Bek Abdullayev knew early on that customers would be interested in his startup, My Super Dispatch.
The company’s Web and mobile platform allows truckers to quickly submit the paperwork related to their deliveries. An invoicing process that used to take 45 days can be reduced to less than a minute. Customers see a huge reduction in the number of hours spent on processing.
Abdullayev talked about his company during the Sept. 23 edition of 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation.
He got the idea for My Super Dispatch from a previous, service-based business serving truckers who haul cars across the country. A few times a year, Abdullayev traveled with actual truckers to get a feel for their day-to-day problems. “Every time I saw a truck driver … they always carried around a folder or a big stack of papers.”
The paperwork problem was just as bad in trucking companies’ offices. Abdullayev visited one accounting department with a 4-foot-tall stack of documents in its inbox.
In 2013, Abdullayev took his concept for My Super Dispatch to a Lean Startup Machine weekend at Kauffman Labs, where he and others worked to research the “pain points” of potential customers and validate the idea as a business.
Something remarkable happened during the weekend. Abdullayev put up a landing page, complete with a PayPal button, to gauge interest in the My Super Dispatch concept. He quickly racked up more than $3,000 in sales.
“This told me there was definitely an opportunity there,” Abdullayev said. (You can read his firsthand account of the process here.)
The app launched last year, but Abdullayev had to relaunch last fall to address customer complaints. The change was worth it, though: Since May, My Super Dispatch’s revenues have quadrupled.
Right now, the company is focusing on trucking fleets of 20 trucks or fewer. Its service also helps customers reduce their risk of false insurance claims related to shipping damage, because the app includes the ability to take pictures of cargo before and after delivery.