How I Built a SaaS Startup (From Idea to Revenue)

0:00here's the situation I've worked in Corporate America all of my life at companies like apple and Amazon but I left all of that to start a freight company at first it was all good I felt like a free man escaping the 9 to-5 and my business was growing fast we were hiring drivers left and right adding more trucks to our Fleet weekly but before I knew it I was working 60 hours a week to run this company one thing I missed from my corporate 9 to5 was having access to the best tools and software that money can buy this is a story of how laminar co-pilot started a

0:37year ago during a random car ride to Santa Barbara the first time we talked about co-pilot was actually during our drive up to Santa Barbara So we had a cycling event and on the way up we were just talking about business ideas and one of the business ideas he had was to have some sort of app for the company that he runs we both thought there was a lot of potential and so yeah that's kind of the first time we talked about laminar co-pilot that entire morning I had actually spent scheduling my team for my freight company even though I was coming from all this experience and operations

1:15I was still having to do a lot of this manually a lot of excel a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of you know just manual Maneuvers until you can make it work and I knew that there had to be some sort of tool that can do this automatically for me but when when I Googled it I found none and that was a complete shocker to me and that's when I realized hey there's something here and potentially if we can code this it could be huge imagine this you have X number of drivers and let's just say you have y number of trucks and every week you want to

1:54fulfill Z number routes optimally and efficiently in theory you can just go down this list and assign each driver to a truck but what happens when you add different variables to the story suddenly a driver only wants to work Monday Tuesday and Wednesday and let's just say this truck is actually out on a trip and only becomes available Monday through Thursday now what happens if you have Z number of routes but not enough trucks on that drive up to Santa Barbara I looked at Moses and I asked him is it possible to create an algorithm that can do all of this for us automatically the first step I think to writing great

2:39software is just having the context necessary to write the software understanding the problem right the second thing is just starting to write the software you just figure things out as you go and there's always going to be roadblocks that come up but step by step that moves the process along and allows you to iterate and build something that uh ends up being used right I'm just trying to think right now so I know that on Wednesday you have 5 230s right [Music] yes yeah there's not really a good way to infert like we were testing Dynamic schedular and this had been you know a a weekly thing that we were doing so every

3:28week we would get an exp of the routes that needed to be fulfilled and we would try to run my code right insufficient drivers we got to 55 wow this was the first time that it actually worked and it was a huge deal for us there were 60 routes in total and um given different driver constraints and truck constraints uh our algorithm was able to automatically schedule 55 routes a person manually scheduling 55 routes would take a couple hours in like 2 or 3 seconds we did 55 we realized that maybe you know our idea could actually be something once we knew that the logic and algorithm actually worked it was

4:14time to actually build the app and for that we needed a team first flow is with Dynamic scheduler starts at the dashboard module Kevin shot me a text saying like I'm currently working on this app and I really need a designer I was like oh shoot another opportunity like I'm down let's do it he sent me a screenshot of here's what we we got so far and I was expecting at least sort of like a browser window with some buttons but it was literally just like an input button and upload form thing and I was just like okay there's a lot we can work with here but honestly that meant I had

4:49a lot of uh impact to the team to help out I would describe design as the glue that holds sort of the form and the function together form being sort of the ideations that Kevin has and the function which is the developmental code that Moses has once you just have a design in front of you it really just brings this personal full feel to the product rather than everything just in your head if you have this it'll take you to that so that way right now the user I'm just so blessed to be a part of a team where everyone is so talented I would never have imagined co-pilot to

5:27make so much progress now and I'm so excited to see where it's going to be the next year and even future years to come it's always fun when you're like kind of trying to do things alone or you're trying to build something but I think the moment when you actually add people into it and they have now invested hundreds of hours into it is when the risk transitions from the risk of the business failing to the risk of you actually letting your team down right now the most important thing and success to me means laminar co-pilot succeeds not just for myself and for my freight company now but for the team

6:05members that have invested hundreds of hours into the project the team is extremely proud of where co-pilot is today we've proven out that the algorithm works and the logic works and that customers love the product going forward we're now focused on scaling the backend infrastructure we're really excited to get co-pilot into the hands of customers all across the nation