When Carrie Love sold her marketing company in 2016, the Portland entrepreneur knew she wanted her next venture to be something meaningful.
The result is MustDeliver. It’s a shipping and logistics startup aimed at bringing radical transparency to the industry by directly connecting owner-operator and small trucking companies to small and medium-sized manufacturers that have loads to deliver.
The startup takes Love back to her roots, she said. The youngest of 11 children growing up in Northern Maine, the trucking industry has been foundational to her family with members all finding careers in the industry.
“It’s an opaque industry,” she said.
MustDeliver is a team of six full-time employees plus a contractor. The company was co-founded by Woody Stratton, who is also owner of manufacturer Axiom Custom Products. Axiom provides design, fabrication, logistics and installation services for clients, including the retailer Muji Portland, Intel, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Sokol Blosser Winery.
It was Stratton, a past business partner of Love’s, who first had her take a look at the challenges of small independent drivers, shippers and freight brokers.
She went straight to the source for research, talking with more than 100 truck drivers at a Jubitz truck stop in North Portland. Those discussions yielded three important themes related to the challenges drivers face:
- Income security for owner/operators.
- Safety.
- Support for their businesses.
As Love found, every truck is a small business in itself and the drivers who own them, not to mention drive them, often struggle to keep up with invoicing and follow-ups with shippers for payment.
“It was obvious they wanted a better way to find loads. And not just making a (freight broker) load board better,” she said. “They didn’t want the same thing.”
Typically, the two sides of the shipping marketplace are connected through freight brokers and there are a number of technology-driven products aimed at that market dynamic. Many focus on large companies with complex logistics or companies that are able to build their own tools, something smaller independent operators are unable to do.
This is an industry not unfamiliar locally. Beaverton-based DAT Freight & Analytics has built a business over 40 years matching loads and drivers and has evolved to a sophisticated software company from a physical message board at truck stops. Last year, Portland startup Fleet Logistics, which built a marketplace connecting businesses to freight forwarders and other providers, was acquired by Seattle-based Expeditors International of Washington Inc (Nasdaq: EXPD).
Love is focused on the smaller trucking operators that are fragmented but still a large portion of the market. She noted 90% of all trucking fleets are less than 10 trucks. The small- to medium-sized manufacturers she is focused on spend $100 billion annually on freight and, according to the National Manufacturers Association, 80 cents of every freight dollar is spent on trucking, she added.
MustDeliver launched its marketplace in September with a focus on shippers and truckers in the Midwest. There are about 500 owner operators on the platform and 14 to 15 manufacturers signed up with a handful that are active.
So far the startup has been funded by a friends-and-family round of investment that Love is working to close. She has raised $825,000 so far. As she finishes fundraising for that round, the money will be used to bring on more engineers and onboard more manufacturers.
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed supply chain issues in the economy and inefficiencies, Love said. It also gave her a sense that she is on the right track with MustDeliver to facilitate better relationships between drivers and their customers.
“This is an industry that would benefit on every level from transparency,” she said. “We want our drivers to be more supported and to have a good working knowledge of what to expect. We want them to add trucks and feel a part of the transaction. ... We want to match the right driver at the right time to the right load.”
Closer look
MustDeliver
What it does: Matches truck drivers with clients that has loads to deliver
Founders: Carrie Love and Woody Stratton
Employees: 6 full time, 1 contractor
Money raised: $825,000
Timeline:
- 2005: Carrie Love and her husband move to Portland, his hometown.
- 2016: Love sells her marketing business. Business partner Woody Stratton suggests she look at trucking for her next endeavor.
- 2017/18: Love starts doing customer research surveying truck drivers at a North Portland Jubitz.
- Sept. 2020: MustDeliver marketplace launches with truck drivers in the Midwest.
- Oct. 2020: MustDeliver wins early stage investment at the Bend Venture Conference.
