Jacob Boudreau CTO of STORD

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Jacob, the CTO and cofounder of STORD. And we discuss Jacob being featured in Inc. and Forbes 30 Under 30, how to position yourself as an authority, and keeping your customers close to the product. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Jacob at 00:00:21) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Dude, so are you having a good day?

(Jacob at 00:00:36) It's going pretty well. I can't complain. You know, it's a warm, sunny Friday. Lots of work getting done. Can't complain. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) I'm good. Where are you at? Like, physically?

(Jacob at 00:00:47) We're located out of Atlanta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) Oh, nice.

(Jacob at 00:00:51) Yeah. Yeah. So yesterday was a bit rainy for us, but today is nice and sunny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Nice. We're just down in Florida.

(Jacob at 00:00:59) Okay. So routinely sunny for you guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) Oh, yeah. It was a great day today. We had a super, super crazy morning, so thanks for helping us out with that.

(Jacob at 00:01:09) Oh, yeah. Yeah. No worries. I definitely know how that goes. So definitely understand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) I really like the simpleness of your brand. The STORD brand, it looks really cool.

(Jacob at 00:01:21) Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to, part of what we're working on both inside our app and just overall is streamline our brand and, you know, streamline it to the minimum so it's super clear for customers, leads, anyone working with us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Yeah. I guess communicating your value, what you do, that's ultra important.

(Jacob at 00:01:46) Yeah. And it's definitely easy to, both in terms of I think our copy and in terms of UI, get too convoluted in having a million different things going on and really just end up confusing everyone rather than helping.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:01) Yeah. So I was just trying to wrap my head around it. And do you use the extra space in warehouses and then leverage that? Is that what's happening? There's warehouses have extra space, and then what you do is you take all the extra space at all the warehouses and kind of bring it together in a platform?

(Jacob at 00:02:18) Yeah. Yeah. Somewhat. Pretty much, if you think about it, these existing third-party warehouses, you know, their entire business is basically filling their space with other businesses' products. And so, you know, the industry as a whole sort of talks about what is the excess space across, you know, industrial warehousing as a whole. But realistically, if you think about it, there's always going to be a bit of excess capacity just because, you know, if you're a warehouse, you can operate at 100%, but only for so long until you end up in this sort of catch-22 position where obviously 100% is, you know, theoretically you're maximizing capacity, but you actually get less efficient if you start getting too close to that 100%. And then if you have any overflow, you're immediately screwed. So we basically work with these existing third-party warehouses that pretty much always have excess capacity that we can leverage in that single point for businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Interesting. Yeah. Because you can't just put it outside.

(Jacob at 00:03:35) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you'd be surprised what some businesses are depending on right now. It's pretty crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) So there's, you're calling these things third-party warehouses. I don't know. I'm not in this industry. What's a third-party warehouse?

(Jacob at 00:03:48) Yeah. So basically, if you think about it, sort of similar to, you know, development or whatnot, you have businesses will typically have some existing facilities that they own or lease themselves and they'll manage, and they'll run and do all of the internal work inside. But then third-party warehouses are basically warehouses that exist as a business to store other companies' product. So, you know, if I'm a company selling fancy water bottles or something, I may, if I'm a huge company, I may have one or two of my own facilities. But more than likely, I will leverage two or three of these third-party facilities that I don't own. I don't personally move the product inside, and I basically pay these warehouses for the service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:47) Right. Because if I'm on the East Coast, right, I'm doing well, most of my business is on the East Coast, and then we're starting to get a little bit of action over on the West Coast. I might not want to buy my own warehouse facility, but at the same time, I need to service those customers. So I get one of these third-party warehouses, and that's what happens?

(Jacob at 00:05:06) Yeah. Exactly. You see a lot of businesses use it for the flexibility for testing new markets, just growing too quickly to really invest that capital in, you know, a building, and really just to, you know, expand their presence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) Interesting. So you tie that space together with your software, and then you have to integrate with the warehouse, third-party warehouses' existing software, or do you provide them the whole suite and they use you for everything?

(Jacob at 00:05:38) So yeah, we do pretty much all of the above.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) Okay. Cool.

(Jacob at 00:05:45) So we integrate all the way through providing that software to the warehouse itself. So in, they're basically their warehouse management system all the way up through our system where we're basically playing that middleman management to assist the customer and the warehouse with streamlining everything, through to the customer side where it's basically an order management and inventory system for the customers so they can get flexibility and insight to be able to say, oh, well, you know, my product movement is showing that I should really have a warehouse in this location because X, Y, Z, that would optimize my spend. You know, this is my inventory across these different locations, all of these different factors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:34) Interesting. So you're kind of doing urban planning for your inventory through third-party warehouses?

(Jacob at 00:06:41) I bet you're sitting, your analytics are telling you where to place it based on, you know, where space is available and how their business is going?

(Jacob at 00:06:49) Yeah. So it's a really interesting thing. You know, most businesses, especially as you reach these large-scale enterprises, they're, you know, part of what they're focused on is really taking and optimizing where they're placing their facilities. Because if you consider someone with the scale of, you know, let's just say Amazon, for example, the exact point that they place their facility across the map really, really matters when they're trying to hit a certain, you know, distribution level of, you know, in Amazon's case, they're trying to get all the way down to, you know, two hours type thing. But for most businesses, that matters quite a bit when you factor in all the shipping and all the freight. So we're able to leverage something that pretty much no one else is able to, in that we have all of this market data because we've gone out and collected all of these third-party warehouses and are actually organizing all of this data and product movement to be able to tell companies the actual locations that they really should locate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) Oh, that's neat. So what do you, do you consume their ordering data or you consume some sort of repository of their existing data and then tell them what to do?

(Jacob at 00:08:06) Yeah. So we do a bit of both. So in taking their existing, that right now is more of a consultation type setup for us. But once they are on our system, we can pull from, you know, if they already have that data in, say, an ERP system or somewhere else, we can pull all of that data, alongside any orders or inventory that they're running through our system. And we can really just pull all of that together to really optimize their overall distribution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) So is warehousing a family business and you just applied technology to this? How did you come across this problem?

(Jacob at 00:08:48) So we, my cofounder and myself, we were part of this supply chain and logistics accelerator up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And there it was started by these three guys who created this freight brokerage that merged with Coyote Logistics and ended up selling to UPS for just over $1 billion. And so they bring a huge amount of logistics industry experience, and brought a lot of different companies and mentors such as, you know, GE, Ryder, some big 3PLs like Kenco, a large variety of different companies. And we basically sat down with each of these different companies and really got to understand their pain points in their distribution and supply chain and have just been iterating on that ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) And how long have you been going at this for?

(Jacob at 00:09:44) So we've been doing this for just over a year now. The accelerator was fall of 2016. So, yeah, I guess a year and a half almost.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) And how did you get from Chattanooga down to Atlanta?

(Jacob at 00:09:56) Well, we were actually based out of Atlanta initially and relocated for the accelerator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) So how did you meet your cofounder specifically? How did that relationship, did you know him before? How did this come about?

(Jacob at 00:10:09) Yeah. So previously, I was running a digital agency. So I was consulting different digital and tech startups, building different applications, helping with their marketing. And my cofounder had been doing several different businesses prior, and he had been working in lean manufacturing. So he was traveling all over the world looking at these different manufacturing plants and trying to improve their supply chain as well. And so we met actually through this startup entrepreneurship newsletter and community here in Atlanta. And we grabbed coffee and sort of kicked it off from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:53) On a newsletter?

(Jacob at 00:10:55) No. No. No. No. There's a startup community in Atlanta. They have a newsletter, all sorts of different things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:02) And he was authoring and then he wrote, he replied back and he's like, no one ever replies.

(Jacob at 00:11:11) Yeah. No. He, so he was actually doing a totally different version of sort of storage at the time. And I thought, oh, wow. That's interesting. You know, another smart entrepreneur who's really trying something new. And I knew that I wanted to get more involved in the space. And so I reached out to him to grab coffee, learn more, and we hit it off and basically pretty quickly went up to Chattanooga, turned into what we're doing today and have been off to the races ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) That's awesome. Yeah. I had a, I have a friend named Don. He's the CTO at University Tees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) And he sent me an email last week. He read this book on lean manufacturing, and it might have actually just been called Lean Manufacturing. But he took the principles of that and then applied it to some bottlenecks in his development life cycle and was teaching his team about that.

(Jacob at 00:12:16) Interesting. So he applied lean manufacturing to development? Yes. I'm going to have to talk to my cofounder a bit more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:26) Yes. And I'll forward you the email because he, I think he sent it to me along with his team just kind of show me. But, yeah, definitely unique, and he was all pumped about the book, and he got his team to buy in. And they, I think they started it. I think they've been going at it for two weeks now with this new concept. So I'm going to reach back out to him and say, hey. How's it going? And we're talking about you and all that good stuff. And then I'll let you know. I'll loop you in on the email. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This guy knows all about manufacturing, knows all about this stuff. So I also saw you guys use Drift.

(Jacob at 00:13:00) We do. We do. That's been something we implemented, I guess, a few months ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) Oh, nice. Do you like it?

(Jacob at 00:13:07) Yeah, we like it quite a bit. It's interesting. I mean, I haven't played around with all of the different sort of chat systems out there. But it's pretty good. I will say no offense to Drift, but my one complaint is, so, you know, most companies, we use Slack. And so, of course, we, you know, have that Slack Drift integration. But what it does is every single time a person messages on Drift, it opens up an entirely new channel on Slack. So instead of one channel with, you know, different comment sections or, what are they, different threads?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:50) With conversation.

(Jacob at 00:13:51) Yeah. Instead of different threads on the same channel, it opens a million different channels all the time. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:58) Oh.

(Jacob at 00:13:58) But I'm—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:59) Do you want me to text their CTO right now?

(Jacob at 00:14:03) Man, go for it. Tell them we're a happy user, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) We're happy. All right. So his name's Elias Torres, and I hope that's his right last name. Is that Torres? Okay. Cool. Yeah. We were hanging out in Tampa last week or the week before. He was giving a talk and really cool dude. Super motivated and high energy and just a really cool person you'd want to hang out with.

(Jacob at 00:14:30) Yeah. No. I mean, Drift is definitely, they're killing it in everything they're doing and especially in how I think they're thinking about not just themselves as, you know, just a product, but how they can really be integral and move forward into owning that entire sales marketing process. So they're doing a lot of really interesting things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) Yeah. You know, they came from leading the engineering team at HubSpot.

(Jacob at 00:14:56) I did not know that, actually. That's really interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) Yeah. So they went to HubSpot, grew it really big, then left, started Drift in Boston just with him and his cofounder. And then they went from 20 employees to 110 in the past year, and they're going to be at 200 and something at the end of this year.

(Jacob at 00:15:19) Dang. That's insane. That's a huge management jump.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) Right? So when I, I actually, I switched from Intercom to Drift when I met Elias because I liked him. And also, they have many features, and then they have some really cool features that I don't immediately see, but after I start using the product, it's a lot better than Intercom in a lot of ways. I don't even know if it's a, or, but their ability to automatically schedule the calendar appointments is really, really, really neat.

(Jacob at 00:15:59) Yeah. Yeah. No. There's a lot of really impressive things that I see them continue to roll out, and I'm impressed by their speed for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) For the quality of it to be what it is with that fast of an expansion is really an engineering marvel. Right?

(Jacob at 00:16:13) Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) So I'm a fan.

(Jacob at 00:16:17) Me too. Me too. Don't let my complaints of Slack dissuade you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) Oh, no, dude. Me and Elias are going to show up at your house and be like, we need some warehouse app, some place to store the body. Yeah.

(Jacob at 00:16:31) Yeah. Well, tell him, tell him that he can use our warehousing, and we'll keep using his chat. So no. But feedback is always great. Right? Because you have a million things going on, and they all have their employees use their own software. So that's always, you know, a good way to get feedback too.

(Jacob at 00:16:51) Yeah. And I've, I mean, I've always thought that's really interesting too because, you know, there's also, of course, in that, you know, in for example, my feedback, I may be an anomaly in disliking that compared to, you know, the average user of theirs. So interesting to see, you know, perhaps what the whole story is on their side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:12)
Yeah. So we have to always look at the data, right? Because we're building the system for everyone. So we prioritize by the data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24)
Everybody has their individual — who knows? That could have been a feature they added because thousands of people requested it, right?

(Jacob at 00:17:32)
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34)
So how did you — other than just straight up being awesome, how did the Forbes 30 Under — you're the third person. You're my third guest in a row to be on Forbes 30 Under 30. Not in a row.

(Jacob at 00:17:47)
Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47)
Yeah. We had Bruno from Orai, and they do video recognition. And he came from Cornell Tech. And then we had another individual from Cornell Tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:58)
His name is Mike Wang, and he has a startup in New York City as well right next to Orai. And then they actually do a chat thing, but for scheduling hairdressers in a salon-type messages. So if the individual is getting a haircut, they can't — or if the hairdresser is giving a haircut, they can't be on their phone texting people that are asking them about appointments. So this is a bot that just schedules the appointments automatically while they're away from the phone, which is really, really neat.

(Jacob at 00:18:28)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29)
And then now we have you. It's like we have this Forbes 30 Under 30 following now. It's awesome.

(Jacob at 00:18:36)
Yeah. You're on a roll, man. Just keep them going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39)
I know. I just missed out. My birthday was last week, and I hit 30. So I make all these friends that are on the list, and I miss out by a couple months.

(Jacob at 00:18:47)
Oh, man. Dude, there's gotta be some more lists. You know? There's gotta be, like, what else? There's probably, like, Movers and Shakers, 40 Under 40 or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57)
That just feels like a sad, tear-filled consolation prize.

(Jacob at 00:19:05)
I feel that. Oh, wait. Here we go. You've got Fortune 40 Under 40. You could do it. It's pretty up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14)
It's up there. I'll start working at that when I'm 37 and I don't hate it as much.

(Jacob at 00:19:21)
Yeah. I gotcha.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:23)
So we'll prepare for the next seven years. So how did that come about? Did they show up on your door and they're just like, we've realized how awesome you are, and we want to give you this award?

(Jacob at 00:19:34)
Yeah. No. I forget who — someone, I feel really bad — someone recommended us for it. I actually don't — very special person. Yeah. And then it's a whole process. I mean, there's sort of a whole process behind it of a million different forms that you fill out, and then somebody — I think there was a couple calls just to better understand what we do and get an idea. And I think at every step along the way, each new form that they have you go through, each call, everything, is sort of like another step along the way.

(Jacob at 00:20:18)
So there was quite a few different interactions before anything came out. But it was interesting because once you get to what is sort of the — you know, almost sort of like the final round, I guess, before you are considered in. In our case, it was we had sort of a final follow-up call to nail down some different parts about our business and different things. And then, you know, they don't tell you anything until it comes out. So you have no idea until it came out, and we're like, awesome. Like, this is great. This is good news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55)
I mean, that's, like, super highlight of the week, right?

(Jacob at 00:21:00)
Yeah. Yeah. I know. For sure. Especially for, you know, trying to — what we're trying to do with building our brand and, you know, growing what we're doing in the warehousing industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10)
Yeah. And you come from a marketing startup background.

(Jacob at 00:21:15)
Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16)
So how have you turned on your propaganda machine at Stord?

(Jacob at 00:21:23)
Yeah. Well, believe it or not, we actually haven't focused extremely heavily this past year on marketing, because our primary things — you know, I think there's somewhat of too much hype around the idea that the perfect product does all its own marketing. To some extent, I think that's true. But also, you have to get someone to use it first to then tell all their friends. But we've primarily spent this past year really focused on our early customer base, growing that and developing that product to really accomplish all the values we're trying to provide and really optimize what's existing.

(Jacob at 00:22:15)
So we're actually ramping up our marketing now. But almost all of our marketing has been around some of our search engine optimization and a few different interviews here and there. And then, surprisingly enough, which sort of goes to the value that we're creating in the marketplace, almost all of our large — you know, a lot of our large enterprise customers and a lot of our sort of key customers have all been inbound.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49)
Now do you think it would have been — so you guys have been at this for, you know, over a year. Do you think it would have been helpful if you've been writing about the problem that ultimately Stord solves every week for the past year?

(Jacob at 00:23:02)
That's a tough question. Yeah. I mean, in a way, it definitely would. I think, you know, I'm kind of an eternal optimist, so I'm always biased to look towards the positive of everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16)
Oh, yeah.

(Jacob at 00:23:18)
But, which in this case, you know, I think — I think while that would have been good, I think in some cases, it was actually better that we didn't because I think a lot of — what it allowed us to do is — I think in some cases, companies, while it's extremely important to build that demand for your product, I think in some cases, companies are too focused. It's — I don't know. I think it's a strange scenario where in the past, companies used to be too focused on building for what they think the users want. And then they would realize that there's no demand and they wouldn't sell anything. And now I think it's almost the opposite problem where everyone says, you know, go out and build this presale list of everyone who's bought in and then build the product, which is great to some extent.

(Jacob at 00:24:10)
But I think a lot of companies struggle with — they have, and it's a good problem, they have so much demand that their product takes almost a back burner to the sales, which we've seen this play out with some different companies we're familiar with where, you know, they have this grand vision of what they're trying to solve, but then they're so focused on growing overall customer numbers, overall sales numbers, and so on and so forth that the actual technology that's supposed to be driving it doesn't get built. And so we sort of came to the realization that, you know, for anything to really scale and to really provide that value long term to these companies, we have to really focus on the technology and the product that we're building out. And so I think to some extent, having not done that was actually, in some ways, a bit of a benefit in that we could work a little more — I don't wanna call it stealth mode because we definitely didn't wanna be hidden, but a little more unnoticed in the sense that we can fine tune different things as we got those early customers who were extremely interested in what we're offering, who are out there actually looking for what we were offering.

(Jacob at 00:25:30)
And now I think we're at a point where we can go out and market to the ones who don't even realize they need what we have. And once they see that, they'll be able to see the value that we've built up at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:42)
Okay. So you brought up a ton of stuff in my head.

(Jacob at 00:25:45)
Yeah. Go for it. That was a long answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47)
Right? Alright. So the first thing is I agree with you on all of it, and what I'm imagining is your experience behind it. So I do see companies that go sales heavy and then they let go of the product a little bit. And I see companies that go product heavy and they ignore the sales and don't even think about it, right? So I don't think it's a choice that you necessarily set out to make. What I have seen in my experience is it's the composition of the people leading the company. So if you have two or three cofounders and one cofounder is excellent at operations, one cofounder is excellent at marketing and propaganda and content, and then one cofounder is excellent at product, and you resource them and they're a team and they work well, well, you get something like Drift, right, where they just explode because the product people are on the product, operations is on the operations, and, you know, it's a balance among the team within the team. For the content, I don't think it's necessarily, and I'm really interested because I've started to have these conversations after, you know, speaking with Peter and some other people that are really into content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:58)
And what I'm kind of noticing is everybody's mind goes to content about the product, like to sell the product, right? And I think that the benefit is content in positioning yourself as an authority on the problem and showing the world that you understand the problem. Because when I come across someone, when I read and find different authors, and I'm trying to find a solution. I'm trying to find a solution. I'm searching about the problem, right? And when I find someone who understands the problem, who really gets it, and they see different perspectives, and they have different solutions, and all of a sudden that marks them in my head. I've consumed their content. I have marked them as an authority on this topic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39)
So if I — and then that brings validity and social proof to the fact that they have the solution. So you could be generating content about the problem and positioning as an authority for that. You know? That's one option too. So you don't have to necessarily write about the product itself before it's ready or you can still stay stealthy but position yourself as an authority on the topic.

(Jacob at 00:28:04)
Yeah. No. That's definitely a good point and, definitely something that we've actually been talking about in terms of doing that now. So, definitely in agreement there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious. I've never had these content conversations before and then a couple companies, they saw the podcast and they started reaching out and asking if we would make content for them. I was like, no. No. No. No. No. Because we do the podcast and then a couple more asked and then we're like, well, maybe, right? And then we're like, alright. Cool. So we gave it a try. We made some content and we're like, oh, man. Dude. We're pretty good at this.

(Jacob at 00:28:42)
And then we

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42)
started making content for other people and they were like, alright. I was previously against content.

(Jacob at 00:28:51)
Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52)
Dude, I'm a developer for seventeen years, man.

(Jacob at 00:28:56)
That's fair. That's fair.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57)
I'm all about the product, man. I would have a company and it would be all product. I'd be like, what are you talking about sales? Give us more money. We're building something better.

(Jacob at 00:29:06)
Yeah. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:08)
Yeah. And then I realized real fast that I had completely dismissed sales teams. And I'm like, oh my god, the company doesn't exist without sales. Eventually people won't give you money.

(Jacob at 00:29:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's hard to build a product with no money from no sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26)
Right. And then I was like, well, I can't generate sales without content. But I was making salespeople develop the content, and it wasn't very good. And then I was having marketing people develop content, but their heads were so in the clouds. And I had technology products, and I really needed my developers to write content. So then I started getting my team to write content, and then they just like to write code. They're not really good at writing content. All that being said, I still made money. Yeah. Well, hey, I hope it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58)
Yeah. I just constantly push content either out of my mind or as a task to someone else who shouldn't be making content. And then who would have thought a decade later, I'd end up being like, content's good. And we have a team that makes content.

(Jacob at 00:30:14)
Yeah, really. It's, I don't know, it's a shifting space for sure. I think, I think though it plays into, you know, and this is sort of my marketing bias background. I think it plays into the changing landscape of nobody really, I don't know, like, there's always going to be a place for direct sort of outbound sort of targeted sales, but people prefer to absorb and consume information at their own pace and get drawn in by that. You know? So I think that plays a huge part, especially if you're talking about a product. People, or at least maybe it's just me, but I'm not a huge fan when I try to learn more about a product and I get 20 million pop ups that are trying to command my attention versus just getting to explore and consume that information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05)
You gotta be chill, man. You gotta — it's like any relationship, you know? You kinda have to see the person, be like, oh, yeah. That's so and so. And it's like, alright. Cool. They're over there. And then you see them a couple more times and you talk to them and then you develop a relationship. If somebody ran up to you, it's like, I want to be your friend, you'd be like, oh man, this is a problem.

(Jacob at 00:31:27)
Yeah. You'd be like, definitely not what should happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31)
Yeah. So you just have to consistently be there and raise your hand. Hey. This is what I do. You know, this is what's going on. And then that's kinda what you're doing with Stord, right? You every single day, you're like, we're Stord. This is what we do. This is what's going on. We're experts. Like, if you need us, we're here.

(Jacob at 00:31:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, I think also with that, just being sort of transparent in a way in — I think what you mentioned of just owning that, hey, we know there's a problem here, and we're working to fix it. And just like this is how we're understanding the problem. This is X, Y, Z of how we're coming to this solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11)
Yeah. That way they can read it and be like this person gets it, right?

(Jacob at 00:32:14)
Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16)
We have a question from the livestream.

(Jacob at 00:32:19)
Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19)
About this?

(Jacob at 00:32:20)
Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:22)
Ivan asked, in the tech aspect, which was the biggest challenge in order to fusion the physical warehouse's daily work with a user remote interaction in the platform?

(Jacob at 00:32:35)
Wow, that's a good question. Yeah. No, I mean, one of our investors, he always likes to say that we're, you know, we're moving things in blocks with bits, you know, we're trying to control the real world through all these different bits that we're really just moving around on the screen. So, I mean, for us, in our case, it was a bunch of different key features that we came to realize over this manual process. So one of the things that we thought was really important as we set out to build this product and set out to try and improve distribution for companies was we didn't want to build a product that we thought would be useful, and we didn't want to build something that one company found useful.

(Jacob at 00:33:34)
So, what we did is — and this sort of goes back to what we were talking about with, you know, whether you have too much sales or too much product and how that sort of flows together. In our case, what we did is we basically built this very, very minimal MVP product. And we went out and we sold customers, got customers, and started working with these warehouses and these customers. And pretty much, we had this product, but we pretty much did everything manually. We learned all of the existing ways that customers interacted with warehouses and ways that warehouses were moving the product inside the facilities.

(Jacob at 00:34:22) And we just started taking stock of, okay, this is the most time consuming. This is where the most errors pop up. This is where data gets lost between the customer and the facility. This is where the insight is lost. And we started chipping away at each of those things with software to basically break down both for the customer and then for the facility, how they could really optimize what they were doing.

(Jacob at 00:34:51) So in the facility case, a lot of times these facilities are independent owner operator. So basically, you have one or two owners and you have a small business running this warehouse. And most of the time, they are not necessarily tech forward. So they're just trying to run their business as best as they can. And in our case, what we're coming in and we're saying is, look, we've learned and we've taken stock of how most warehouses are running their facility and how you're running your facility.

(Jacob at 00:35:33) And we can help you in this process of, you know, say pick and pack the product, of taking the product off the truck, of these different physical pieces. And we can employ software at these key points that allow you to do less physical work overall in the sense of, in a lot of cases, warehouses are actually manually scheduling these orders. So someone in the front office is, for example, placing an appointment window for a specific dock door on a bulletin board or something. And then everyone's coming back over to check this bulletin board and then determine, you know, is the truck here? Should I go out?

(Jacob at 00:36:17) Should I bring the product in? What's going on? And I mean, this is something that, you know, we just think, being very tech focused, we just think, oh, there should be a calendar that everyone has access to that tells people when they're supposed to go to the dock, whose appointment it is, these different things. But in a lot of cases, these aren't employed. So we basically looked at the manual process first and then learned how we could leverage the software to improve or remove that process versus coming in and bringing that software outside without working first manually and trying to totally shift what they're doing, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:02) That absolutely makes sense. It's the way the best products get made, and I wish I could just convince everyone to do it this way.

(Jacob at 00:37:11) Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, it was definitely a learning curve for us anyways to really understand the complexities of these unique processes inside the warehouses. So I think if we tried to do it any other way, we would have almost zero success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) You know, we should write a book after this called, like, Building Technology the Right and Wrong Way. Because I'm talking to all these people all day and it's unbelievable how there's everyone that's doing well or everyone that's having some success, they're all doing the same things.

(Jacob at 00:37:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) Everyone that's running out of money and not doing, like, that's having issues, and also they're all doing the same things. There's two very black and white systems, and the only way I'm seeing them is by talking to so many people.

(Jacob at 00:38:11) Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's really interesting when you look at, you know, when you zoom out at a forest, every tree looks the same. Right?

(Jacob at 00:38:20) But when you zoom in, all the ones that are the tallest and able to capture the most light have the exact same features, exact same criteria. And I think that's definitely the case with business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:32) I'm gonna use that. I like that. So how did you financially survive? What was the situation like when you were going around and learning and trying to figure it out? Like, what was the situation that you had that allowed you the time to go and explore and interact with these warehouses and understand their business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:56) How did that come about?

(Jacob at 00:38:58) Yeah. No, that's a good question. So basically, what we did is we've operated with revenue for pretty much the entire length of the business. So we didn't, you know, in this learning process, obviously, there was a lot of unique processes that we had to learn and a lot of things that we could optimize with software.

(Jacob at 00:39:24) But that doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't take revenue for optimizing them manually. So when we went out and we did all of this manually initially, and learned all of these different processes, we still charged for it. Obviously, we couldn't charge for the value that our software is bringing now, but we were able to charge to bring revenue in the door and start growing the business that way. And then at the same time, you know, we did the accelerator, took a small amount of accelerator funding. We've raised investment following that.

(Jacob at 00:40:03) And we're actually in the midst of a fundraise right now for our seed round.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) Nice. I'm finding that people, I guess we'll call them tech entrepreneurs or something. Like a general, like a small trend, micro trend that I'm seeing is that they tend to be scared to go out and talk to clients and get clients on board with what they're doing and to help be a pillar client as they build their product. They tend to be more scared to do that, but they don't seem to be shy at all for going and asking investors for their money. They're going to 20 meetings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) They'll go to 20 investor meetings and say, we want $200,000 for 0.02%. We're gonna be a unicorn. But they haven't, they say that, but they won't just go to 10 warehouses and say, hey, we're trying to solve this problem. This is the idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:53) We want money for X or consulting or however you did it. Right? And this is where we're going, and then this is the process of how we get there, and then just going around over and over and over and figuring out who's in. Right?

(Jacob at 00:41:06) Yeah, it's definitely a really strange thing, I think, that you see sometimes. And I think in some ways, it's this sad situation where I think it's great that startups and entrepreneurship and especially tech startups are, you know, the new trendy thing. Everyone, like, nowadays, you know, tech, you have these large scale tech founders that are famous just because they're simply the founders of some sort of tech company, which I think is a very unique thing that never really was the case before. And so I think because of that, you know, everyone sees these huge unicorn successes.

(Jacob at 00:41:54) They see these famous tech founders and they want a piece of that. But I think the interesting thing is that there's so many startups now that are in some ways diluting themselves in believing that they're truly changing an industry or creating this 10x value where they're really only doing a small step change that prevents them from seeing that because they're so focused in talking to their investors and playing the startup game versus talking to real users and real customers and seeing, hey, maybe this isn't the exact solution that's needed in the marketplace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) Yeah. We've trained a whole generation on it's good to go through rounds of funding.

(Jacob at 00:42:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) Like, I'm in round C or D or I've got this for that or whatever. They'll congratulate each other. It's like, bro, you just gave up part of your business for money because the market didn't give you enough money to grow your business.

(Jacob at 00:42:58) Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:00) It's not glamorous. It's something that you do out of necessity. It's not something that should, cheerleaders should be happening.

(Jacob at 00:43:07) Yeah. Well, and, you know, I think VCs to some extent, and I think there's starting to be this realization that, hey, you know, we can't keep funding this financial arbitrage of the next person to, like, the early people, early investors to get in, they do alright because they push them to raise more money that allows them to get out through selling their ownership in the next fundraising or whatnot. And, like, this never ending liquidity process of just financially propping up the valuation. And I think people are starting to wake up to that and realize, you know, the point is not so much how valuable the company is. The point is how much value the company is creating.

(Jacob at 00:44:00) And I think that's starting to change, but I think it's definitely a slow process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) Preach it, Jacob.

(Jacob at 00:44:07) Come on. I'm trying to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:10) Yeah. Dude, get up on that stage. I was on LinkedIn and I saw someone, some analyst article analyzing this, that, and the other financials, the report, and everyone was like, oh, great report. I put a comment on there. I said, let's see the report that shows what value the company actually brings to the market.

(Jacob at 00:44:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:27) Where's that report? Like, I wanna see the human report. I wanna see Amazon allows you to one click buy stuff.

(Jacob at 00:44:35) Just use your voice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's those are the metrics to which companies should be judged, the value they bring to a market because currency is simply a way to exchange value. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:48) It's a medium to exchange value. And people will, it's kind of like the past. You're analyzing history when you're looking at the numbers. Right? You could lose all the special people and tomorrow stop bringing the whole market value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:03) Right? But, yeah, all your numbers will say you're gonna keep going up.

(Jacob at 00:45:07) Yeah. Right? Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) So and you made a great point. Like, the guy that did Sun Microsystems, I just pulled that out of my head. And like the 1980s, the guy who made like a microchip and, you know, whatever, made millions and millions of dollars. No 13 year old kid was like, oh, I wanna be Serp August 3 or something like that. Nobody wanted that person. The kids did not wanna be that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) And everyone's like, I wanna be Zuckerberg.

(Jacob at 00:45:33) Yeah. Exactly. Or, you know, oh, Snapchat blew up. I wanna be Evan Spiegel. Or, for example, you see, like, this is, you know, still the tech space, but obviously a lot more hardware.

(Jacob at 00:45:45) But Elon Musk with his companies, they've got such a celebrity presence now that I think it's shifting people's desires, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:57) Yeah. And I actually like the perspective that people want to be Elon Musk in the sense of bringing good products into the world that actually change life and improve it for everyone. I like that. I don't like that. I don't believe that that's most people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) I think they just want the money.

(Jacob at 00:46:19) Yeah. Yeah. The money or the fame or the glory. You know?

(Jacob at 00:46:24) Yeah. Yeah. And I think the struggle as well is, I mean, the thing that I think is impressive amongst many things about, for example, Elon Musk, is that he is willing to be open sometimes with the fact that what he's doing is extremely hard. And, I mean, you look at different factors of his life and you consider, you know, some of the things, some of the decisions he's had to make around building his companies have taken an effect on his personal life or, you know, different things that he could have done. And when you consider all of these negative factors that someone has to also put on their shoulders to get the celebrity status and the money and everything else, I think it would send a lot more people in the other direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) Have you read his life story?

(Jacob at 00:47:17) I've only read part of his bio so far. I'm working my way through it, but it's pretty crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:22) If you audible it, it's way easier.

(Jacob at 00:47:24) Oh, yeah? Man, I

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:25) Oh, yeah. It will let

(Jacob at 00:47:26) I don't know. I've been trying to get on that, get on that bandwagon, but I struggle. I just really love being able to hold a physical book. And I know that's such a guilty pleasure, but there's just, I think there's a difference in terms of how I remember things when I'm reading it physically versus just hearing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:48) Yeah. So it's called the forgetting curve, and it, based on how you consume the content, determines how you'll remember it, and it's actually a curve that'll show you. So if you go read a book and it's this many pages and this long, then you'll remember X amount over time and based on the type of media and then how you consume it, how long it is determines how much of it you'll remember. But everybody's different. That's the thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:11) So you like your reading because it's sticking with you. For me, audio sticks with me. If I read something, it doesn't.

(Jacob at 00:48:20) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's always an interesting thing. And that, you know, that plays into how someone learns something, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:27) Yeah. That's, it's so important. And we don't even need to get into the whole how the school system's entirely backwards. But, yeah, for me

(Jacob at 00:48:34) We could go into that all day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:38) Yeah. It's audio for me, man. And so the fact that Audible exists, I'm extraordinarily grateful that I live in a time right now where one of the leading ways of media is the one that I learn best with.

(Jacob at 00:48:52) Yeah. Well, hey. There's more value in the market for Amazon. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Right. So how much code are you writing? Are you the only developer there? What language are you partial to? Get some developer stuff.

(Jacob at 00:49:05) Yeah. So I'm not the only developer. We have a small development team, pretty rapidly growing. We've got a million job openings as we're pretty quickly expanding. But I write code. I write code. I wouldn't say every day, though I try to, you know, I try to stay fairly deeply involved beyond just the high level product, because I do think there's a transition period that everyone has to go through from sort of that early hacker type CTO to, you know, a development lead to managing to overall just high level interacting with these different businesses. And so I think we're still transitioning.

(Jacob at 00:49:55) And so I think there's still some inner workings that I need to be aware of, which you can only be so aware of if you're not writing code. Right. So I write code, you know, every other day, weekly type thing. And we were built in Ruby on Rails. Yay.

(Jacob at 00:50:17) Yeah. It's been great for us in terms of being able to rapidly prototype. And then once we get past the prototyping, actually build a real structure and real base behind it. So it's been really great for us going forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:33) Yeah. We had Ryan Singer on the show. He's one of the leads with DHH and Jason Fried over at Basecamp.

(Jacob at 00:50:39) Oh, yeah. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:41) Yeah. Yeah. He's pretty cool, dude. So do you guys have your own APIs that companies are integrating with, or do you just provide the software right now?

(Jacob at 00:50:51) Yeah. So we provide the, so basically the way a lot of our customers and our facilities, our vendors interact with us is they're basically using just our software, you know, web based in the browser, interacting in the warehouse. We have some other different methods of interacting via the phone, so on and so forth because they're scanning product and whatnot. But in most cases, they're interacting through our software. We do have different APIs that we're interacting with, and we are rolling out our initial API to some different select companies to play around with and better understand.

(Jacob at 00:51:39) But primarily they're interacting through our software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:43) Now when you, I'm kind of taking a poll here. Right? I'm asking a couple different people this question right here. What I'm looking for in an API, let's say for like natural language processing, maybe I was doing a project that involved that. Right?

(Jacob at 00:51:57) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) What I would do is I would kind of search around for what I want, look at the two or three options, see which one has the best documentation, the most resources, like looks really alive, you know? Like looks like there's stuff happening, has a good team, all that stuff. And then I kind of make my decision. If, like, three of them all solve the problem, then I will make the decision based on how well their documentation is, how much resources, how alive they are. Do you do the same thing?

(Jacob at 00:52:24) When we're, when

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:26) When you as a developer are looking to just integrate an API, like forget STORD for a second, just in general when you're looking to integrate an API.

(Jacob at 00:52:36) Oh, definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:37) How do you make that decision process?

(Jacob at 00:52:39) Definitely, it's a huge part of it. And I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus, but a huge part of that, even for STORD as we're considering some of these different factors, obviously we don't have as much choice with when we're working with different companies and different things with STORD. But as a personal developer, I think if an API doesn't have good documentation or doesn't have people actively using it who could act as that documentation, I mean, it's a hard decision to even try to remotely use it because then you're basically just shooting in the dark trying to rebuild the API in your head from scratch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:26) Right.

(Jacob at 00:53:26) It just doesn't make any sense, doesn't save anyone any time. So I mean, in our case for STORD, we see this all the time where we work with some different APIs and some of them will have great documentation, have some different people using them, and we can, our development team can fly through that in practically a day almost. Versus in other cases, we're working with some different APIs that, believe it or not, have zero documentation out there to help. And so we have to really invest a significant amount of time just trying to literally just troubleshoot back and forth with this API. So that's a huge, huge thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:15) Yeah, because I was talking to this guy, super brilliant guy, right? And we were talking about natural language processing and all this stuff. And they have a big team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:25) They're doing great things. I actually have experience building something in the world that they're in, so I knew some of the domain specific stuff that they deal with. And so excited, so pumped. And then I pop open the browser to go to their site and click on the docs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:44) And it's like there's like one page. It looked like it was put up overnight, and then there was like one example of how to use it. And I'm like, dude, nobody knows. Like you're in it, so you understand what you do. You guys all eat, sleep, and breathe it. Your whole engineering team is all about it all the time. You're rocking and rolling in your offices. But when a developer that has this problem comes to your site, they're like nope.

(Jacob at 00:55:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:09) And they move on.

(Jacob at 00:55:11) Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's the toughest thing both for APIs to other developers and then even just for general software use to your end customer. I think the part that so many companies overlook is literally the documentation and the walkthroughs and the help. Those are some of your key features because if nobody knows how to use it, there's no point in it even existing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:39) I've been introduced to more APIs and softwares, little widgets and things like that that I would integrate with by just scanning around through someone's guide that they wrote about it. Like, oh, this is real pain and it took me twenty hours to figure out. Here's a guide on how to do it. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. Yeah. Oh, wow, that's useful. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:59) That is, they could do that? We didn't even know.

(Jacob at 00:56:02) Yeah. Saves me twenty hours, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:05) Right? Yeah, thank you, sir. Yeah, that's. And then it's like, and then I feel like such a jerk because it's like there's this little button that says coffee for $2. I'm like, nah.

(Jacob at 00:56:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:15) You know you've skimmed past it too. Yeah, like I feel bad. I do feel bad, but it happens.

(Jacob at 00:56:21) Yeah, you know? Yeah, it's tough. It's one of those weird phenomenons, I think, on the Internet is like, especially as you see some of these different publishing companies and different content providers throwing up these paywalls of, you know, if you're a subscriber you get XYZ or these other things.

(Jacob at 00:56:43) And like the majority's natural reaction is, alright, ad blocker it is, you know, scam it. And it's such a weird phenomenon, but yet we'll pay, I don't know, however much, I don't even know how much Amazon Prime is, but monthly for Amazon Prime, even if we don't use it an entire month. You know, it's a weird—

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:04) It's because it's value.

(Jacob at 00:57:06) That's true. And maybe that gets back to the overall value to the end consumer, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:11) See, this is what happens. The market is changing and so now content has become this requirement that you must have that you can't really charge for to your viewer of the content. So you have to be in a space where you have a product and then you're creating content around the product, and then you're also creating content in the space. That way like if STORD was creating content around things in the warehouse world, then the warehouse people are going to be reading it because it's their world and they're going to see that STORD produced it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:47) Right? So I'm kind of a fan of Gary Vee's whole thing now where every company needs to act like a media company.

(Jacob at 00:57:54) Yeah. Yeah. No, I do think, especially if you have a product, you have to be putting out so much content even just around the product itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:04) So I want to wrap it up with, did you watch the SpaceX launch?

(Jacob at 00:58:08) Yes. That was incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:10) Dude, I was so excited. I was just, if I could do a physical backflip, that would have been a moment where I pulled that out. I can't though.

(Jacob at 00:58:18) Oh, man. Yeah, I almost did one in the office. I was pretty close.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:23) Nice. So if Elon Musk called you up, invited you over, he's got a time machine, you're going to jump back, give yourself some advice from ten years ago, what are you going to say?

(Jacob at 00:58:34) Whew. That's a tough one. I would say spend the most time learning. As a business, spend the most time learning your customers, and personally, just spend the most time you can learning every little piece of information because at the end of the day, it all connects back together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:57) Great advice. Your past self says thank you, by the way.

(Jacob at 00:59:01) Yeah. Well, hopefully he can make better use of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:05) Well, he clearly has because we're here talking. Forbes 30 under 30, STORD, you're doing it right. All that happened. The loop's been closed. Congratulations, my friend.

(Jacob at 00:59:13) Well, I appreciate it. I'm glad to, you know, glad to be here getting to talk to you and learn from all of the different people you've had on board. So it's been amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:28) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.