This Next Billion Dollar Startup Is Helping Truckers Get Paid Faster | Forbes

think about the the psychology of a person who decides to be a truck driver there's something about the freedom of driving a truck around the country right so that person is already wired to be kind of like an entrepreneur someone who loves them and creates this Freedom Cloud trucks which is based in San Francisco helps truckers especially smaller owner operators to manage their operations four Cloud trucks started a truck driver would go on something called a Load Board they would find a job that they want to take and then they would call a broker manually right so actually call this broker and negotiate with this broker to figure out uh what the right price is that that they should book this load for and you you can imagine that in this negotiation the driver is at a disadvantage they're on the road they are not in front of the computer so they don't really have the data to know what's going on in the market in real time with Cloud trucks not only are they searching multiple sources at once so you don't need to go you know search by search by search and these different platforms you have one platform where you're doing this search but we also tell you hey in this current time here is what we we believe is a fair market price for this load so you're negotiating with confidence we had started cloudtracks in 2019 prior to Cloud trucks I'd worked with Savannah and Scotty and that was my first exposure to the trucking industry and learning some of these problems that truck drivers faced and we had spoken with local carriers and learned some of the pain points that they face in to us we knew that there were these were really tangible problems that we could use technology to solve so one piece of it is the search side of it making sure that all of this is integrated and aggregated and another piece of it is something we call the schedule Optimizer where we're recommending these jobs that they should take to maximize their revenue we do similar things as well with other parts of the problem so with cash flow for example we've built something called a CT cache where we're able to pay these drivers instantly after they complete a job as opposed to having them wait for 30 days or 45 days to get paid and recently we launched a CT credit where we're actually provide writing a credit card to the truck drivers that work with us as well Joanna grew up in Nigeria where his parents had a soap Factory after he moved to the U.S he worked at zenefits an open door then he found itself driving car startup Scotty labs in 2019 he sold Scotty to doordash I come from a family in Nigeria that's entrepreneurial and my my parents own a manufacturing business back there and I worked there for a year actually before I moved out to the states for college 15 years ago or so I've always been interested and attracted to very traditional Industries and Manufacturing and trucking are very closely tied but before I started Cloud trucks I started a company called Scotty Labs where we were building autonomous driving technology for the trucking industry so I was spending a lot of time talking to truck drivers understanding their pain points and over over the time running that company I ran it for about three years before it was acquired I came to learn that a lot of truck drivers wanted to be entrepreneurs I think what we learned is that um a lot of a lot of uh truck drivers the company drivers wanted the owner operators because they want to determine where they get to go when they get to go there when they're on the road when they're at home with their families right and a lot of the entrepreneurs just need more help to be able to manage their business more profitably so the impact that we're seeing is if if we do our jobs right and we continue to build out the very best software to make it very easy to operate a trucking business the owner operators that exist today who are primarily the people that we work with will be more and more successful we have EI products that allow drivers to really have Data Insights on how their their business is performing to get a picture of what's going well how can they improve and how are they tracking against their financial goals and then along with this we have our schedule Optimizer which just makes it easy uh which makes it easy for drivers to plan out Revenue maximizing schedules over periods of time so instead of searching for independent jobs or searching uh day in day out they can put in their preferences and we will generate a revenue maximizing schedule for them with 142 million in Venture funding Cloud trucks hopes to tap into the nation's network of 3.4 million truck drivers they're large Trucking communities on Facebook they're large large Trucking communities in every single state that you go to and just going out and talking to people and really hearing from them it's pretty obvious that they want to be entrepreneurs because they want to earn their time right they want to determine when they're going cross-country and when they're spending time at home I'm not saying that every single truck driver wants to be an entrepreneur but certainly it's something that's that's a key part of the trucking industry so we're we're constantly listening to feedback to really understand the pain points our drivers are facing and this is feedback across multiple channels so our social media channels as well as feedback we hear from conversation with our sales team and feedback they submit directly from the app and for example a recent piece of feedback that was acted on was actually drivers preferred to submit preferences in terms of regions as opposed to having to like specifically submit specific like states or cities and that was like what we had thought of as an engineering team and so we kind of quickly acted on this feedback and built a region-based search and region-based preferences and were able to kind of ship this and so this is this really embodies a spirit of customer feedback of customer focus and continuing continuing to iterate and build uh towards solving the problems our drivers are facing

Channel: Forbes

Views: 15,137

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, Truckers, Trucking, trucker shortage, how to become a trucker, digital freight, supply chain, supply chain issues, Worker shortage, fintech, CT Cash, payments, Next billion dollar startups, the biggest startups, biggest technology firms, US Tech Firms, Black-Led, Black-Founded, Tobenna Arodiogbu, George Ezenna, CloudTrucks, Nigeria, Nigerian Entrepreneurs

Id: 663OuJQEdn8

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023