Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking” | Hacker News Reader

Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”

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47 pointsprostoalex46 comments

My brother-in-law (and next door neighbor) owns a logistics trucking company (that mostly ships for my father-in-law's hay company, which is the largest exporter in the US). My father-in-law is the largest exporter of anything out of Utah, and loads all of his trucks back up from the port, making him one of the largest importers. In short, they do a lot of business.

I talked with them at length about this exact idea, and they had me convinced that the Uber model doesn't necessarily make sense in this space.

First of all, there's no network effect or immediacy required (a la Uber). Basically you're just contracting out trucking companies, and there are a bunch of different ways you can already do that, even online. It's not a simple push-button order, and generally the ordering is done based on relationships.

So basically this company is putting that ordering process into an app. I'm not sure if there is a big enough of a differentiation to make a difference. But I wish them luck.

Yeah, that was my thought as well. Logistics companies have been operating computerized dispatch systems for decades: it just never made sense in the taxi business because prior to widespread smartphone adoption, the systems were too expensive relative to the amount of money a single taxi makes.

This might be attractive to small shippers, but yeah, anyone who does any volume of shipping by truck likely already has a computerized dispatch system that's probably integrated into their warehouse management software (so they don't even have to order the truck - the warehouse just does it for them when a shipment is entered into the system).

That is correct. The hard part of the logistics industry is getting the integration between warehouse, trucking and operations correct. I worked as a programmer in this space and most of the time and money in this space is not going towards apps and websites (most logistics companies have that or have easy ability to get those things up and running) but integration between interested parties.

Something something EDI something something kill me.

I too worked in that space. Super not fun. You're absolutely right that there is tons of money to be made by interconnecting interested parties with incompatible systems. It is a massive industry but yet still there is room for new competition.

I agree with you and above, nobody is going to replace their warehouse system's automatically generated requests with this Uber clone, they want deep integration and this doesn't get them closer to that.

Companies are already competing with this but not by copying Uber but by acting as a data intermediary making it easy to connect logistics companies with their end users. Data compatibility is the "hard problem" not connecting two companies together.

The trucking business has several models within it, some more likely targets for this than others. LTL would be a good one, as would intermodal.

Having attempted to purchase truck-shipping online before, and found a morass of confusing interfaces with no current information but plenty of spamming over a year later, I think there is room for improvement here. We ended up hiring someone local whose name we got after about 14 phone calls, and who was much cheaper than anything listed online.

>> there's no network effect or immediacy required

If there's enough "shared trips"[1] , there's a network effect.And actually the lack of immediacy makes more shared trips combinations possible.That's on the customers side.

And on the drivers side - more drivers you'll get, more competition, but also more trucks that are spread through space and time - which would help in finding an optimal driver - with the shortest distance to the next job , and with the end point of that job closer to "home".

> It's not a simple push-button order

Why ?

[1]Or even close to share trips - drive from A to B , and from somewhere near-B to C .Also shared trips could be less-than-truckload and that's probably why they aim at small/medium business first.

Is he shipping his hay as break bulk or in 40ft standard containers? The intermodal market is very different from the bulk market and carriers are – by design – interchangeable. In fact many intermodal carriers scale by bringing several smaller mom and pop – referenced in the article – owner/operators under their dispatch. This is essentially what this startup is doing.

The not having immediacy part is not entirely correct. Line Haul departments of large carriers like FedEx Ground generally have a need to quickly find a truck when their trucks cannot make it from one hub to another. This occurs relatively common and there's an auction market for drivers.

Where, and who, does your father-in-law export hay to? It never occurred to me that it was something that flowed across borders in substantial amounts.

Interesting post here: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=17566

Oh, superb, thanks! Who would have thought that the UAE was a significant importer of hay from the US? That raises yet more questions.

A further random aside: i have no idea what alfalfa is. It seems to be a well-known plant in the US, but i don't think we have it in the UK. Sources tell me we call it 'lucerne', and we don't grow it. It seems we grow various beets and brassicas instead, plus maize and ryegrass. Perhaps because of the climate? Although perhaps just through absentmindedness:

https://www.cotswoldseeds.com/seed-info/lucerne-also-known-a...

> 1.2 million trucking companies in the US, most of which have fewer than six trucks

And thousands get shut down each year by the DOT. Being the Uber for trucking is great and all, but enabling these small trucking companies to pass DOT safety audits with flying colors could be the biggest advantage of all.

Safety rating is one of the biggest factors involved in selection of carriers because Union Carbide doesn't want their toxic chemical spilled all over the highway.

The safety rules for trucking are written in blood, meaning much of the rule book exists because people died. Trucking is immensely dangerous. If they get the safety part right, they'll take over the industry. If you knew how the trucking industry works you'd be amazed anything gets anywhere.

I would think that being able to package the passing of audits would be a service by now.

FWIW, the people who carry permit loads are more trained and at least when last I checked, not necessarily competing with the rank and file of truckers.

Your last sentence is 100% spot on. I wish people driving in mixed traffic including lots of trucks understood. They clearly do not.

> I would think that being able to package the passing of audits would be a service by now.

Most of the software out there for this is crap. It is a big job though, mainly dealing with driver logs.

That's the part I'd most like to see automated. I'm sure it's not that simple.

Some people I know are building this: https://keeptruckin.com

If safety is such a big deal, how do trucks still have blind spots, drivers sitting too high and non-mandatory side guards? These are design flaws.

It seems the "safety" interpretation here doesn't apply to everyone else not involved.

I think the problem is that you're assuming that safety rating == safety.

The big deal is to make sure that the companies are able to operate and pass the safety checks with a sufficiently high mark. Since those are based on the existing vehicles, there is no reason to redesign everything to get the same rating at the end.

Your state DOT truck enforcement division very much cares about things like this and it's likely that they've tried to get rules changed or legislation passed on exactly these issues.

Frankly there are much scarier issues to deal with, such as trucks losing their load, tire quality, "running the scales", etc...

You're forgetting that they're trying to be the Uber of trucking. Meaning they don't give a damn about safety, because the truckers are not working for them. They're contractors.

The shipping industry is ripe for innovation all over, and of course it's been driven by innovation for decades, at least since the 1950s when the shipping container was invented.

The trucking industry will absolutely see several new billion-dollar companies emerge in the near future. If I were investing in a startup, though, I'd want it to be run by founders with a background in trucking, shipping, and/or logistics.

If the only experience either founder has is one of them working a summer job at his uncle's company delivering office supplies, I'd be a bit wary. Between Lewis & Goodale, they've run a game studio, a natural-language processing startup, and had various software development roles.

You could argue that Uber broke into a blue-collar market without any experience, but they had the general public as customers, The trucking industry is a very insular place, they're going to need to get a co-founder who comes from the world they're trying to break into.

In 2007 or so, a number of us engineers from Lockheed had created a shipping/trucking cargo tracking device... It was a combo rfid tag with gprs, gps, wifi and mesh networking capabilities along with sensors like accelerometers...

Nobody wanted it.

in 2012 we had this in Afghanistan on almost every single container/pallet/load.

Yeah thats what we originally built at Savi... but there was no security, wifi or any other security in those original tags.

This was the impetus behind us trying to make the modular version.

I chatted with an engineer from Oracle a couple years ago who talked about those existing in Afghanistan, he was involved in that project somehow.

Do you know what they were called/who made them? I had no idea they were actually in production.

Around 2009 I talked to some people who offer that exact mix and were still at least open.

8 months ago a redditor shared insight to his freight brokerage business: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2w8an6/any_fr...

6 months ago another 23yo redditor shared insight of his trucking company--even as generous as a peek into his revenue and expenses spreadsheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/32gwjj/april_...

Lots to dissect from there.

The reason the taxi business had been so ripe for disruption is that it's a big example of regulations creating a market failure. The business of actually driving a taxi is far, far less lucrative than being an owner of medallions and collecting rent from a fleet of drivers.

I'd be worried about the trucking unions having a legal field day over something like this. The taxi unions are one thing, but the teamsters and longshoreman are a whole different thing. I don't think we'll see Convoy trucks picking loads up at port for some time (if ever), which is where the big money is to be had.

Just for those too young who might not get the reference - I believe the company name is a riff on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077369/.

I think I watched it in the USSR in late 80s - we all thought that's what USA is like.

It's more likely that the movie and the company chose the name because of its meaning. A convoy is literally a group of ships or vehicles transporting something, usually protected.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/convoy

The Peckinpah movie (and the hit C.W. McCall song that inspired it several years earlier) stands among the most famous instances of trucking in popular culture-- I would guess rather strongly that it's a reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss

somebody gotta link the convoy song!

Logically, then, the next move would be a high-speed, long-distance, high value small load courier startup called Vanishing Point.

Expect it to have a sudden, but dramatic, exit.

Notably, a URL for the website is missing from the news article, as well as pretty much every single news article on Convoy.

But I found it, after furious Google sleuthing.

Their website:

https://convoy.com/

And their Android app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.convoy.dri...

The iOS app is Coming Soon(TM), and apparently they received $2.5M in seed funding yesterday.

One would not have expected "convoy.com" to have required any "sleuthing" at all?

Yeah, that seems like a weird oversight considering that they linked to three other related services: Trucker Path, UberRUSH, and Go Go Messenger.

uShip has been doing this for a while, curious as to what competitive advantages Convoy is going to bring to the space.

Never underestimate the power of the long tail.

10-4 rubber ducky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy_(song)

Give it a listen. It's pretty bad...

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