Zander Adell, co-founder and CEO of Doorman. Zander’s aiming to solve the frustrating problem of finding a note on your door, instead of your Amazon or FedEx package. He left his job as technical director at Pixar to go to Business school, and wound up solving one of the stickiest problems in e-commerce. Listen as Zander and Nathan talk Logistics, changing a business ecosystem, and dreaming big.

Famous 5 Favorite Book? – Good to Great What CEO do you follow? — Jeff Bezos What is your favorite online tool? — Slack Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Yes If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? — To focus on the big dream, not the little pieces along the way

Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:26 – Nathan’s introduction 02:00 – Welcoming Zander to the show 02:20 – Zander left Pixar in his early 30s to go to business school 02:50 – He wanted to understand how to get a business off the ground 03:10 – Fascinated by the logistics element of apps 03:40 – Worked in the gaming industry briefly before starting Doorman 04:10 – Doorman aims to solve the e-commerce problem of getting your stuff delivered 04:40 – It lets customers schedule when a package will come to their house 05:10 – We’re still in a transitional period between shopping in person and online 05:30 – The existing logistics infrastructure isn’t ready to interact with consumers 06:00 – Revenue comes from both retail partnerships and consumer customers 06:40 – Items are delivered to Doorman’s warehouse; customers then choose a delivery time 07:10 – Warehouses in San Francisco, Chicago and New York 07:20 – Working with retailers is currently more profitable 07:50 – Launched in 2014 08:00 – One co-founder and a team of 10 people 08:15 – Raised a little over $3 million through 500 Startups 09:00 – Around 10-20% growth of users per month 10:40 – Delivered over 100,000 packages 11:10 – “We’ll deliver pretty much anything” - anything under 45lb is a normal package 12:00 – Furniture etc. costs a little more 12:40 – Doorman is currently trying to build economies of scale 14:15 – A big win in 2016 would be hooking up with a large retailer 15:00 – Don’t consider themselves a SaaS business - but use SaaS measures 16:00 – Logistics margins are tight - they can get down to 5% in big companies 16:50 – “We can scale without really owning anything” 17:10 – Delivering 15-20 packages on average for top-quartile customers 18:25 – People’s buying doubled when they started using Doorman 21:20 – Famous Five

3 Key Points: Logistics companies can learn from the pared-down model of SaaS. It’s possible to grow without owning bricks-and-mortar infrastructure, or fleets of lorries. Assess whether what you’re doing right now is serving your long-term goals. If it isn’t: change what you’re doing. When you solve a problem in an ecosystem, you change people’s behaviour. Simply providing an effective solution can make a market develop.

Resources Mentioned: Freshbooks - The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts. Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible. Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+ Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives