[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we're speaking with Chronar Kamone, CEO and founder of TIEF, a supply chain visibility platform that's raised 82 million in funding. Chronar, how are you? >> I'm doing great, Brett, thanks for inviting me. >> No problem, super excited for our conversation. Before we dive in to talk about everything that you're building there, let's go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. >> Awesome, yeah, my name's Chronar Kamone. I'm the founder and CEO here at TIEF and background wise, I grew up in Kosovo. I don't know how much relevant that is, but I came to US when I was 17. I came as a senior in high school through the exchange student program where you live with a host family and then after high school I went to college and my master. So I went to Norwich University for my undergrad, studied computer engineering and math. I did two majors there in the minor in computer science and then at Tufts University I did my master's in electrical engineering. But throughout the journey I've been quite a bit involved in the wireless space and engineering so I'll kind of links the story of how I started the company and what I do today, but that's a little bit about me. >> What was going on inside your mind when you landed in the US there at age 17? >> Oh man, what was going on inside my mind? I was like, I'm going to land, it's going to be like New York City. So I landed in Boston, got picked up from a really good friend of mine, Jonathan. And he drove me to Vermont, and I went to Northfield, Vermont. It was a little late and I'm like, this is the town. This is it, I'm like, it's one pizzeria, one bank, one laundromat, one Chinese restaurant. I'm like, what is this, this is America. >> So they see in the movies? >> No, it was, so that was what was going on in my mind. >> And do you go back home often or do you just stay in the US now for the most part? >> I've been home every single year. I go there every year for a week or two or three. And now I have a team there also. So I've opened an office in Kosovo. We have with 205 employees and 80 are in Kosovo. >> Wow, after 600 episodes, you're the first founder that I've talked to from there. So thank you for being the first guest. >> That's awesome, great. >> Let's dive deep now into everything that you've been building for the last couple of years. So go ahead and just give us a quick overview of what the company does. So the company's called TIEV and what we do is we help companies all over the world track shipments. That's the simplest way I can put it. And the way we do it is we make these little GPS trackers that customers just press a button, put it on top of the shipment, usually inside of a trailer, inside of a container, and we give them real time information anywhere in the global where that shipment is. And in addition to that, the condition of the shipment, how hot, how wet, how cold did somebody open the trailer or container. And all of that data comes to our platform in real time using cellular connectivity. >> We have more than 700 customers think of strawberries, blueberries, servers, rocket parts, we track everything. >> Take us back to 2015 and the founding of the company. I know you touched on that a little bit when you're talking about your background, but take us back to 2015. What was going on then and what was it about this supply chain visibility problem that made you say, yep, that's it. I'm going to go dedicate the next nine years to my life. >> Maybe more, for sure. >> Always been an entrepreneur, turns out, since I was 14 years old, I just realized I wanted to play around code, start companies, try to do different things. And as I mentioned, my background is in engineering. I work for a startup called Bitwave Semiconductor. We built the world's most, it's called software defined radio on a chip. So a chip that would do 2G, 3G, 4G, all in a single chip set. And then I worked for an MIT startup where I was the first employee and this MIT professor that I worked with, Bitwave Semiconductor invited me to join his company. And there were built the world's most efficient base stations, those things that go on self-hours. So a lot of experience with wireless, but I've always worked for startups, but I've never worked for a big company ever in my life. And I just have that startup bug since I was a kid. Even my mom was like an entrepreneur because I would watch her do things. And I'm like, wow, this is the way I'm going to live. But the way I stumbled into supply chain logistics is what I say quote unquote through marriage. My wife's dad had a trucking company that he sold it last year. And every time I would go to his house, he would be on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. And I got pretty tired of it because I was trying to have dinner with him, trying to drink a glass of wine and he's getting up at 10 p.m., 9 p.m., calling drivers. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to make a GPS tracker. For fun, put in your trucks and then I'll make a little app using PHP and MySQL on the phone. And you can see where the truck drivers are. And that's how it started. And then his friends like, oh, you can track his trucks, why don't you track mine? I started tracking like 30, 40 trucks. But there was a lot of companies tracking trucks because you don't need a battery. You can just plug it into the truck and you have GPS data flowing into the cloud. And where I came up with this idea of putting trackers behind the truck on the trail inside the trailer was this truck driver, Tony. He was moving lobster and moving scallops from New Bedford. And every time he would move, he would, they would put this temperature sensor on top of these pallets and ask him how did this temperature sensor work. And he was like, well, at the end of the shipment, somebody takes a look at it and he gave me one. I'm like, that's crazy. Like, this is 2015, we got to figure out how to make things real time. So I went on Google and tried to find GPS trackers with battery. I couldn't find anything good. Everything I saw looked like Windows 3.1, Windows 98 type of user interface. I'm like, I'm naive, I'm going to start this company and that's how it all started. We have something in common then. I also married into the supply chain industry. I'll share some more details about that offline, but that's very much a part of my father-in-law's world and my wife's world as well. So probably a lot to talk about there. Oh, that's awesome. It's fun every day, isn't it? It's fun. I've definitely learned a lot and it's very interesting. As you dive deep into supply chain and logistics, you start to uncover all of these random facts that are just mind-blowing, at least that's been my experience. Yeah, same here. For me, it was many years later after I started realizing that $22 trillion of global trade happened every single year in the United States. I'm like, this is not a small number and companies started $11 trillion in logistics. It's crazy. That is absolutely insane and so crazy. It must have been interesting during COVID. I feel like supply chain became a word that every household was using and there were people, everyone was talking about supply chain. I have to think there, guess that that wasn't normal. What was COVID like for you and for the company? Yeah, so if I go back to COVID, this is March 2020, right? February 2020. Just for context, our revenue in 2019, it was like 350k a year. And when we got into 2020, in December of 2019, January of 2020, we just released the world's first single-use 5G ready tracker. And that was, I would say, we hit product market fit with that because customers were using these single-use trackers that go on shipments, but they were 2G, like GSM. And 2G was phasing out, T-Mobile was shutting down, AT&T was shutting down, Verizon shut it down, so your connectivity is not that great. And then global is also pretty abysmal. And what we did, we released a 5G ready with 4G LTE, but very cost effective. And we were the first in the market. And the customers started buying more and more. And then when COVID hit, I don't think that changed much. My company and Tive, I would say, it created more awareness in the kitchen table. And when people were eating, like you said, everybody was talking about supply sheet logistics, but we really hit product market fit in January when we released the product. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. What happened before you've reached product market fit? What was that journey like for you? Oh, it was a lot of, I would say, trial and error. That's another one way to put it. First, we released this tracker. And I thought that if I make the world's best tracker, which we did, we're going to have a lot of sales and everybody's going to buy this tracker. And when we did it, we bought it. We sold it for $250 and you have to pay $50 a month for the tracker. And it was great. It had more than a year battery life. This is 2017, 2018. For that time, it was pretty advanced. And some customers loved it, but the challenge was they couldn't use it a lot, because they had to figure out how they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be one of my first customers was Nokia. But then they would have to return these trackers back. And it was logistical difficulty, because they would do everything to ship their product from A to B. Now they have to return a tracker from B to A. So as we're running out of money back in 2018, I had very little left and I was going to run out of money in three months. I still remember and I had to extend it to nine. In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that. And then what I had to do is figure out, we need to figure out how to sell more. So one of the biggest things, and I would say one of the advice that I give to a lot of entrepreneurs is do not be afraid to cold call customers, especially potential customers. So I started cold calling, started cold emailing, like 150, 200 customers a week. I hired a few college grads, and they started working with me. And that's all we all do, email, cold call, email, cold call, change messaging, change the subject line, change how we write things and just try and try and try. What happened is we got a lot of responses. We were usually doing like one proof of value a month. We started doing two, three per week. And but throughout that process, we learned a lot about this issue. And we learned that we got to figure out how to make more cost-effective trackers that could be used once. And if the customer doesn't return them, it's okay. And that was one of the biggest lessons. And I can go into details how we did that. But that's one way we figured out product market fit. I always love when founders come out and share the stories of some of the pain that they've experienced in the journey. I'm sure it was not easy to do those layoffs. I've done a lot of cold calling, a lot of cold emailing. It's a pain. It's a grind. It's not fun work, but getting that deal is fun. And you do feel good at that point, at least. But I always appreciate hearing those types of stories. Yeah, thank you. Now let's talk about how did you word that, you know, single use where it could be thrown away. Obviously, Elon Musk is doing that with rockets. Sounds like you're doing that with trackers. From an innovation and a technology perspective, how hard was it to get it to that point that you could have them just be thrown away like that? The biggest challenge was cost. So how can you make a tracker that's sub $30, $40 so you could sell it for $40, $50, $60, right? Because what I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs, they say, "Oh, we have product market fit. People are buying it." But then they sell a product that's potentially losing money in the beginning. I couldn't afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like, going with the first sale. So we had to figure out how do we make very cost-effective trackers? And what we did is we flew to China, myself and my VP of technology, Martin. And Martin's amazing. We went and visited eight different manufacturing sites all over China, in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, in Guangduo, and all over the place. And we figured out who can make cost-effective trackers for us, but most importantly, who can listen to us? Because we have the ideas, we have the way on how we want to build this, how we want to design it, what's important. We don't want to just buy something that doesn't work for our customers. And we figured out that intersection between cost and, I would say, empathy with the manufacturer, and we've been able, very successful to date. So I think that's one of the things that just people think things are impossible. You just get on a plane and go actually figure it out on your own. Who's the ICP today? And what was that process like and that journey and the trial and error to really lock in that ICP? Yeah, I'll be honest in the beginning, I thought the VP of supply chain was our ICP, the chief supply chain officer was our ICP. And what we realized over time, and after a lot of cold emails, cold calls, and people who are responding, we kept getting directed towards logistics managers, of course, transportation managers, people are actually doing the work of moving the goods from A to B. And that's how we figured out as far as the persona goes. The other part was the vertical and the vertical and the beginning. I always thought that pharma was going to be the biggest vertical for us. And we're going to win there right immediately. But what I realized over time, we've been trying to unlock pharma for a while. We finally started to and it's going to be very big for us in 2024 and 2025. But in 2015, I thought all pharma customers are going to line up and sign up. The challenges with pharma, there's so many regulatory requirements you got to pass through. There was no time for me to get that done, no team. It's a lot of work in the beginning. And that was another shock. I thought that life sciences of pharma was going to be a big customer. But when we realized this produce market is huge, because customers care to make sure that those strawberries, those blueberries, that poultry, chicken, turkey, meat, bananas, asparagus, they want to make sure that those arrive in good condition at the retail store. And temperature is very important for those, but they also want to do it very cost-effectively. And that's where we really started to see some strides in the beginning. Yeah, one thing as a founder that I deal with is I have an idea and I execute on it. And it's not working sometimes. And in my head, I'm telling myself, just keep going. It'll eventually work. But the reality is sometimes you have to actually do the opposite and tell yourself, you were wrong. That's not going to work and you need to change. How do you approach that? And how do you know when it's time to just keep grinding and keep pushing on pharma life sciences or it's time to scale it back and reevaluate and then go a different direction? I'll just use the example of pharma life sciences. So what we realized is, okay, we're not going to have meaningful revenue in that I have to not put too much energy on my team and myself to go after those customers, because we're not going to see revenue now. So we're going to put it, I would say, not in the back burner, but always know that when the team grows and when we grow and we've sold millions of trackers, we're going to be ready for that market. And that's what happened. We found that customers, logistics companies and food market were much eager to buy trackers today, pay us today, use them today. Whereas pharma is going to be big for us. It's already big now, but it's going to become much bigger in 2024 and 2025. But this is what, nine years later. And what was that unlock with pharma? Why is it going to be so big in the future? Can you impact that a little bit for us? Yeah, for sure. One of the biggest hurdles that you have to pass on the life sciences and pharma is the regulatory requirements. So there's these things like CFR 21 part 11, making sure that your data is not being manipulated, making sure that all the data that customers see there is exactly what the tracker setting was on temperature side, making sure that you can generate reports for that pharma customers need. But also they want the device that's been very successful in pharma is what I call temperature logger that's not real time. But the temperature logger was nice about it. It has a screen, you can plug it into a computer at the end of the shipment and download the data. So you have 100% reliability on the data. And on the real time track inside, that hasn't been fully cracked yet. There are some companies that have done it, but pharma customers are still begging for a very reliable real time tracker on the pharma side. And that's something we're working on and we'll release the prototype at the end of this year. And then we'll start selling in large volumes in Q1. Let's talk about marketing philosophy and marketing strategy. How would you summarize the marketing strategy today? So on strategy and philosophy, this is how I explain it always to my marketing team. I say, I want two feelings to be experienced by our customers through our marketing. The number one, I want our customers to love our brand. And number two, I want the customers to trust our brand. If we can achieve those two things, love and trust, which are difficult, because somebody can love the brand, but they might not trust it because the product is not good. So we have to do both at the same time. But through messaging, you can convey both of those. So a little bit of fun sometimes, create a little bit loving feeling with the customers. And then with case studies, with use cases, with shipments that we've saved, with real world customers who really trust our devices, you start building more trust. Those are the two philosophy that I have around marketing. Let's talk about love. How do you build love with customers? I think it starts with employees. It starts with a culture inside the company. If we all love one another, I think the customer starts to experience that too. And one of the biggest areas where customers sees that is in customer support, in sales and account management. And what we have is just immediate responses, being able to show customers that we really, really care. That's where love starts. It starts with care from the support team. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70 percent less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. And I know you mentioned a few things there that you do to address the trust side of the equation. What's like the number one most impactful thing you've done to really build trust with your customers? The number one, I would say is transparency. That's our number one value in the company, transparency first, so that we can operate better as a business. When I say transparency first, I also mean with customers. So what I've done, if there's been a challenge in the market or we run into an issue, I've trained the team and I've done it myself to immediately call the customer, email the customer, apologize to the customer, tell them about the issue before they figure out the issue. But I think that builds more trust than anything else, especially when things are not going well. What about your market category? Is it supply chain visibility? And if so, are there buyers who are out there just thinking, "Oh, I need a supply chain visibility platform." Or do you have to go out there, convince them they need a supply chain visibility platform, and then sell them a supply chain visibility platform? That's a good question. So if you look at the magic quadrant of Gardener, we're not there. We're not in the real-time visibility platforms. We're not in the supply chain visibility category. I believe we're defining a new category as a business. So when we sell the customers, we're not going there and selling them a supply chain visibility platform. What we're selling them is peace of mind and we're selling them away for them to really understand 100% of the time with 100% visibility on what's happening with their supply chain so they can operate more efficiently. If I had to say maybe what category we're defining, what category we're creating, I've thought a lot of it, but think of IoT-based supply chain visibility. That's one way that I could categorize the category that we're creating. And what's going to happen over time is, and this is something that we have to educate our customers a little bit and tell them, "We have customers who reach out." Or we talk to them like, "This is real. I can pay $45, $50 and actually get real-time visibility." And I don't have to return this tracker and you guys can recycle it. Like, "Yeah, this is real. It's happening. It's in the world today." And not many people know that. And the more people see this as a possibility, this new category is being defined and growing quite a bit. We've sold more than one and a half million trackers the date. Wow. What's the goal for this year? Can you share how many trackers you want to sell? Ideally, we'd love to do a million, but let's see. Probably we'll do somewhere at least 700 feet to get a million. So we'll bring you back on the first week of January to check in on how things are going. Oh, I'd love to. Yes. What about building out the marketing team specifically? From my conversations with other founders, that's always very hard. What's your experience been like building a marketing team and what have you learned from doing so? What I've learned is in the beginning, when you build out a marketing team, you want to find, I would say, hustlers in the beginning. Definitely people who are willing to roll up their sleeve and do everything on their own. Whether it's press release, whether it's guerrilla marketing, whether it's understanding how Google ads on LinkedIn ads work, whether it's SEO search, figure it out. How do you get as many blogs out there as possible so your ranking can go up? In the early stages, that's super, super important. And what happens when you get to 10, 20 million, I would say, in ARR, suddenly there's this shift where data starts to play a huge role in marketing. And then I think that's when a more data-driven marketing approach is important, but I would say until then, you've got to try everything. What about fundraising? So as I mentioned there in the intro, I've seen 82 million to date. At least that's what Crunchbase says. Is that right? Is that right? 80, yes. 80 million. Okay. Very close, please. All right. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey of raising $80 million? I'll talk to probably somewhere between, I don't know the exact number, 600, just 800 different investors, whether it's VCs or angel investors or private equity throughout my journey as a founder. And all of that, I've gotten a total of, I think it's somewhere between 14, 8, 18 term sheets. I forget the exact number and we've signed five today or six. So think of pre-seed, seed, seed, one, A, A, one, B, all of those rounds. One of the biggest things that I've learned is that same way as you build trust with customers, you got to build trust with a venture capital community and with the investor community. And the reason why that's very important is because nobody will just write a check the first day that you meet them. And I'm sure you have this experience, but they will write the check three months, six months, nine months later or 12 months later, sometimes 24 months later. But one of the biggest things is you tell them what you're doing. You get advice from everyone because there's a lot of amazing investors out there. And then you digest all of that and you say, this is what I'm going to do next. And I'll check in with you in three months. And then three months later you were at point A three months ago. Now you're at point B and they can start drawing a line. And then three months later, six months later, you're at point C and you've told them you'll be at point C and ideal. You want to be a little bit about point C with more attraction. So then they start building this line from A to B to C and can say, wow, I can actually trust your as a founder, as an entrepreneur. If he's telling me he's going to do ABC, he's got to do deal all the way to IPO. I'm going to back him up. And that's one of the biggest things out there. Let's imagine that a early stage founder who's trying to build supply chain technology comes to you and they say, okay, you've had this company now for almost a decade. What would be your number one piece of advice that you'd give them based on everything that you've learned? The number one piece of advice, especially in supply chain tech that I'll give them is the one that I mentioned to you around cold calling. You have to be close to customers, especially in supply chain logistics. It's such an operational world, such in daily basis things change. Going to figure out, visit warehouses, visit logistics centers, visit DCs, distribution centers, figure out a way how to get into with customers as much as possible early on, so you can learn where the pain points are. There's so much pain in supply chain tech still brick. It's immense amount of pain. People, I want to invest in told me that people true through last to go by in this industry, because there's just so much pain and there's so much opportunity. But the number one thing I would say is just get as close to the customers and learn from them and as many of them as possible. Why do you think that there's massive market? There's massive pain and it seems like there's just not a lot of activity or no one's really solving the pain points apart from you and maybe a small number of other companies. But it sounds like there's still a lot of pain. Why is that? Is it just very, very difficult and very, very complex or what's the reason? Yes, the reason is because of, I would say, there's a lot, but just on top of my mind right now, Brett, what's coming is fragmentation and it's physical. Everything that we do, everything, the microphone that I'm talking to, the microphone that you're talking on, it's something that got shipped to you and to me. It didn't originate from there. Everything, our table, the chair that we're sitting on, it got shipped to us from somewhere or we picked it up somewhere that got shipped to from somewhere else. There's so much physical moment and physical moment always has uncertainties. And on top of that, you have a ton of fragmentation. Ten of those of thousands of logistic service providers touching that product, moving it from A to B and then B to C and then C to D and all of those working in different systems. Somebody works at a different transportation mapping system and all the one at different TMS and all the one has a carrier that has different GPS's and all that has a carrier that has other GPS. It's just so fragmented. The systems are all over the place and on top of that, you have the physical operational complexities. It's very difficult to say, well, we have the one solution that solves all of it. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision look like here? Three to five years, I believe that we're going to be a fairly large company, somewhere in the 200 plus million dollar range on revenue, maybe even more. And the goal is to prepare ourselves to go public. I'm very confident that we're going to achieve that. What'll be the most important thing for you to really get right and really nail to make that happen? The most important thing I would say is, so what happens is I'm sure you've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. There's plateaus on every single product in the world, even the 2G plateaued, right? There's now you have to release the 5G and now we release the newer lower cost tracker. And then there's a new tracker that we're releasing on life sciences to go after another vertical and we're going to continue to do that on our software. The biggest thing that we need to do right is execute on the product roadmap and keep innovating there so that we can capture more and more and more of the market share. The market's there. I know that for a fact, it's execution. That's the most important thing. You'll have to agree here on the spot. You will give us the first interview after you ring the bell after the IPO. First second deal. Yeah, first and second. In the top five. Top five, for sure. Awesome, man. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed our conversation and really appreciate you taking the time to talk about everything that you're building. Before we wrap, if there's any founders that are listening in that want to fall along with your journey, where should they go? Go to time.com. You can also email me kronaratai.com. Amazing. Kronar, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Brett. I really enjoyed it. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episodes, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
