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· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Good Morning and welcome to another LOST FR8 blog post. It's been a few weeks since I've done a blog post, forgive me, but we have a lot going on these days.

We've added new features and will be attended our first trade show this week!

Don't forget to join our Discord.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

  • Capacity Email Events

We have now given carriers the ability to access event information related to their capacity emails. There are 4 statuses, delivered, opened, clicked, and failed.

capacity events

⏩ This Week ⏩​

More sales. As we spend more time selling, we continue to hone the process. Selling software subscriptions is a lot different than freight sales, so it's taken some time to figure out how to adjust strategies to fit software.

MATs. Thursday - Sunday this week I will be attending the Mid America Truck Show in Louisville, KY. The plan for the show is to get in front of as many carriers & potential customers as possible. We do not have a booth and I am not presenting, so we will be engaging guerrilla mode. If you're in the area and want to meet up drop me a note at reed@lostfr8.com

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week goes to @philkillerlain with his advice to carriers looking to get direct customers.

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the nineth LOST FR8 weekly recap. It was an action packed week, more memes, more sign ups, high vibes, etc.

Don't forget to join our Discord.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

  • first organic social sign up.

Our social media 'strategy' has paid off! We had our first organic sign up take place! This is our key to growth, so we're very excited to have it happen so early in the process!

This week we started posting more on LinkedIn, which wasn't a place I'd expect to find as many carriers. Turns out, I was wrong again! Expect more content to be coming from our LinkedIn page.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the eighth LOST FR8 weekly recap.

Don't forget to join our Discord.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

  • first organic broker/carrier discovery & booking
  • onsite customer meeting
  • podcast invitation

Takeaway​

Relationships make freight life better

The day-to-day life of a driver, dispatcher, broker, etc. can be tough. Crisis after crisis can make some days feel like an eterenity. Reflecting back on my time as a broker it's clear that one of the best parts of the job are the relationships you create, the people you grow to trust. That could be coworkers, partners, carriers, brokers, vendors, whatever.

As a carrier rep, the relationships I had with my carriers kept me going. They were valuable to me in executing in my role, but generally they were valuable to me as a human. Trusting someone and being trusted by someone are powerful feelings and likely critical to satisfaction in general.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

More sales. More feedback. More bug squashing. More Tik toks, more tweets, more content.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the seventh LOST FR8 weekly recap.

Don't forget to join our Discord. The vibes have been spectacular.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

We had a little fun creating pleaseadvise.ai, a site for truck drivers to create AI-generated excuses for why they're late to warehouse appointments.

pleaseadvise.ai

We made a tik tok.

Takeaways​

  • An engaged following is a super power.

This seems obvious as I type it, but I think it's worth typing again. An engaged social following is a great tool for driving traffic to our site. We created pleaseadvise in part as an experiment in generating traffic. We spun up the site on Wednesday night, pushed it live on Thursdaay, and first tweeted about it on Thurs evening. By Friday night we had driven about ~500 unique visitors to the site.

  • There are a lot of truckers on Tik Tok

We created a Tok Tok on Friday. Our first Tok Tok was created and sent Friday, in an effort to drive some pleaseadvise.ai traffic. It gained about 900 views overnight despite us having only a handful of followers. Pretty interesting. We're going to spend some time working on it this week.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

More sales. More feedback. More bug squashing. More Tik toks, more tweets, more content.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week

We're combining tweet and meme of the week.

🫡 Meme of the week 🫡​

meme of the week

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the sixth LOST FR8 weekly recap. Don't forget to join our Discord. The vibes have been spectacular.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

We released a new, updated demo video!

Takeaways​

  • This takes time

Creating something useful then getting it in front of potential customers is not easy. But even if you manage to hone in on potential customers and pitch your product, you need a succinct, jargon-less, easy to understand message. This just takes time.

  • It's easy to get distracted

At any given moment there are a dozen things to be done, being disciplined about sticking to a list and focusing your attention is critical.

Feedback/Fixes​

  • Email Bug

We've fixed a bug limiting the amount of capacity emails a carrier could send out.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

More sales. More feedback. More bug squashing.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week

🫡 Meme of the week 🫡​

We're doing a meme of the week contenst in the discord. Hop in to participate!

meme of the week

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the fifth LOST FR8 weekly recap. We added another customer! Also our Discord has been popping lately, all are welcome to come and join the fun!

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

Old Goals​

- 1 new customer​

✅ Got it

- Capacity email pushed to prod​

✅ Done

- Update Guide to reflect Email instructions​

✅ All set.

Takeaways​

  • People like email

    Both our customers and their brokers mentioned they still want to receive capacity via email. Prior to launching and receiving actual customer feedback, I assumed customers/brokers would prefer not using email. We quickly realized that wasn't the case.

  • Give carriers control

    We kicked around a couple ways of implementing capacity emails, including giving brokers the ability to subscribe to capacity changes, but ultimately decided placing the functionality entirely in the hands of carriers. They add emails to a list and can toggle which emails they want to send a capacity list to.

Feedback/Fixes​

  • Sort order for dates

Our customers mentioned they'd prefer the capacity table be default sorted from present -> future. We've made that change on both the dashboard and profile.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

New Goals​

  • 2 new customer

We picked up some traffic momentum on Friday and plan to build on it this week. We have some good leads and are going to up the sign up goal this week!

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the fourth LOST FR8 weekly recap. We added another customer and are working our way through sharing capacity via email. Also our Discord has been popping lately, all are welcome to come and join the fun!

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

Goals​

  • Teams pushed to prod
  • Update Guide to reflect Teams instructions

- 1 new customer​

✅ Got it

- Teams pushed to prod​

✅ Done

- Update Guide to reflect Teams instructions​

✅ All set.

Takeaways​

  • People still want email.

In talking to our customers and their brokers, we've realized they still want to be able to send and receive capacity in email. This makes sense after listening to their reasons, so we've decided to add this feature quickly. This is a feature that, left to my own devices, we probably wouldn't have added as soon.

Feedback/Fixes​

  • No major bugs this week.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

Goals​

  • 1 new customer
  • Capacity email pushed
  • Update Guide to reflect email instructions

This week wer're pushing out our capacity email feature. This will provide a new way for carriers to alert their broker partners to new/changes in their capacity.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week
  • Fr8 Stock Photo of the Week

stock photo

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 2 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the third LOST FR8 weekly recap. We had a last minute new customer addition and we developed and started testing our new teams feature.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

Goals​

- 1 new customer​

✅ Got it

- 1 blog posts​

Draft done, final coming on Monday

- Teams Feature​

✅ Testing in Beta

Any carrier with more than one dispatcher will likely need the ability to invite multiple users to manage a carrier account. We've had this feature up in beta and have spent the week testing it. We will have it launched sometime this coming week.

teams feature

Takeaways​

  • Feedback from brokers is going to be important.

    We've made contact with our customer's broker contacts who are making use of their profiles. It's been very satisfying to see regular repeat traffic on the profiles. The brokers we've spoken with have been generally spoken favorably about the site, and clearly get what we're trying to do. They've been happy to give feedback and discuss potential features/fixes. It's been awesome.

Feedback/Fixes​

  • No date issues have arisen since we fixed them last week.

  • Teams is needed

    Our second customer realized quickly that they needed a teams feature.

⏩ This Week ⏩​

Goals​

  • 1 new customer
  • 1 blog post
  • Teams pushed to prod
  • Update Guide to reflect Teams instructions

This week we're going to roll out teams and get existing customers using/testing it. We will continue to gather feedback from our customers and their brokers.

🔗 Links 🔗​

  • Fr8 Tweet of the week
  • Fr8 Stock Photo of the Week

fr8 stock photo

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you!

Email me at reed@lostf8.com

Find us on Twitter

· 3 min read
Reed Loustalot

Hey there,

Welcome to the second LOST FR8 weekly recap. This week didn't see any progress in terms of new customers. But it was the first full week of use from our first customer and we have a lot to be happy about.

Let's get started.

⏪ Last Week ⏪​

Goals​

- 5 customers​

❌ We still have 2

- 2 blog posts​

❌ Didn't do this again.

Takeaways​

  • Despite not reaching these goals, I think this week was a success. Our first customer got a solid week's use under their belt. We quickly patched the bugs that appeared and responded quickly to feedback.

  • Our customer's brokers 'get it' without explanation. We got in contact with a handful of them. They had positive things to say about the site. We were pleased they quickly saw the value in having access to our customer's real time capacity.

  • Our customer had more loads offered to them

  • Just write. Being a solid writer is insanely underrated. The ability to clearly and succinctly articulate ideas is a super power. I have a list of ideas for blog posts, I just need to get the show on the road.

Feedback/Fixes​

  • Date issues

We had numerous bugs surrounding incorrect dates showing up on the capacity board on the profile. We made some adjustments to the way we were storing dates in our database and the issue seems to have been fixed.

  • Full equipment type names on hover

equipment type on hover

⏩ This Week ⏩​

Goals​

  • 1 new customer
  • 1 blog post
  • Teams (new feature)

At this state, we gotta just keep it simple. Small, incremental progress is the name of the game at this point. The focus is on getting customers on who are willing to help us work through bugs/kinks so that when more come onboard we have smoothed out the rough edges.

🔗 Links 🔗​

👤 Contact 👤​

We want to hear from you

email me at reed@lostf8.com

find us on twitter