409: Movo: Lessons from Growing a SaaS in Tough Industries - with Jason Radisson

Jason welcome to the show hey om thanks for having me on my pleasure uh do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us no nothing nothing in particular at the moment I think I think there are are enough quotes that are that are coming out of the political cycle this time around we'll we'll we'll see I might answer that differently in a couple Weeks and moving on so tell us about moo what does the product do who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to

solve moo is mobile first platform for Frontline workers and uh the companies that employ them the problem it solves is the age-old uh 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 uh all across the company uh we work primarily with large Enterprise clients anyone from sort of upper midcap uh to the fortune 10 uh Fortune 100 so so moas 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 focused your your your kind of differentiator is you're focused on a very specific type of end user right which is Frontline workers that's Right and the other thing is is you know the the world as it is today um 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 uh you know all across the developing Rich world uh we're not really going to go back um you know

to these to these days when you could just hire your way out of everything so mobile is is trying to make the maximum productivity and Efficiency out of the workers you already have um the main areas you know I mentioned scheduling automation uh 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 uh and the platform is consistently constantly making those matches between the worker preferences and and demand and depending on the settings um you know

for the most part The workforce feels very empowered because they're getting the schedule that they want uh they're picking up the extra hours that they wanted they're getting the time off that they wanted uh and we're able to sort of power Empower uh the workforce and and Empower teams in a way that that you know we were prior to having this kind of Technology um another big area is Task and we we distribute tasks um in in real time we Have a task dispatching uh technology uh that does that so we're really about making people

as maximally effective as possible and that is such a win-win thing it lifts all boats the more productive you are the more you get paid the quicker you get promoted uh you know the more that drops to the bottom line uh for your employer great so give us a sense of the size of the business where are you in terms of Revenue number of customers Size of team we're approaching sure thing we're approaching 100 customers uh we have about uh 700,000 800,000 uh employees workers uh on the platform uh we are in the single uh

uh millions of ARR um and I would say um you know growth prospects uh certainly of of doubling and um in some of our best quarters uh We've doubled and tripled in a quarter and and you've raised just shy of $10 million that's right that's right so far 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 that's why I'm excited to tell you about lead feeder a tool that helps you cut through the data and turn

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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 moo like what's your background sure well going all the way back um I grew up uh poor as as uh the first and only child of a 16-year-old single mom uh in uh a rural part of Massachusetts a rural County in a rural area of Massachusetts literally on a dirt road um I had the experience of

working just about every kind of job and I had this great experience I think it was really privileged uh to grow up in an area of the country that really appreciated education and also for kids that were less well off um and the system uh just really helped me I you know was able to go uh and have an amazing college experience I had a lot of teachers along the way that looked out for me I was in these kind of enrichment classes and things to kind of help accelerate catch kids up and Accelerate them

I was a Fullbright scholar um which was amazing program and very sort of globally mind opening uh when I did it and uh you know that led to grad school at Harvard and I ended up uh working at McKenzie as my first job after grad school um just all of these things uh I have to say the system has has really benefited me um in the way that it's supposed to I worked very very hard I always worked uh jobs to to pay for school and uh everything else that Was going on in my life

I saw my mom's example she bootstrapped herself uh through Teachers College and uh got us ahead and got us into Better Living circumstances and you you and you were doing all kinds of jobs right short order cook HVAC technician everything possible yeah yeah tin knocking short order cooking uh I love huge breakfast uh I think are are um there there are some founder skills in there uh trying to cook a couple hundred breakfasts at The same time um you know just uh everything possible picking fruit uh doing janitorial work uh I did just about everything

and then tell us about your career you you looked at McKenzie um and Uber uh just tell us a little bit about that Journey yeah I think um I was always interested in kind of this the ability to sort of apply math and Tech to Big Business problems uh to me um you know that was uh a way to have tremendous impact and and I got A lot of uh just sort of job satisfaction and fulfillment from uh being able to help a lot of people into to really be able to help turn around companies

and and and such things and you know that led to uh a number of projects as a Mackenzie consultant but then I worked in post merger uh management of a couple of big us Industries after that so specifically telecoms the rollup of telecoms uh the uh rollup of the casino Industry um first at AT&T with telecoms at Caesars at hara's entertainment and then Caesars Entertainment and the roll uh of of casino and then in uh e-commerce uh in particular I spent a bunch of years at uh eBay uh sort of helping to automate and sort

of transition from what have been largely a curated experience to an algorithmic automated experience to compete with Amazon 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 um and that's really those were the corporate experiences I had um along the way I started some smaller engineering companies um where I saw there was an opportunity particularly sort of in the space of algorithms for hire and kind of these um you know backend technologies that could be useful to different

client sets um and then uh I don't about 12 Years or so ago um I uh was approached by Uber and I got into uh a very interesting early time in the ride sharing industry and ride sharing and um for those of you that have seen my bio I I've done a lot in food delivery as well and uh built uh 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 rollups are super valuable skills whether you apply them to

venture back Companies or whether you go into private Equity or whatever whatever case um those kind of business operation skills are are just invaluable and that's really been uh you know the stamp of my whole career has been helping companies to really Thrive when when I was researching for this interview and I I looked at what you were doing with moo and then I looked at your background with with uh Uber GM at Uber and McKenzie you know it's it's Understandable that you think oh this is somebody 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 and 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 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 to and um honestly when I read that I was like

I I want to 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 that that opened up for me let's let's get into the moo where did the idea come from like what were you doing at the time and and how did you come up with this idea um I'd say the idea the original idea came from Somewhere in the 2015 2016 uh time frame um and and you know one of the things that I would say just say generally

the way I think about the world is you know there are great Technologies out there and one of the one of one of the things entrepreneur should be doing is thinking about how to take a great technology and apply it to some place that it's not being applied to now um 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 um mobile 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 um and and talk about mobile first um you know where you know the experience fundamentally is uh you know even you know a guy running 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 uh you know a fleet of 50,000 cars I 50,000 people that are that you're directly sort of managing um 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 and that there would be all kinds of efficiencies that that would flow from that and it is you know we see with moo as we you know we're not there are similarities there are differences to how you can run the workforce at a Fortune 100 company versus how you can run it in Uber um 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 r on your team in kind of a Real-time optimized environment uh so that really was sort of the Genesis of the idea and it was bridging that Gap and I'd seen it a number of times in my career you know a lot of my early career was was B Toc 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 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 um and that was super applicable across multiple verticals um to begin with we all started like you know with sort of yield management that came out of American Airlines that came out of petroleum uh you know trading Concepts from the 70s and 80s FL kind of flowed into American airlin L flowed into the Consumer banking industry flowed into Hospitality

then flowed into Amazon eBay and the big e-commerce platform so there's just there's kind of this growing body and I view you know the problem that we're trying to solve with the Frontline worker the same way there are algorithms that were applying that have been tried and true from other other Industries so very different maybe approach to technology you know we're not out there doing deep foundational R&D on something that's never been done in the world before but more um dealing with the adaptation and the messiness of bringing a technology to a different industry so

you mentioned this idea of like going after an industry or Market where technology isn't being used you know maybe there's there's not a lot of competition in that space or you know so that's that's on one side that's good because there's an opportunity on the other side your biggest Competitor is probably the status quo like them just continuing to keep doing what they're doing 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 one did you find that and and You know how did you go about validating what kind of demand there was I I love that question I think it's a very very perceptive one and and it's absolutely the case and um you know I think I think basically there are two types of customers for a company like moo and you know for anyone that's you know attempting the same thing big systemic change with a new technology um you either have a

the customer who's in so much pain um 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 um the leading light of an industry for any any number of reasons that the industry is going to go in that direction they're trying to get ahead of it um and so you know much like some of my earlier experiences um you know I think the challenge is it's finding these right moments for the Technology it means we

don't we don't tend to work with late adopting customers um you know that is a problem for way down the road uh right now we just entirely focused on on early adopting uh customers and and their challenges okay so th 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 absolutely so we um you know and I I

had the idea for for a while um you know I got a I got a little a little tied up uh with uh some companies in in Latin America with some some important things uh you know we grew 99 taxis and and sold that is um you know kind of one of the leading exits in the Brazilian and Latin American ecosystem um and with Robie uh you know the the first few billion dollars of growth There um 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 um with the time that I had available was uh organize a few sales calls and a few pilots and uh some of of my uh buddies that we started mobo with uh and I uh you know we just we were just all hands on deck run some small pilots and particularly we're deploying moo at large conventions so CES for those of You that know the electronic space and what that shows like in Las Vegas and we're talking pre pandemic and you know with all

the challenges that they had um labor wise otherwise uh SEMA which is the aftermarket uh Auto Parts uh industry and they usually come into Las Vegas with almost a quarter million people um and just uh 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 uh 2018 2019 uh we did a few Pilots uh we cashed a few customer checks um those first customers I literally met with them all with Co 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 absolutely we'll we'll work with you on that um and that's how we got the company started and then did You have a product at the time barely barely okay a mini kind of a a mini version of uh of a V1 um I I wouldn't call it an MVP it actually did some really functional things it was like good enough uh to

get going and uh you know that was uh that was the very beginning and then in 2020 um you know I made mobile my day job as did a couple of the other guys on the team uh 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 two of March of 2020 the pandemic hit with had all the disruption of like we actually had a physical office we a physical office we had a laid people off we all

started to work you know from our dining room tables and stuff and uh the business just exploded and uh it was you know all of the craziness of of the early pandemic and uh we were very active in Minneapolis all through the social Unrest in Minneapolis 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 um and you know the rest as they say it was kind of history that um led to uh us you know having an

extremely successful seed and kind of the takeoff of our company okay I just want to get a clear about a few things so you had the idea for a while you weren't able to spend a huge amount of Time on it so you were doing some sales calls and and trying to get these Pilots up and running the before you started building this sort of basic V1 did you do any any kind of customer interviews or did you feel like you you had enough of an idea to be able to build something to show people

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 um we knew we knew the problem existed and I think the people often in our industry focus on pain points but the problem is everybody has pain points it's just which of them are they going to do anything about and so the validation process was you know I had a

two or three page uh slide deck uh I went for coffee with these early clients who were People that you know we knew we trusted we'd worked with them at Uber before Uber we we kind of knew the fabric of the city of Las Vegas in particular where we where we first got started um commercially uh 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 and then you know the nuts and bolts of how

the solution was going to work was entirely on us um what I would Say too is 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 um I also feel very confident if you can work backwards from an Optimum um and you know I'll you know to use Basil's Optimum and I don't know if this is you know still the case but it used to always uh be the case that Amazon was supposed to be the

quickest way between the buyer's intent and Actually getting the merchandise and I think in our world if you're looking at the first problem we were trying to solve during the pandemic which is hiring automation onboarding automation like get people working um if you look at the G people working problem then hiring and onboarding is the shortest path between somebody and work and so engineering's job is to get out of the way it's to engineer away and automate away all the BS around getting a job for These folks um and so we didn't know how much

of that we' be able to shrink we didn't know we'd be able to shrink hiring and onboarding to a minute or two um but we knew it would be mobile uh 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 you know just pristine mobile experience of a couple of clicks and you're hired um and that was Literally the you know kind of V1 of the product or almost V1 when it was still very um unrobust is

we were we were launching a bunch of these Pilots had you had you raised any money when you were building that V1 of the product no no none entirely bootstrapped and entirely all the early engineering all the early R&D we funded from our client receipts got it okay so you get this this basic product which you described as barely worked You you got these you were doing these sales calls and with a very simple I love the fact that you said it was 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 either be focusing on people who have a huge amount of pain or people Who are The Visionaries the people who are the early adopters but at that point you hadn't figured that out right you didn't know who those people were how to find them most of these initial customers were just through through friends and and people you knew and you know through your network

right is that how you got those first 10 customers I think it it was and it was they were our friends and they had huge amount of pay they were Our friends and they were Visionary um 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 um you know with with crazy labor challenges and you know how do you manage a Workforce that you only see once a year um you know these kinds of things um 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 um and that's early Calls um but that you know that was that was what it took and I think you know as you look you know if we' engineered the process differently um you know different products different different go to market or whatever I think you know the only difference is maybe they're not friends maybe you need an introduction of a board member maybe you know it's an alumni uh 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 four five six people in the country who are right at the top of the list for having this problem very uh extremely and so let's go talk to them how did you figure out these were the people who had the pain you said you had this list of people but H how do you figure out they have a pain that's not it's not something you

can search for on LinkedIn or you know by data so what were you doing to figure that out yeah I think I think some of it was um you know we had experienced their pain firsthand so um you know I think you know in absence of that you could you could get there through hypotheticals right um 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

um 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 uh the labor dynamics that that were there pardon me pre pandemic um 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 you're looking for industries that have just um structurally are very variable um you

know there's been a lot of focus on the labor side of Logistics in the last few years there you go I meanly average 3 p 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 so we're sort of looking for these Places that just um you know like I said personally we knew them but otherwise it would have 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 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&l owners in Mexico who are

the most ambitious the most Forward Thinking the most Visionary and go work with that um and I think both approaches are valid um 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 uh cap table Uh Syndicate members can can get you a warm intro uh and kind of starting from there I I think that's super helpful what you described there because 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 there 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 a sort of visionary the other Advantage you had was you were going into a market you focused on in Vegas week you knew that market you knew 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 going to have a you know a greater chance of Success than if you don't know the market 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 you think I this probably like 100,000 companies that I could my product could help that creates a lot of analysis paralysis

because you don't know where To start and what you did was you said okay I have a hypothesis and we're going to pick a very specific thing a very specific you know a a geography a type of Industry a type of company a type of problem and then we're going to go and test that and I think you have to get to that level of specificity to be able to test something otherwise you're just going to have this vague group of potential customers you could help but you're just never going to kind of get Any

traction very M very much so and and we really we have this very strong bias towards towards just really challenging problems 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 uh a slightly better app for doing X or Y we're really trying to solve where for our customers is usually the number one strategic problem they have or the number two strategic problem they have Okay so you you you you kind of got this business off the ground you

got these Pilots things are going well you start working on the business full-time but you also launched in January 2020 how did the pandemic play out for you because for a lot of companies it was actually a pretty good time yeah we definitely benefited um so our initial sort of lens on pain and Visionary leaders and in Las Vegas where we had sort of started commercially um branched out and you know a because of the work with Amazon branched us into all kinds of logistics and um you know the logistics operations of a large retailers

um B uh we got involved in all kinds of things food related food manufacturing food delivery um manufacturing of raw materials for food uh all of these kinds of Industries and they were you know Largely in the Midwest and I would say production in food tends to be largely in the midwest closer to Agriculture and then distribution they all have their own distribution arms also uh generally large ones uh tend to be sort of on the coast um in logistics hubs uh that we'd already started to be uh dealing with so uh it just ended

up being really synergistic the way sort of demand unfolded um you know and we got into that magic spot of the early adopter and Visionary uh 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 uh with new clients in that vertical so I would say the pandemic was um was an incredible sweet spot for us and just

you know sort of the problem we were working on the Incredible product Market fit um you know we we we never bulked up on sales people or anything like that we were able to largely um you know just uh just focus on delivering an excellent experience to ling an excellent product and and really that was what we did for the duration of the pandemic well in this early first couple of years were you doing most of the sales or or did you have somebody on your team yeah we've had um you know we had and

we've Had a few different folks doing sales we have tended towards uh the general manager model where you know we we we tend to hire people um in the core team that are good at sales and good at operations um and you know that's really served us well you know because it is it's you know you're in a small startup you're trying to manage supply and demand in real time uh it's good to have people that speak both languages um and so you know that was really in the early Days uh most of the sales

were the US and mostly were me uh although we did have uh other folks uh in some of our foreign markets in particular uh you know primarily dedicated to selling at that time so when I asked you uh before we started recording I said hey tell me more about all the different ways that you grew this business you got to the first million in ARR and often Founders will tell me things like well actually you know what we did uh we did outbound We did content marketing we did XYZ 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 was like okay we need to talk about that so tell us what that one thing was I mean if you you know people call it different things I I think it goes broadly under the term founder Le sales but uh you Know founder Le sales board sales uh 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 um or the friends of deep deep insiders and you're primarily selling to people where that trust already exists and that helps you know of course shorten the sales cycle but it also really helps with change management because 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 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 product sort of into the right workflows and help you with the change management um so we we definitely think like large Enterprise product with a lot of displacement and change management you have to go senior um and

that's just been you know what we've done and it's not I guess Homer it's not that we haven't experimented with other things but all those other things have never Moved the needle 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're using warm intros as a way to get get an introduction with somebody at a senior

level the way I've seen this play out is often if this 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 they reply back and they'll say go and talk to somebody in my organization at this level what was your experience like with with kind of going through and getting These introductions well I think you know you've got to be

you've got to be strategic it's a strategic IC conversation if you're talking to the regional president with a couple billion dollar p&l which is sort of uh RP um so it's a strategic conversation the topic has to be tip tip top of their agenda um and then you've just got to be really focused on what it is you think you can do um and you know Define that in a way that leads itself lends itself Uh to a pretty quick and easy POV or proof of value um and then off off you go and uh

so so give me give give me one example of that because I think people might listen to this may be like you said have a conversation at a strategic level maybe just give me 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 XYZ feature that lets you do this and whatever right That's not where you were starting these conversations I mean fundament Mally um you show them what you've done for a company like theirs um and you ask them if it

would be any different with them um so I you know it's it's more we more sell case studies um than uh then we sell we definitely don't sell features we sell 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 uh you know may have been trying Solutions out with the same sort of uh cast of characters different different SI firms and different other Technologies out there in the market it is really kind of stuck and

um you know you'll know some things getting into it like we're doing we've sort of come full circle and I think in particular on scheduling automation we're doing a lot Of work in hospitality companies now um and and it's fairly recent um and I would say you know if you want a commonality you know a hospitality company that's that's under some duress is is is just run very differently right there's a lot of private Equity investment in 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 um 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 year or two of the person you're about to meet you kind of already largely know 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 uh that's why I think the case study is is more effective because you can kind of point to the company across the street you know and talk about their pain uh and and use that one degree of separation to really get to a fruitful Place with the client quickly what was one thing you learned from that experience of talking to these these Executives I'm I'm assuming you didn't

have a 100% success rate uh 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 followup so what what did you learn from that experience that helped you to get better at having these Types of initial conversations that actually led to some kind of outcome whether it was at least bringing in more people to uh to talk to you guys or getting closer to a pilot or whatever that next step

was for you at the time sure so I think I think the the the dues are I always look for we always look for uh additional areas of differentiation and and our fundamental differentiation is is we are a win-win company we're we're selling Productivity uh and productivity makes workers lives better and it makes employers lives better and so that's fundamentally the differentiation um you know and those are algorithmic choices those are filters those are rules that we Implement that makes the world that way um I think it's important that if people you know Ai and

machine learning and all these fuzzy terms and you know they they EU publishing white papers about things That you can and can't do I I think you've got to you've got to make technology very real in these conversations 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 do something that nobody else can do um 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 uh sort of a named feature for them put an extra filter on put an extra Twist on the way that they do substitutions on their nursing floors you know whatever the very specific additional thing is that Would really make moo 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 pil how did you balance giving people that level of custom solution without ending up Building custom solutions for every different every customer 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 i' say mobile applications that

are heavily algorithmic is it's a relatively light lit to take something very interesting that's happening in the world and develop a unique algorithm or a unique filter for it and those are the kinds of Things we look for we look for the kinds of things that in a day or two of engineering time a week of engineering time we've done something the industry has never seen before can you give me one example just so people can yeah yeah sure so um I was just I just mentioned Healthcare a minute ago so we built we built

a an additional filter for 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 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 uh individual paired to a team as a part of that team for that particular uh procedure and um that was the kind of thing we had a

CL client discussion about it um 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 initial request and we thought hey why not this will take us a couple days to do um we had some thoughts in the team about how to develop this specific additional uh filter and allocation and you know if you've designed the product right you're sort of thinking about it in this way the product needs to be apply 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 so you basically taking these these um use cases like surgery and you were putting in 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's just you're making you're doing what's something that probably a human would have to do to figure out who's the right person the Best fit da d da whatever very much very much

and I think if you've designed your platform right um you know and I would say this just generally for a lot of Automation and AI hack need but you know these kind these kinds of systems these Smart Systems then you sort of you'll have bus business processes where a human still is going to do something but the very mundane and something very specific and something very highend requiring our higher level thinking 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 nurses in which slot is something that robots solve because once you've got a general pool and you've got General demand they just need to be on the schedule on this particular floor that's not very hard um but which particular nurse is going to go with which particular surgeon on which particular SE 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 often times you're pulling specific resources in hospitals that are anyway constrained out of pools where they

would be needed otherwise and that's the little additional bit of engineering that you need to be able to accommodate a feature like that um 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 um I think you know there are lots of examples um I'm old enough you know to have been a part of sort of

e-commerce and algorithmic approaches there and you know uh Amazon forever would talk about uh how they had sort of five or 600 homepage strategies for optimizing the homepage and those Would all compete with each other and you know what's a strategy it's some some creative it's probably some copy it's some business logic uh you know there might be a couple 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 R relevance uh run by a buddy of mine Dave

Selinger who came out of Amazon who basically took that Productized it and then sold it to Big retailers and I think the process you know kind of similar and throughout Rich relevance you know they would come out in quarter after quarter they would report that they had another 50 strategies they had another 100 strategies uh in moovo we have we don't we're not selling algorithms uh you know per se in that way but uh but these kind of customizations Labor Strategies automated Labor Strategies as 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 um you know because we we are we're looking for how to beat the competition in terms of differentiation anyway 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 going to be a long time before your Erp is going to do that it's going to be a long time before your your

workday does that uh those are the kinds of things where we think we can put years ahead of our competition uh with a couple days of engineering yeah 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're you're a more Nimble that you can you can basically adapt to These types of needs much faster um than some of these bigger players 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 um and I think in our particular case it's sort of you know the difference between Instagram or the difference between Tik Tok and the difference between Facebook trying to do mobile um 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 um in the totality of the experience in the

nimbleness and the way you solve things uh you know the kinds of of user experiences that you put out into the market are just going to be so vastly different and I think for us you know it was just so obvious that if you're going to work with front online workers it's Got to be the mobile phone it's not going to be smart glasses uh it's not going to be PCS or laptops or or even tablets it's got to be the mobile phone as the way that you really Drive technology into this place in the

economy that hasn't had it great we should wrap up otherwise we're just going to keep talking for for a long time um let's let's uh 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 I think um you know for for a kid that that was very bootstrapped um you know a mentor of mine mentioned early on in my career to think about Job transitions role transitions as basically a train and the metaphor being that before making

a decision about that new internal role to take or whether to go return to Head Hunters 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 you know you have the choice of where you get off but it's going to be constrained it sets up new constraints it brings you new places but sets up new constraints and that's helped me a lot just to think about um you know in starting from where I

started from I was really trying to accelerate accelerate for the first 20 years of my career um I felt like I had A lot a lot of make ground to make up I had a lot academically to make up I had a lot just relationship wise I didn't know anybody I came from the backwoods you know and um I think just any any help in terms of career guidance but particularly that one helped me a ton I like that what book would you recommend to our audience and why well I um have just recently finished

uh reading the Dutch house I think probably years behind everybody else because I think it Came out in the pandemic uh by Ann patchet um what I pr so there's a business lesson in there there's a Real Estate Mogul who's extremely successful um comes from a little bit of a background like mine there's kind of uh some interesting twists and turns and basically this particular house ends up being uh sort of uh the albatross and uh you know what what it eventually uh really changes his fortunes um what I Particularly loved about the book that

aside and the business aspects and leaders sh learnings aside uh was that I mostly listened to it and it was narrated by Tom hankes who I thought did an amazing job narrating that book cool I haven't had that recommendation before so you're a first um what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder I think uh successful Founders are just uh are just truffle hounds um I think you have you Have got to just keep keep keep keep added and keep looking um 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 um you know there are moments where you get to do that um and then there are just those moments where things aren't working you're running experiments none of them are panning out um and you really just have to put your nose down and uh keep keep looking until You find what it is um you know that's going to be that next client or that that product feature that you've been missing in a particular Market um I think you know

the other thing is just the the the longevity of everything we talk about and we focus on and I think it comes from VCS and family offices and their sort of cycles of capital and oh my God it's a good year this year it's a bad year this year whatever um the reality is it takes 5 10 years to put Together a good company um and a lot of that time is really challenging um it'll be really lonely and uh you just have to be somebody that sticks with it what's your favorite personal productivity tool

or habit my favorite personal productivity I think so much of our careers is writing and still and yes I wish shat GPT could read my mind and write for me um but um 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 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 um and avoid uh sort of being too responsive or reactive is the word I'm looking for in email communication I like that email clients should have that algorithmic feature built in right that would make it easier

or people have worked with like these text editors that are you know just a blank sheet of P what whatever whatever your you know text editor of choice but Making sure that you're essentially offline while you write um your correspondence for the day what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time oh my God I um you know I I I'm a big Outdoorsman I love fishing and hunting um I would love to see essentially uh a gen AI for finding a hunting or fishing spot um there's great

you know there's there's early gist uh uh gen AI out there um there were great kind of mapping Softwares for hunters and fishermen I'd love to combine the two and be able to uh you know get a list of three recommendations that exactly meet my criteria I think my father-in-law would love that it saves so much time you know because ultimately fish finder or not or scouting or not other ultimately you're out there it's part of it to be out there Scouting Around but uh I'd love as a Founder as a and a busy parent

uh I'd love to be able cut my scouting time uh Dramatically what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know well I I think uh family heritage we talked a lot about um you know the circumstances I grew up in um we're descendants in my family of uh of of voyagers of the original Rison who was uh you know one of these woodsmen uh exploring uh the outer reaches in Canada um which is which is kind of fun and the history is all a lot of fun and uh you know the

different experiences and I'm I'm really kind of fascinated by this whole kind of early colonial period uh 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 um but fascinating period of history and finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work and you may have already answered that yeah I think so and and I think in Particular family uh four kids and uh you know uh I think my wife and I and just our

home life uh is is just wonderful it's it's it's um you know I have to pinch myself I feel so fortunate to have that kind of family life and I think um it's a big part of what has motivated me also throughout my life particularly growing up um you can feel very alone when you grow up in kind of the way that I did so um it's it's nice to have come full circle and to be Surrounded by loved ones I love that that's a that is full circle awesome Jason thank you so much for

joining me it's been a pleasure uh talking about your story and and uh how you've built moo so far uh if people want to check out moo they can go to Moo that's mov O.co not.com uh and if folks want to get in touch with you what's the best way for them to do that yeah via the website or I'm on LinkedIn uh Jason D Rison on LinkedIn as well awesome it's been a pleasure thank you so much and uh I wish you and the team the best of success thanks so much Elmer I really

enjoyed being on the show my pleasure cheers