Hi guys!
I’d like to share some background of Doft starting from the idea.
I hope it will be interesting for you.
The IdeaThe idea appeared almost 2 years ago. Alia (our co-founder) has friends in Chicago, Illinois. Husband works as a truck driver. And wife is sitting at home with a child.
He works as so called ‘owner operator’. It means that he is employed truck driver of the trucking company but in fact he searches for shipment orders by himself and pay % fee to the company.
And we discovered that those kind of work requires 2 people. His wife worked at home 4-5 hours a day. She was looking for shipment orders (‘loads’ in trucking), doing paperwork, managing payments etc.
You can imagine taxi company with 1 taxi driver and 1 dispatcher - it was the same.
We saw a big opportunity. We wanted to create software product that would instantly match shippers and truck drivers, do all paperwork and finance. In fact we wanted to replace the wife of owner operator
- save her time for playing with her daughter and any home affairs.
PreparationWe were 3 founders - 2 IT guys with 15 years experience in IT area and 1 PR and Marketing professional. How to start working in trucking - absolutely new industry for us that we know nothing about.
As experiment on 1 January 2016 we acquired US Freight Broker license and started operation as old-school trucking broker. Using phone, email and fax we started matching shippers (companies that pay for cargo movement) with motor-carriers (companies that move cargo).
It was difficult and tricky at the beginning but after a while we started to move loads pretty successfully. Size of the industry and huge perspectives even more inspired us during that period.
ImplementationAt the end of the summer 2016 we decided to start creation of our own iPhone App.
First version of the product we made by ourselves without employees.
We were selected from 6000 perspective projects and invited to Y Combinator. But at that time we had working prototype not presented at AppStore and no customers at all - so we didn’t pass last interview.
At the end of 2016 we released mobile App and started to acquire first customers. At that time we started our PreSeed investment round. Talking to angel investors and VCs we discovered that many of them shared our thoughts. Almost all of them told us the same thing - that revolution in logistics is coming. Similar to revolution in taxi transportation started by Uber. And all that is heating up by self-driving cars researches.
We closed preSeed round and started to grow our customers base at the same time improving our product. Now we have Android App and actively working on web-version. Mobile App suits better for small customers like owner operators, small shippers. Web-version is needed to cover medium and large customers like motor carrier companies, brokers, big shippers.
Since we started our project we receive requests from different countries - like Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Canada, China. People are asking us to start the same kind of startup in their countries. We decided that it is too early for us to do that now. We need to take stronger position in US first. But with the help of the universal coins economy, it became possible to develop in this direction much faster. Adding the opportunity to mine our coins while you drive (when mobile App opened and ready to accept orders) we will start to grow our drivers community much and much faster.
I believe that we are in the right place at the right time. The trucking industry is very old-school but it is ready for innovations.
Thank you for reading this!
Sergey Zaturanov
CTO and Founder of Doft
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