Accelerating WorkHound Week 1

7 min readJun 16, 2015

We have 90 Days to build a company solving an urgent problem in an ignored industry.

Overview:

Welcome to WorkHound. We’re tackling one of the biggest problems in one of the most essential industries in the United States: the massive driver turnover in the trucking industry. There’s currently a 97% turnover rate in the trucking industry. That means if you’re a carrier (trucking company) with 100 trucks, you’re statistically replacing 97 drivers. Every year!

There’s a number of areas to improve in the transportation industry, but we’ve focused on the gap in communication between drivers and the carriers. Drivers often don’t have a voice on the road and we’re out to change that. Our goal is to create feedback loops between drivers and carriers with actionable insights to improve the driving experience.

Andrew and I at the Arkansas Truck Driving Championship Awards

I’ve teamed up with Andrew Kirpalani as my co-founder, a brilliant mind out of Des Moines with experience as a software engineer, product manager and a passion for solving problems that aren’t always sexy.

We’re participating in the Straight Shot accelerator out of Omaha, NE. They have a logistics focus and were willing to take a gamble on something very conceptual. They invested and we’ll work our ass off to prove them right.

Each week or so throughout the summer we’ll highlight our experience / learnings. It won’t all be glamorous, but hopefully we can help paint a picture about the commitment we signed up for.

Week 1

The clock started before Monday, but the pressure is real. We have 90 days to build a company to generate enough revenue, be attractive enough for investment or explore other career paths. The odds are stacked against us: we have limited experience in the trucking industry, we have limited capital and time is definitely not on our side. We’re eager for what’s ahead.

Setting up the Hustle House

Many folks have asked where we’re staying in Omaha, as it usually sucks to find temporary housing.

As it always does, “you can do more with friends than you can with money” holds true here.

My good friend and duck hunting buddy Rich is a retired Union Pacific employee who happens to keep a house in Omaha while he lives with his family in central Arkansas. I asked about Omaha recently and he offered to host us.

It saved us a massive headache and I’m forever grateful for the hospitality.

With Straight Shot starting Monday, Andrew and I moved into “the Hustle House” Sunday night and hastily set up for the months ahead.

Getting Familiar

The Straight Shot kick off was a bundle of nerves, mixed with tremendous pride. There’s some savvy founders we’re working around that are all trying to figure out this accelerator while proudly promoting / fighting for their companies. All in all, there’s a solid group of 5 other startups (and a corporate team).

The biggest win for us was the face-to-face introduction to our community manager: Kayla Good (Straight Shot provided interns for each team but Kayla dug in with us even before the accelerator and is a full-fledged member of our team).

Customer Development

Are we even solving a problem that drivers or carriers care about?

It’s a question that Andrew and I have asked one another a lot over the past few weeks. I even spent 3 days riding with a truck driver to understand the experience. We’ve run Startup Weekends around the country and know the process of validating problems/customers/solutions, but its another thing to bet the future of the company on assumptions.

Our good friend Shane Reiser ran a multi-day workshop on customer development, experiments, MVP (minimum viable product), startup metrics and all of the nitty gritty for us to work through early on. As the most conceptual company, we have a lot to validate.

So what did we do?

We interviewed drivers in person at truck stops
We interviewed drivers around the country on the phone
We mapped out the riskiest assumptions of our company (if you have never done this, you should)
We ran our first experiments, testing how drivers would interact with our method of collecting driver feedback

Andrew and Kayla working through WorkHound’s riskiest assumptions

Pro Tip

If you are looking to do customer discovery / development and are not sure how to find people to interview, here are a few recommendations:

Go to where your prospective customer / user is: We spent time at truck stops talking with drivers and it was an eye opening process. We were able to double down on focus of one particular subset of truckers (yes, we went hyper niche).
Use Facebook groups: Drivers are all over Facebook, especially groups. This is the case for a lot of other communities. It’s allowed us to do a lot of learning / community building quickly
Reddit: there’s a trucking sub-reddit and we use it. They tell it like it is. And we’ve had some solid interviews with folks from there.
Craigslist: Haven’t tried it yet, but we will.
Warm leads: You know when someone asks “how can I help?”, we ask them to connect us with a driver or a carrier. It usually works.

First Pitch

Straight Shot had its first public event on Thursday with 75+ mentors, investors, community members and other startup folks coming to the accelerator. And we had to give the classic one minute pitch.

Given that this was our first impression to the Omaha community (some of which could be investors in the coming months), we couldn’t screw up. Luckily we got our act together, nailed a good first elevator pitch and received solid feedback / curiosity about what we’re tackling with WorkHound.

Pro Tip:

Here are some of the key things we added in our first one minute pitch:

The problem we’re solving
Why we care to solve it / why it’s a big deal
Who we’re solving the problem for
How we’re approaching the problem (our hypothesis)
Traction (what we’ve done so far)
Our team (why we’re the ones that should be doing this)
Call to action (an ask of the crowd)

This format worked well for us and may be a valuable guide for others out there wanting to quickly articulate what you’re up to.

Arkansas Truck Driving Championships

To finish off the week, Andrew and I hustled 6 hours south to Northwest Arkansas to attend the Arkansas Truck Driving Championships (yes, it’s a real thing). It was a chance for us to dig deeper in the industry, build relationships with some brilliant minds in the industry and learn about the pageantry of the trucking.

The crowd going wild for a JB Hunt driver at the Championships

The competition featured hundreds of the best drivers out of Arkansas and consisted of a 6-stage driving skills challenge with pre-check and written exam portions as well. The event was lively with family members, friends and employees all rooting on the drivers.

Arkansas Trucking Association President Shannon Newton bringing the crowd to tears

Afterwards, we attended the “Oscars of Trucking” — the awards for the championships. It was a lively, revival-esque celebration of the backbone of trucking: the drivers. As awards were handed out, some drivers started crying while their companies hollered with pride as company drivers won.

We were able to learn a lot more about what is important to drivers and carriers at the event. We were also able to refine our messaging simply by interacting with our target audience for a weekend.

Agile for Everything

We’re testing out an agile-like workflow for all of our work efforts (even non-technical ones). We’re using Pivotal Tracker to track our progress while doing planning / retros / standups each week. We’ll keep you posted on how this goes.

Wrapping Up

We’re happy with Week 1. We learned a ton, continued to refine our approach and improve our flow as a team. I got back to Omaha late Sunday night pretty exhausted with a full week ahead. Such is the summer of hustle.

Other Updates:

Week 1 Update // Week 2 Update // Week 3 Update // Week 4 Update //
Week 5 Update // Week 6 Update // Week 7 Update// Week 8 Update//
Week 9 Update // Week 10 Update // Week 11 Update // Week 12 Update //