that we want to be as a business? For our team to start having an intellectual debate without my presence, around our values and how we want to show up as a company, that's when you know you've hit some product market fit with the talent and the people, and in many ways, GoBolt is a product to an employee base and a team base. That, to me, is like, you are buying into what we're selling, and you're able to then use it to manage decision-making.

00:38:57 · Mark, Pablo SrugoPlay from here

Another reality that I came to probably a bit late to the party on was the need for those things and how it can help drive the seeking out of product market fit at various levels and continue our acceleration as a business. [00:39:17] S0: I don't know if you listen to a lot of podcasts, but David Senra talks about this, which is like, the best companies are really the founder multiplied by 1,000 or 10,000. I think culture is the way you do that. It really becomes the values that obviously you believe in, but how do you put that in a way and instill that so that everybody's acting, not obviously exactly like you, but at least at a high level, is aligned? I think that's incredibly important. Going back to the main storylines, sorry, took us off on a tangent there. BMW and big companies are kind of hacking it. WeWork, you mentioned, was hacking it. Take us back there. You started to see this as interesting. Where'd you go from there?

00:39:57 · MarkPlay from here

[00:39:57] S1: Yeah, I found it interesting since I was also our bookkeeper. I was like, "Oh, these are like really good accounts." I was like, we need to do more of this. We assembled a sales team of one person and we said, let's go knock on doors, and let's go drum up some last-mile logistics business, because we had trucks, we had warehouses, we had movers that were capable and drove great experiences. Let's do more of that. This is like 2019, we started to build software specifically for fulfillment. We got our first e-commerce pick-and-pack business that year. We started doing delivery and reverse logistics for local furniture companies and brands. Then, our biggest development was when we started to integrate with IKEA. This is advance of us having a formal MSA at the time. This was December of 2019, and we finished the integration end of January 2020, and this thing called COVID hit. When everyone was at home, they started buying a lot of stuff, and they wanted their backgrounds to look good, and have a painting like yours, and do all these little things to their place to make it more homey. IKEA's volume skyrocketed and they need more logistical support. We were able in the right moment to say, okay team, we're now going to help deliver commerce in the moment where the world needs it most. We're going to help people enjoy their space that they're confined to for obviously health reasons. We took our entire Toronto fleet and turned it into a last-mile delivery team that was one of the best-performing teams in the country. It was a really fast pivot, and as things gradually opened up, and people needed more logistical support, we were able to capitalize on that and grow, and support all these businesses in a moment of need. We were also able to keep our team fully employed and actually grow that team over that period. We had an aerospace QA engineer delivering for us, and crazy stuff. We were very lucky because some of those people, we pulled into management, and as we grew, they've grown with us as well. That was late 2019, I would say H1 and H2 of 2020, super pivotal for the business. We're where we are today because of the events that happened then. They were just listening and reacting to small things that we pulled from the day-to-day.

00:42:00 · Mark, Pablo SrugoPlay from here

I was in an IKEA meeting, we were talking about reverse logistics and helping with their buyback program, which still hasn't launched in Canada yet. Then we talked about our sustainability ambitions, and that really kind of piqued everyone's interest because we were probably the only company in the country that said we want to be fully electric one day. It just so happened that IKEA also had internal goals to do that, which are now super public. That was able to start a relationship that's led to further growth and an investment from Ingka, the parent company. [00:42:41] S0: What do you do with Second Closet during this time? [00:42:44] S1: Second Closet, I mean the nice thing with storage is it just kind of keeps tolling. We just had all this high gross margin storage revenue in our warehouses that let us finance all our software development and builds for this new B2B business. They were all still in our warehouse, bearing in mind that when you are using your last-mile fleet, it's not touching the warehouse largely, right? It's just they're dormant and collecting revenue, which is the great thing about the business model, but also the thing that we, as founders, weren't super excited about anymore, it's just literally collecting dust. If our success is going to be measured by how much dust is on top of a pallet, that's a really shitty measurement of success. Let's go do something that's way better from a consumer experience perspective, and let's go create cool experiences for brands that sell online.