Accelerating WorkHound Week 2

5 min readJun 22, 2015

Building communication channels and the pains of legal docs

Quick Overview:

At WorkHound, we’re tackling a big issue in the trucking industry: the 97% driver turnover rate. We’re building a platform to allow drivers to share feedback with their companies. Companies then receive the aggregated feedback to improve the driver experience.

This is our weekly post highlighting our learnings and actions each week in the Straight Shot accelerator out of Omaha.

Week 2

The glory of being an accelerator team is evolving to the grit of building a viable company in 12 weeks. The rah-rah of week one gave way to the reality of week two: we have a shit ton of work left to do. Here’s a peek into week two:

Communication

We may be coming into this accelerator the most conceptual team, but continuous communication remains a strong rallying point for us.

We’ve built out a few different channels of communication to ensure we remain relevant, get support from brilliant minds in our circles and engage our community (professional drivers and carriers).

Here are our current channels:

this weekly Medium recap that is shared to various folks online
a weekly email sent to a small group of investors, mentors, connectors and other good people with a summary, company updates and asks for help
updates through the weekly Straight Shot newsletter to the Omaha community
continuous social media content on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

We’ll aim to have a newsletter focused on trucking company execs live soon, but we received 10+ notes of support or inquiries of “how can I help” because of our outreach through these various channels. If folks don’t know what you’re up to, you don’t exist.

Pressing pause for the Hogs

Watching the final innings of Arkansas vs. Miami at the CWS

For those of you that don’t know me well, I’m from Arkansas. For those of you that know Arkansas well, we love the Razorbacks (sometimes called the Hogs). So when the Hogs made it to the College World Series (the biggest baseball tournament played in Omaha), I’d be damned if I missed their game on Monday.

So I skipped out of Monday afternoon activities at the accelerator to join Clete and Jerry Brewer of Northwest Arkansas to cheer on the Hogs.

Despite the loss, it was a great chance to experience the magic of the CWS and learn from some savvy business minds during the game. There’s something special about getting to call the Hogs in the midwest with good people around you.

Pitch until it hurts

While I was away at the game, Andrew was giving our first 6 minute pitch at the accelerator. He received great feedback from the pitch and we have John Jackovin to thank for sharing some insights on building / presenting a great pitch deck.

We’re gonna be doing a lot of pitches leading up to demo day, which would sound exhausting, except the goal is to build up the stamina / comfort level with how we present the company. It sounds a lot like training for a marathon. The more we do now, the easier it will be in the final weeks to nail an amazing pitch.

Legal paperwork sucks

The startup life is glamorized a lot, but the legal side of launching a new venture, especially one with investment is painful. I’m pretty sure the phrase “tear my eyeballs out” was used by Andrew or I at some point this week, but it’s a necessary evil to ensure we don’t sign our soul over or something like that.

Legal paperwork is built to cover our ass on all fronts and I’m grateful for that being the case. It still doesn’t change the fact that the language of these documents reads worse than Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”.

This is what reading legal documents feels like. From canterburytales.org

We’ve been fortunate to work with Fraser Stryker, an Omaha firm that has had our back through company formation and the investment of Straight Shot, but still this stuff is painful.

Pro Tip:

The one thing that makes life easier when interacting with lawyers: strongly urge the lawyers to provide a one page dummed down overview of what the heck is being signed. Bonus if you can sit down with the lawyer that can explain it in human speak. It saves hours, increases comfort levels tremendously and escalates the process.

The almighty funnel

After a week mixed with product experiments and prospect calls, we learned two things:

We need to run more experiments simulating the product experience to validate our approach and the value it brings to companies.
Companies want to see something and we need to be able to show them what will be built for them to push forward with our product (even if “showing” isn’t the exact approach that will be taken.

It’s the ultimate catch 22. We don’t want to build something companies don’t want, but we have to build something (even if it’s wrong and ugly) so that companies can visualize our approach and the vision we have with WorkHound.

There’s one funnel, but only so many resources we can pour down it at any one time. We’ll continue to evaluate the best approach in week 3. We know everyone wrestles with this and we’re eager to find the breakthrough.

Wrapping Up:

It was a heads down kind of week. We’re thrilled with our social media community growth (almost 100%+ on all fronts) and continue to learn what insights drivers will share, what companies are looking to learn and how we can fit in with all of this. The grind picks up full steam soon.