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Comment by exclusiv | Hacker News Reader

I have some direct experience with some warehouses. On a personal level with employees and owners. And on a tech and solution level too.

I'm actually amazed these warehouses are even semi-functional with the talent and wild west environment they seem to operate in. In retrospect - they seem very similar to a police department.

There are a ton of super smart people in logistics but by and large, it's an industry full of cowboys.

Now, I've also been to super clean distribution centers that are incredible. Drones automatically fly around each evening to take inventory and operators that are on top of every piece of the business.

Disrupting an industry like this is very hard as you mentioned.

Much easier to break off pieces where you don't require a lot of people/stakeholders and the solution is 1) easy to say yes to and 2) easy and quick to deliver a win after the yes.

I want no part of that business unless it satisfies those things.

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Your comment was evocative, smart, brief, and enigmatic. If you had a blog or podcast I’d be all over it.

So what you are saying is the "good" logistics operators haver their shit together already and don't need your solutions, and the cowboys won't even consider them?

No, I'm saying that if you want to sell to both operators you should want to satisfy both criteria:

1) easy to say yes to and 2) easy and quick to deliver a win after the yes.

The cowboys would need solutions that work without having to change human processes much (if any). They have a hierarchical command of their subordinates akin to a police department or army, not a normal leadership command; they don't give them much trust or room to think. Getting them to say yes requires something that is pretty brain dead to implement and delivers results quickly.

The subordinates are going to trust the warehouse manager more than the business owner. There are often competing interests between those parties. If you satisfy the above, you can satisfy the owner and the warehouse manager and get a yes and get results. If you don't, you could have a great solution, get a yes from owner and a disastrous time wasting experience with the implementation. If you don't understand the human processes involved, your solution will fail.

The good operators are more likely to be open to trying things that require some change to their operation. Example: putting massive barcodes on pallets for the drones to easily detect nightly for inventory and installing power for drone stations or modifying human processes for efficiency. But good operators get pitched all the time and are more sophisticated so you still need to make it easy to yes and easy to win. If your solution needs a lot of human intervention and takes time to get the win, you can get sucked into that implementation vortex which is hard to scale.

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