DHL Deal Announcement
Today I am extremely happy to announce that world’s largest logistics provider, DHL, has officially signed a contract to deploy Geospago across 17 countries for their freight forwarding business.
This is a huge achievement for any company at this early stage (pre-seed). DHL did not happen overnight. It is the result of 3 years of relentless hard work, determination, and a wide variety of customers that have helped shape a product mature enough to attract the world’s leader in logistic. DHL is now not just a client, but a champion of our product.
The Geospago journey started with a walk after lunch with my co-founder Jeff. We started talking about the state of the GIS industry, and lamented over how this industry was plagued with legacy systems which have made wide scale adoption to be non-existent. In this day and age where mobility was changing everything, GIS was still stuck in the stone age. We fist pumped and decided to change that.
The company we used to work for had always encouraged us to think outside the box, so we thought, this is a out of the box idea, why not build a prototype and present it to our CEO? See, both of us did not know much about the VC market then, in our minds, our CEO was like a VC — a great idea = a great bonus check.
So we built a prototype and took it to the CEO of our company. His first question was, will a client pay for this? My initial reaction was “but of course”, who builds a product that does not have clients willing to pay for it. Then I realized he didn’t mean buy it as a finished product, but pay for building it. This was the reality of this GIS industry, few key companies built the software, and majority of the industry was built on services on that software. WIth companies focused on services instead of customer needs, very little innovation was happening.
This made us even more resolved to change the status quo. We spent 18 months building a product with the end user in mind. Every step of the way we involved our industry contacts to provide the validation for our product. This not only helped us build the product right, but also build the right product.
Even though DHL had already validated our product through our self service portal, working with a global leader was not going to be easy. We faced many hurdles before we could be adopted across the organization. Since we had built a mobile-first product for a highly mobile industry, in our hearts we knew we had a good chance of winning. From our market research we quickly realized that bringing in DHL would mean great global validation and every possible use case in the logistics industry. It also made us a premium brand that all other logistics companies will want.
We decided to take the risk and channel all our efforts in winning this client. After 4 months of many meetings, 4 POC’s, here we are with an industry leader by our side.
Geospago is here to stay. We are going to keep our heads down and win many more industry leaders. As we begin to supercharge our efforts, we are glad to have you all in our corner.