How SemiCab CEO Ajesh Kapoor grew SemiCab to $3.5M revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ajesh kapoor he believes there's a better or better ways to do things he rejects the status quo is always going to learn more so we continue to improve each day numbers are constantly on his mind today he's building semicap.com to make transportation a competitive advantage are you ready to take it to the top excited to do it nathan okay so who's paying for semicab right now who are your customers so customers are large enterprises like staples and pepsico uh colgate hp uh some of the smaller mid-sized companies that are always looking to move goods in a truckload full truckload when you see those large trucks out there they're moving goods and they're not doing it very efficiently so we are building this marketplace to uh make them much more efficient than they are today so let's talk about the marketplace how many people that own a truck do you have on your platform that's a good question it's a very fragmented market uh we we have uh an industry that is dominated by these numbers where people talk about bringing in uh 10 000 thousand hundred thousand a million trucking companies on the platform the fact of the matter is uh u.s market is dominated by small carriers and owner operators close to somewhere around six hundred thousand legal entities that are operating trucks we try to be very targeted in how we bring in partners into the ecosystem so we have about 1200 carriers but we try to create a very long-term relationship with them so we are not just addressing the shippers who are paying for transportation but these guys that we take we take good care of and build uh a more predictable revenue stream for them so they are taking advantage of the marketplace and over your entire company lifespan how many shippers who pay for transportation have paid at least a dollar through your platform so we again uh over on that side also we try to bring in a small number of shippers that we want to create a core with and once we have built the core up to a reasonable size that's when we start attracting the smaller and mid-sized shippers so we when we bring in a a large shipper uh there's this large enterprise we don't really have uh a good sense in the market of what kind of numbers they represent so a large beverage company may spend somewhere around a billion dollars a year just on the truckload part of it moving goods no i get that education but how many do you have that have paid at least a dollar through your whole life lifetime yeah we we started uh bringing on customers at the end of 2020 and we have eight customers uh that we have brought on during this time okay got it so 20 now when did you launch 2020 is when you got your trucker but when did you launch the business we launched the business in 2018 we wanted to build out the platform we wanted to the first time we were introducing this kind of technology the predictive optimization technology so we tested that out over a very very large uh data set before we actually launched and went to the market and help us understand velocity today let's just look at january of 2022 what's the total project value that went through your platform in those 30 days yeah so that that has been a pretty crazy growth for us so when we talk about april last year april of 2021 right in the middle of covid when we are acquiring these customers and moving goods we started with let's say uh five to ten loads a week what's the dollar value of that oh yeah it's so uh if you analyzed it it would be 400 000 when we when we look at uh january that we just finished oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in 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over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview uh we were somewhere in the in excess of 11 million analyzed right so a good 25 to 30 x growth during this period and how many loads is that through your platform in january 2022 that represents 11 million in project value yeah about 100 loads a week is what we do so about 400 total yep okay so so these are expensive right if we take 11 million in project value divided by 400 total loads these are 27 500 per truck on average like per per load what 2700 not 27 000 well if we take 11 million divided by that's the annualized that's the annualized number nathan okay got it so again the question was just in january how many did you do so you did about a million in january across 400 loads that's right okay got it so yeah i see what you're saying now so it's about 2 700. and what's the average use case are they shipping from ship driving from chicago to new york city or from san francisco to washington dc yeah there's not not a typical load for us we we are moving goods uh all the way from so southern california is big right all the stuff that is coming in on those ports it's going across the country so coming in from southern cal into dallas into the northeast into chicago into atlanta and then you are moving goods between northeast and the midwest that's a big volume everything from between texas atlanta in the southeast going up into uh the midwest and the northeast those are some of the busier lanes for us and then we do a little bit of stuff in the rockies where uh of course you get into all kinds of squirrely stuff as the snow snow starts coming down as heavy and shutting down highways when it does that this is fascinating okay so just to summarize the marketplace as it stands today has about 1200 people that drive trucks on it and you match them up with shippers who pay for transportation where you have eight big clients right now total right now your run rate you know they did about a million bucks in total project value across those eight shippers in january of the 400 loads that were processed how many truck owners the 1200 on your platform facilitated one of those 400 payments or 400 shipments so out of the 1200 that have joined the platform we have actively used 700 during our lifetime till this point so what you and actively use means you pay them at least a dollar you pay them at least a few thousand dollars yes okay so so yes but what happened to the other 500 you got you did all the work to get them on the platform and you haven't been able to get them any work yet yeah every single time so there are a whole lot of things that we go through so we go through a carrier betting period where we want to make sure that the customers are receiving the best quality service that they can and so you go through that period you're watching the carriers and then some of the carriers don't qualify they join the network they join the platform but they don't get through the qualification process that we have to bring them in and give them a load right what's the number one reason people don't make it through what's the actual reason there is uh there's a whole lot of uh historical data that we want to go through we want to make sure that the insurance requirements are met the safety requirements are met so we allow the...