Did you know that you can navigate the posts by swiping left and right?
Context: https://evotrux.com
Hello!
It’s been a while since I have had the time and clarity to write down what has happened since the last entry. But here we are: a little older, a little more experienced and a little further down the road. “Ahí va”.
This post is my attempt at building a high-level story around the last 4 years between our mvp launch and our “seed” round raise in early 2026. By writing this I wish to capture the journey while I have it fresh, and I want to help guide anyone attempting anything similar. Here we go.
Where was I in my previous post?
Ah, yes of course. It was October 2022. Almost 2 months post-launch. Excitement was still high. The brand new platform was working well (technically speaking), and a few customers had successfully migrated from the old evotrux to the new evotrux 2.0. A lot of them also did not figure it out - we underestimated the friction of needing to recreate an account. Regardless, new and existing users were trickling in, and the logistics marketplace was slowly coming to life. We were getting ready to see the first wave of paying customers…or so we thought.
The product was receiving engagement, but users were not completing the journey. Think of Airbnb: you set dates, find a place, pay, communicate with the host and eventually you grill burgers on someone else’s porch (and hopefully nothing burns down). Our users were getting stuck at the “finding a place” stage: or better said, that’s the last step until which it made sense to stay on evotrux.
Users would find their logistics partner, and promptly go off-platform to arrange the real shipment. Since those shipments were not being booked through the platform, “stale” shipments would remain - the person needing to move this shipment had already found someone for it, and going back and updating their posting was unnecessary work.
In hindsight, it was our first product design lesson. There was not much at the other end of booking a shipment. No status updates, live chat or any of what’s needed in the real world. People will do what makes sense to them, so what made sense was to use evotrux for the “find” stage, and then to take their shipment to the tools that took care of actually fulfilling a shipment after finding a carrier: The phone, the email, the TMS.
The paying customers did not materialize. We also did not have an easy answer beyond what we were already doing to compel customers that they should pay for our service. Expanding the platform’s capabilities to be useful in the post-booking world (live communication, doc exchange, tracking updates, data dashboards…) was not something we could even dream of taking on with the amount of time left on the runway.
The decision was made to shrink the company to three people (the two original co-founders + a developer) in a bid to gain 3-ish months of runway. It was that or shut down by the end of the year. I received the offer to be part of that 3 person team a few days before Christmas 2022. It was sad and daunting. I still believed we could take this idea somewhere so I accepted. For the next 3-ish years we would live 4 months at a time, gaining just enough momentum each time to raise capital for another 4 months of oxygen.
Over the 2022 holiday season downtime, we furiously worked to improve the UX. We threw away key frontend pieces in a bid for simplification across the board. Session replay technology really opened our eyes here.
A new niche?
The original product thesis was that evotrux was a marketplace first, and on the shipper side we were hoping to attract basically anyone who had goods to move. This made us compete with all the other loadboards and brokers - a well-established category and a notoriously frustrating set of bloated and hard to use software products. Crucially, most of the products in this space are directed at logistics professionals (AKA logistics brokers). We were competing with everyone else for the same customers.
Among our first customers was a manufacturing company that was using the platform to directly manage their shipments. After reaching out to the customer, we learned they preferred our platform because it was easy to use (remember, at this point it was an MVP), so compared to most other load boards, it was considerably less bloated.
That same emphasis on simplicity showed up in another important way. Our platform wasn’t overly technical when it came to logistics details, which allowed people without deep domain knowledge to use it successfully. Looking back, it feels like we struck the right balance: we let the humans with expertise handle the complexity (the carriers on the other end), while keeping the interface and system interactions straightforward, without making too many assumptions about how things should be done.
For the next 2 years, we leaned into this new type of customer - manufacturers and businesses, not brokers - and slowly, very slowly (recall we were three people, only one of them being a software developer) built around them.
Every new feature was its own mini mvp. Every new project had to be sized, debated, and stripped of anything absolutely not essential. This constraint-driven planning taught us discipline around how we invested our time and this has gone on to become one of our main guiding principles. We call it the “mvp mindset”.
Companies who own the goods (our new customer profile) need different tools from brokers who are handling a shipment on behalf of someone else. “Direct shippers” (as they are known in the logistics space) need ways to work with their existing carriers - they don’t always need to go to market for bidding or brokering a shipment. They have a set of carriers they trust to get the job done. Direct shippers also need collaboration features such that team members can collaborate and hand-off tasks effectively. Direct shipper management also needs to see how the department is doing, how much it’s spending and whether they are on track to meet the logistics budget for the year.
On the other hand, direct shippers do need to go to market sometimes, for example, when they need to deliver goods to a customer in a location not covered by their trusted carriers. Guided by customer feedback, we began to address all of these areas for which there was no unified solution.
Through very persistent work in outbound sales (and s l o w B2B sales cycles), that single direct shipper customer eventually turned into a handful. We were beginning to form a new hypothesis on who our platform was for. It was still a marketplace, but the supply side of the marketplace was a different customer profile from the one we had started with. Much more specific (good!), but also with pain points we did not personally know (lots to learn!).
After what seemed like decades, thanks to successful pilots, our first enterprise customers started rolling out adoption of evotrux in their branches across the country. We developed deep relationships with them through months of collaborating on the roadmap, putting everything on the line to fulfill commitments, solving everyday problems, and going the extra mile in on-boarding and training their workforce to use evotrux.
Within every successful org adoption, we found there was a “champion” on the customer side who was driving change and adoption. We leaned in and forged strong bonds with these champions. To this day, without a champion, there is almost never full adoption.
For a specific need (mostly spot freight) evotrux was being adopted as the tool for the job. We were still a team of three, so maintaining a platform for two kinds of users (brokers and direct shippers) was never really manageable. We made the decision to focus on the direct shipper use case and made the tough choice to fire customers so that we could focus on building around direct shippers exclusively.
And they lived happily ever after…right?
Around the start of 2025 we had built up a small but healthy base of direct shippers using evotrux, as well as a network of carriers that could service their shippers and also provide capacity for the marketplace. Though still far away in terms of revenue, the activity helped us raise capital such that our fire had a little more fuel.
The software team had two great members join. We added a new sales and marketing department. We also gained new battle-tested business advisors, who helped us see issues we were not aware of, as well as provided input and direction on what our future could be.
We made the seed round happen, and as I write this, evotrux has grown to a team of nine, with plans to expand to about a dozen soon. We also made a deliberate leadership shift, bringing in a new CEO while our previous CEO transitioned to focus on product and operations. With that foundation in place, we’re now pushing forward with a bold roadmap for 2026 and beyond.
The road ahead is still very uncertain. There are still no guarantees, but we carry with us years of persistence and the lessons that come with it, particularly in product development. I will continue to write about the lessons of the last few years, but for now this is the very, very, very high level story.
I am forever thankful to the shareholders who have continuously backed us through the journey. Thank you for believing in us.
Secondly, I am grateful to all customers who have believed in us and have helped us drive adoption. I am particularly thankful to those who have gone out of their way to share their pain points, and those who have taken the time to participate in our customer interviews.
Lastly, I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to be on this ride with such passionate and enduring people as my co-founders, Dan Santos and Ross Prentice. There is much to learn from these two.
These, however, are not final acknowledgements. We are nowhere near the finish line.
That’s it! Stay tuned!
I could not let this go without briefly musing on how stories are made. The events of the last 4 years need to be massaged into a story for them to make sense to the outside world. It was never that clear where we were going, and there have been many more dead ends, frustrations, and rock-bottom moments than I could ever fit into a brief story encompassing years of work.
All I can say is that this is much harder than it looks, and that persistence is the only way we can ever hope to find out what we can achieve.