EPISODE SUMMARY
In the dynamic world of business, where innovation is the lifeblood of success, it takes a special kind of vision and determination to carve out a niche that truly makes a difference. In this episode of Scale Your SaaS, Jason Radisson, CEO and founder of Movo, shared insights into his entrepreneurial journey with host and B2B SaaS Sales Trainer Matt Wolach, offering a glimpse into the strategic thinking and passion that drives his work. Read on to learn how to go from startup to unicorn.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach
Episode: Episode No. 316, “Go from Startup to Unicorn – with Jason Radisson”
Guest: Jason Radisson, CEO and founder of Movo
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Sponsored by: Leadfeeder
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Leveraging Technology to Drive Innovation
Jason’s background in applied math and his fascination with technology have been instrumental in shaping Movo’s innovative approach. By harnessing the power of AI and real-time data analytics, Movo empowers companies to optimize workforce management, streamline scheduling processes, and enhance employee engagement. Founders should explore emerging technologies and seek creative ways to leverage them in solving real-world problems.
Embracing Resilience and Adaptability
Navigating the entrepreneurial landscape is rarely smooth sailing, and Jason’s journey with Movo has been no exception. From unexpected challenges to unforeseen opportunities, resilience and adaptability have been key to Movo’s growth and success. Founders must cultivate a mindset of resilience, embracing setbacks as learning opportunities and adapting their strategies accordingly.
Prioritizing Portfolio Management
A strategic approach to portfolio management has been pivotal in Movo’s growth trajectory. Jason emphasizes the importance of diversifying business initiatives and exploring new markets to mitigate risks and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Founders should continuously evaluate their portfolio of projects and investments, making informed decisions based on market trends and customer feedback.
Fostering a Culture of Innovation
At the heart of Movo’s innovation lies a culture that values creativity, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Jason highlights the importance of fostering an environment where team members feel empowered to experiment, take calculated risks, and challenge the status quo. Founders should prioritize building a diverse and inclusive team culture that encourages innovation at every level of the organization.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Understanding the Importance of Product-Market Fit
At the heart of Movo’s success lies a relentless pursuit of product-market fit. Jason emphasizes the need for founders to go beyond surface-level differentiation and genuinely understand the pain points of their target audience. By immersing themselves in the customer experience and iterating based on feedback, founders can fine-tune their product offerings to meet market demands effectively.
A Vision for Empowering the Frontline Workforce
Under Jason’s leadership, Movo is revolutionizing human capital management for the frontline workforce. With a keen focus on leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, Movo offers a mobile employee experience that is engaging, efficient, and empowering. Jason’s inspiration for Movo stems from his own experiences growing up, where he witnessed firsthand the challenges faced by workers striving to improve their living standards through semi-skilled and skilled labor.
Lessons Learned and Advice for Aspiring Founders
Reflecting on his experiences with Movo and previous ventures, Jason emphasizes the importance of relentlessly pursuing product-market fit. He encourages aspiring founders to challenge themselves to think beyond conventional boundaries and strive for unicorn-level differentiation. By pushing the boundaries of innovation and remaining laser-focused on solving real-world problems, founders can position their companies for long-term success.
Lessons on Visionary Leadership
Jason’s journey with Movo exemplifies the transformative potential of visionary leadership and relentless innovation. As he continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in human capital management, Jason’s story inspires entrepreneurs everywhere, reminding us that anything is possible in the business world with passion, perseverance, and a commitment to excellence.
TOP QUOTES
Jason Radisson
[17:14] “Every company has a couple of algorithms that will tremendously ring the cash register if you tap into them… it’s few and far between are the companies that realize that have the insight and then have the leadership and money actually to make it happen at scale within their organization.”
[22:55] “I think the overall skill that… every company that I found, every company that I scale up, I get more learnings and more insights on it, that fundamental skill is portfolio management.”
[25:01] “The gig economy serves as a friction remover for kind of crappy employment in a different… country… where the product market fit is actually smoking hot.”
Matt Wolach
[12:41] “Go get money, to fuel this fire that was growing.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Movo, visit: https://Movo.co/
You can also find Jason Radisson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-radisson/
For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.
Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial: https://www.leadfeeder.com/
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Check out the whole episode transcript here:
Matt Wolach 00:05
Hello, welcome, welcome. This is Scale Your SaaS. And I’m really glad that you here. So thank you for being here. By the way, if this is your first time to the show, we are here to help you do just that scale your SaaS, we want to make sure we’re marketing that we’re getting a lot of leads, we want to make sure we’re closing those leads, we have an effective process to do so. And we want to build our team so that that team is very strong and capable, and can do all that stuff for us. If you want any of those things, definitely subscribe to the show right now, hit that button. And you’ll be notified of all the future episodes where we bring you some of the best people in the world who have done this before, who know how to scale a company, and share their experience and wisdom with you. And one of those people who certainly knows how to scale a business is with us today. And I’m super excited about it. I’ve got Jason Radisson with me, Jason, how you doing?
Jason Radisson 00:52
Hey, Matt doing well, how about you? Great to be honest.
Matt Wolach 00:56
Oh, well I’m super glad to have you. I can’t wait for this conversation because of some of the amazing things that you’ve done. I’m just really looking forward to it. So let me make sure everybody knows who you are. And then what you’re all about Jason. So Jason, he’s the CEO and founder at Movo. Movo is human capital management for the frontline is offering an engaging mobile employee experience, powered by the latest AI features. Jason himself. He is a serial unicorn breeder with over 20 years of experience in strategy, operations and growth. He has scaled multiple tech unicorns that provide help and improve standards for millions of workers. He is super passionate about using mobile technology and algorithms to empower and uplift the frontline workforce, which he believes is the foundation of the economy and society. Jason, so cool with what you’ve done, and I’m really excited for our conversation. Thanks for being here.
Jason Radisson 01:48
Hey, thanks. Yeah, excited to jump in.
Matt Wolach 01:51
Cool. So tell me what have you been up to lately? What’s going on?
Jason Radisson 01:54
Well the company that I founded a few years back is called Movo. And, as you mentioned, we’re building a solution for the frontline workforce. And largely what Movo is, is it’s taking the inspiration of the kind of real time platform that you have in the gig economy. And bringing that technology to traditional companies. So that if you have 10,000, 5,000 50,000, 100,000 workers out there professionals out there in the field and your different facilities. With Movo, you’re able to run that workforce, task that workforce, automatically schedule and roster that workforce, automatically cross train them and do a bunch of really cool things. All in a super engaging mobile app.
Matt Wolach 02:45
super slick, very cool. And I’m sure very needed, but I want to go back. So how did this idea come about? Where did Movo come from?
Jason Radisson 02:53
Well, I you know, all the way back, I worked a lot of these jobs, I grew up poor and, you know, very bootstrapped. And I had this experience as a child of a 16 year old single mom and sort of the work that we did in our family, to get ourselves through school and to get ahead, or a lot of these jobs, semi skilled and skilled work, you know, where the usual the challenges are there. How do I get the next bit of training? You know, how do I maximize my schedule, and frankly, my wage per hour, you know, what are the different kinds of things that I can do? That’s been some of the inspiration and I think, in a constant theme in my in my life, and I had this real sort of curiosity and and built a set of skills around applied math, and that goes all the way back to essentially early elementary school, and then all the way through graduate school. And, you know, I sort of emerged from graduate school and that kind of training. In an era where the internet was sort of just rolling out, we’d obviously been through sort of the PC, you know, rollout and people finding very useful things to do with PC technologies. And then suddenly, the Internet was there. And I was very interested in sort of these applied math problems and database problems and you know, the power of sort of the systems and algorithms to dramatically impact the success of a business and and even set you up to be an entirely different company than your competitor based on your use of your own data. And using these technologies, the old days, things used to be batch processed, we would run things on mainframes and other early systems overnight. We would recalculate all of our algorithms and sort To start the morning out in North America with a fresh set of scores. These days, everything’s real time. And it has been for pretty much 15 years or so. And just, as we got into the gig economy, I really saw this opportunity to take the technology further. And really sort of, you know, there’s a lot of practices in the gig economy that aren’t so applicable or aren’t always the best way to go about things, take shortcuts with workers, you know, hack regulations in countries, a lot of things that you can sort of do without, and what it wanted to do was take the best practices and the best technology of the world and bring it to traditional companies so that they could gain this same kind of frictionless employee experience, and operations that that we benefited from in the gig economy. But just like in a nutshell, you know, for folks out there listening, like, the way you run a city in the gig economy is you have a team of operations research, you know, industrial engineer kind of types, maybe some MBAs in the room depending, but a team of three, four or five individuals in a room covered with monitors, where you might have a million real time employees doing things, and the system will test them out, this system will pay them, the system will schedule. And the team is essentially in this, you know, control room with situational awareness of everything that’s going on, in in the company or in that particular deployment. That’s what I wanted to bring to big hospitals, big manufacturers, big retailers, and so on.
Matt Wolach 06:40
I love it. I know that that’s super needed. I’m glad you are doing this for everybody. So I want to I want to dive into those early days. So you’d have this idea you launch it. How do you find your first customers, how do you convince these big organizations that this new little guy startup can help them?
Jason Radisson 07:01
I think, you know, we’ve benefited from from a tailwind. Our very first customers were 2019 the team and I we weren’t full time we were sort of experimenting around, we’d written a little bit of software. And we started working with customers that we knew that it then hospitality customers that we interfaced with Uber, and you know, large kind of venues and and, you know, places that employed a lot of people and had all kinds of worker challenges. That’s where we started. Those are our experiments in 2019 2020. In January, a bunch of us went full time and we were doubling down. And we were going to go after then the logistics industry. And we saw this sort of like ecommerce fulfillment as a big area of the economy, like no one had sort of figured out the warehouse worker, and you know, from Amazon on down, and we were gonna go after that problem. And just as we started diving in, we signed a big deal with Amazon and the pandemic hit literally mid March of 2020. And we spent most of the pandemic, helping large companies fill their rosters back up and and, you know, essentially deploying our hiring automation and onboarding automation technology across different markets, where, you know, companies had been super struggling and we’re super strapped for labor. And we had a point in that early development where you’d written $200 million worth of orders in a few weeks, pandemic tailwinds, you know. And for a small company, we didn’t have the capital to support that team to support that. That’s how crazy the market was at that point in the need was at that point, we knew we were onto something. And you know, over the course of the last couple of years, we’ve we’ve hired or helped our, our clients hire 700,000 people in the US. So definitely some good, you know, learnings and give us a lot of data to sort of bootstrap everything else that we’ve done, warm up all of our algos and remove all of our systems. And you know, it’s really, from there, we’ve expanded out into some of the other big sort of AI challenges and applications that are that are out there and task, you know, as I mentioned, is a really big one. If you’re a large employer, sort of being able to change and caps in 17,000 places simultaneously. And follow up on it is something that’s very useful to you. Task Management and Jewel aware task management and real time task management is a set of capabilities of the platform. And we’re also very excited and very humbled by the scheduling problem. It’s incredibly difficult to optimize the scheduling of nurses in a large hospital chain or other clinical staff And I know it’s one thing to sort of have the data, it’s another thing to have the user interactions, that employee interaction where, you know, an employee feels super comfortable taking tomorrow off because they’re sick, or because they have something with a family member, and not really having to worry about, oh, my God, is it going to be embarrassing? Do I have to go have this conversation? You know, am I going to be indebted to some other colleague who’s going to jump in for me, we’ve sort of made that a, it’s actually one of those experiences were working with the AI is much more comfortable than working with humans. Because you can just kind of, you know, with a click of a button and not worry about it, we find it very empowering. And certainly, the employees on our platform, find it very empowering to have that kind of flexibility. So we brought gig style flexibility to a, you know, traditional role, by giving people with our scheduling automation, this kind of empowerment, and self service options. UX was really challenging, I think, you know, the problem itself, you know, it is a big database problem, there’s a lot of change management involved. UX has been one of those things where we’re just obsess about it, because it’s so important that the experience is not complex, that you can just sort of think about what you need to have your schedule do and with a couple of clicks, it’s done in, that’s the employee experience that we keep building on. But, you know, I’ve talked a lot, those are several of the sort of AI powered use cases that are out there. And I think if you’re listening to this, and you know, your CEO, or your board is saying to you go do something with generative AI before the competitor, does the use cases are there? Well, it’d be generative AI, maybe maybe there’s a chat element to it, I think what’s much more important is are you using your data in some kind of smart system, some kind of algorithmic system to really power your business? And what are those big levers and, and use cases that you’ve got? And, you know, I really believe with all the work that I’ve been doing these last couple of decades in the space, every company has a couple of algorithms that will tremendously ring the cash register, if you tap into them. They’re in every company, it’s just, you know, it’s few and far between are the companies that realize that have the insight, and then have the leadership and wherewithal to actually make it happen at scale within their organization.
Matt Wolach 12:41
Yeah, I agree. Totally. I think that that data is there, it’s just a matter of, hey, can you grab it? How do you sell it? How do you package it all that stuff? So I think it’s, it’s really insightful? How when did you decide that you needed to go get money, and he did fundraise and, and want to fuel this this fire that was growing? How did that happen?
Jason Radisson 12:59
Yeah, great question. You know, funny, kind of funny story, because I think where we were, in 2020, you know, and we’ve been sort of experimenting around in 2019, and just sort of kind of heads down, sort of experienced operators, and, and, and product builders and company builders. And you know, so 2020, we have this huge deal with Amazon. And, you know, I mean, Floyd, and we were sort of like, in the thick of like, the labor problems in the US and excited, like, I think part of the beauty of working in a client relationship like Amazon, you know, for all the challenges and whatnot, they really had a wage pricing mentality that really resonated with the gig economy team like ours. So in every gig economy, sort of City Regional Leadership, you always have sort of, you know, again, operations research, but it’s with a little bit of a financial flavor, where what you’re running are wage pricing experiments, all the time, parallel, stacked, orthogonal testing of, which are the incentives that if I layer them on in this way, and for anyone who’s seen like, Hey, why is Lyft doing like this incentive pricing this weekend? Right? Those are the kinds of programs that I’m talking about. And when we were working in 2020, and sort of just starting to ramp up and the economy was just in such a crazy place mid year, we were running hundreds of those experiments a week with warehouse workers in North America. And I think by the time you know, at that point, we were saying, like, we’re onto something here, like, you know, we’re sort of building the graph of labor in North America. And as we got for entry level, right, and as we got deeper and deeper into it, we just started getting crazy inbound, and so sort of like q3 q4 of 2020. And people were like, wait a minute, like you guys are, like supplying warehouse labor in North America in the middle of this pandemic, like, you know, where did is I just was telling investors like, you know, lock is like, I think almost half the battle, you know, we just happen to be working on the problem we were working on, you know, if the pandemic hadn’t happened, I don’t know, we might have bootstrapped the company, you know, because we certainly weren’t looking for funding. And I think at that point, you know, we started talking to several investors, we had all of these early conversations, and, you know, actually, you know, here’s what we would do if we did raise down. And that’s what sort of, you know, sort of take the baseline plan for the company, but then add on to it. venture funding and, you know, we did quite a bit of, of a raise at seed, we’re already far along. So, you know, we were, we were able to raise at a much higher valuation probably than somebody who just starting out and doing a precede or, or a small seed, we raised over $8 million in our seed. And that really was the foundation for us to build out our technology to really kind of ramp up.
Matt Wolach 16:23
So you’ve been a part of some awesome companies that you’ve helped really scale and grow, become unicorns. So Uber, 99, taxis rappy, what similarities Have you taken from those? Or what were your learnings from those experiences that you’re now applying to this organization? Helping it get where it’s got to be?
Jason Radisson 16:42
I think absolutely. I think one of my first learnings or first principles, I think, is product market fit. And I think my particular learning from Product Market Fit and the gig economy is the capital markets don’t know any better than the entrepreneurs and some of the some of the learnings aren’t obvious to the entire world until a few years in. And the example I would give is just the terrible product market fit of the gig economy in North America. You know, the only way that Uber and others can make money now is by cutting worker wages by, you know, or worker percentage of revenue has gone from, in my day, it used to be 20, or 25% was the take rate. So workers were taking home 75 or 80% of the total fair, you know, these days, it’s 30. It’s 40. You know, and that’s why the gig economy companies are now profitable in North America. It’s kind of a sorrowful, sort of turn of events and sort of development. But that’s, you know, the alternative would be they wouldn’t be viable, because who can really underwrite that much, you know, sort of negative EBITDA for however long, right, so true. Um, I think what I mean to say with that is there are places in the world where the gig economy is tremendously profitable. And we didn’t know we had an inkling, I think, as we started to internationalize, and, you know, I was very active on sort of the International fronts of the gig economy. Working with DD co founders, in some projects, and particularly, going over to 99 taxis to scale up 99 taxis. And in Brazil, even some Paulo and Rio are not particularly profitable. It’s really the secondary cities. Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte could achieve places like that, which for North America would be huge cities, I mean, we’re talking to places that three 5 million people where the product market fit is actually smoking hot. You know, you’ve got a great pool of labour that’s under employed, you’ve got a really strong middle upper middle class that doesn’t have enough time, doesn’t want to be driving their own car doesn’t want to be snarled in traffic, once you just outsource that problem. And the gig economy works beautifully and similar thing on food delivery and, and other delivery businesses in those kinds of cities. So you look at and you go, why is it that the entire US venture capital industry, we’re talking some really big funds, had no idea. And, you know, it sounded like great technology, here’s how it’s gonna work. And Hindsight is easy. You look back at it in hindsight and you go actually, the gig economy serves as a friction remover for kind of crappy employment in a different in a developing country. You know, the kind of bureaucratic red tape, the kind of super inefficient labor markets that you get in a Latin American city that’s been held back for years. Perfect. Bring in the gig. economy solve that. So I think product market fit, you know, the standard SaaS thing of like, piloted in your own backyard and you know, build from there. Maybe I think the overall skill that, you know, I am learning and I think every company that I found every company that I scale up, I get more learnings and more insights on it, that fundamental skill is portfolio management. It’s like, it really, really matters where you place your bets. And it really matters that you’re running experiments continually. You know, very early in the history of Moscow, one of the first things we did was open an office and start working in Colombia. You know, for that very reason, I didn’t want to be blindsided by I built this North American business that the unit economics, we’re never going to pin in and out, but they were fantastic in Latin America, and who knew, and here I was, you know, five years of investor funds down the road before I figured that out. So I wanted to de risk that. And there probably a dozen other examples of kind of macro level experiments that we’ve run, to make sure that we were kind of on track with the portfolio that businesses and opportunities that we’re managing.
Matt Wolach 21:19
Very cool. So if we kind of summarize, and as we have to wrap up here, somebody else out there, they’re listening to this, they’re starting their company, they’re, they’re in their early stages wanting to grow and achieve the type of sales success you’ve had before. And now Movo, what advice would you share for other software founders who are looking to do the same thing?
Jason Radisson 21:40
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s, you know, there’s, there’s this opportunity with product-market fit that, you know, I think it’s, it’s beyond sort of, you need to obsess about it, it’s more, you know, stretching yourself to, to sort of look at, you know, given the technology that’s available in the world, what really what it takes to have that product that, you know, immediately your phone is sort of ringing off the hook. You know, as we said, in the kind of the peak of the pandemic, like we used to joke with our investors, we’d say, our hands are like, literally hurting from signing so many orders like that. That’s, you know, that’s the kind of product market fit you’re looking for. You know, everything else is, is a slog, and, and, you know, it’s, you know, meaning who wants to be in a company that’s barely differentiated. It’s, you know, founding a company and running a company is too, too hard. So I think it’s almost being maniacal about product market fit and stretching yourself and stretching the team, like, Do we really have it? Are we really thinking hard enough? You know, are we just doing the easy features, because you know, that specific AI that somebody really could and should build in this industry is too hard for us right now. And stretching yourself to go and do that? If if, you know, that’s if just having that bought would be, you know, the reason that everybody would call you and you know, it’d be the tremendous success of your company, going for it and really finding that degree of differentiation that’s going to, you know, is unicorn level of differentiation, not just sort of, you know, moderate sloggy kind of differentiation and success.
Matt Wolach 23:36
Yeah, I think that’s the key word right there differentiation, find what, what you can do to separate from the herd. That’s awesome advice. Jason, this has been fantastic. I want to make sure everybody can learn more about what you’re doing at Mobile, what’s the best way for them to find out or get in touch with you?
Jason Radisson 23:50
Absolutely. It’s out our company website, Movo.co, m o v. o.co. You can find us also on LinkedIn, by searching for Movo for our company page and my personal page and, you know, any, any the folks on the team, that’s the best way to find us. Okay.
Matt Wolach 24:08
perfect. And we’ll put all that into the show notes. So if you’re listening, go ahead and click there. And you can grab that and go check out Movo. Jason, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Jason Radisson 24:17
Matt, Thanks for having me on.
Matt Wolach 24:18
It’s been a real pleasure. Absolutely. Likewise, and everybody out there. Thank you for being here. Again, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out on any other amazing leaders like Jason. You don’t want to have to worry what you’re missing out on. Well, we’ll see you next time. Take care and bye-bye.
