Founders Friday – Fanny See
This Friday, we are excited to feature Fanny See, COO and Co-founder of Detrack.
About Fanny
Fanny’s entrepreneurship journey first started in 2012, with an online florist startup that she launched with her partner, Dason (Co-founder and CEO of Detrack). It didn’t take long for them to encounter every florist’s logistical nightmare- Valentine’s Day, in 2013.
After the nightmarish experience, Fanny and Dason searched for a solution to help them track and manage deliveries better, preferably through smartphones. Much to their surprise, no SME-friendly solutions were available.
Realising a market gap existed, they left their florist startup behind, roped in a new co-founder, Daniel (CTO & Co-founder of Detrack) and embarked on a journey with Detrack, an affordable proof-of-delivery solution for SMEs to manage their deliveries.
About Detrack
Detrack is a cloud-based real-time delivery tracking and electronic proof-of-delivery (e-POD) solution that digitalizes last-mile deliveries and provides a user-friendly platform for all stakeholders in the delivery process – drivers, customers and back-office staff.
Since Detrack began operations in mid-2013, more than 35 million deliveries have been completed using its platform. As the market-leading real-time (POD solution), Detrack’s mobile application has been translated into more than 21 languages, supporting users from more than 40 countries.
What has been the most satisfying aspect of entrepreneurship for you and why?
F: It has been most gratifying to be part of a committed and creative team that was able to create Detrack from scratch and to bring it to its current state. I think the metaphor of having a child is apt – as founders, we experience pretty much the joy and also the pain of having a “baby” and watching it grow up. From the difficult birthing process, where it was just 3 co-founders working round the clock to build the MVP, and then going global just 6 months after first launch, to acquiring our first customer from South Africa (who paid for annual subscriptions and is still with us), to having helped companies all over the world complete more than 35 million jobs today.
This journey has been most unbelievable!
Being able to experience the fun and excitement of seeing how Detrack can change the world through revolutionizing the last mile delivery experience is definitely the most satisfying aspect of entrepreneurship for me.
Drawing on your personal experiences, what traits do you think are essential for startup founders and why?
F: I would say tenacity, humility and optimism are essential traits for start-up founders. Being a founder of a start-up means starting something new and breaking new ground. Therefore, you will not know what to expect. But one thing is for sure, expect failures.
In Detrack’s start-up journey, we have encountered countless failures and obstacles. We have spent tens of thousands of dollars in growth strategies that don’t work in the B2B context that Detrack operates in. We have also encountered ‘impossible’ tech challenges that almost cut our start-up journey short.
It is important not to be daunted by the failures, and instead, be willing to learn from them, take advice and eat humble pie! Failures are good for start-ups. Be positive, humble, and tenacious in standing straight back up again. The sooner you meet failures, the fewer of them you will encounter. Being able to stand back up again and overcome a failure means you are one step ahead of your competitors, and have contributed to the building of your start-up’s defence
What was the biggest challenge you faced in scaling your sales and why?
F: As a bootstrap start-up based in Singapore, we face the challenge of ensuring 24 / 7 operations to serve our global customers while having to maintain the delicate balance of low operational and customer acquisition costs.
It was tough in the beginning where the co-founders had to burn the midnight oil, 7 days a week, and also on Singapore public holidays like Chinese New Year, as our global customers do not share the same rest days.
To overcome these challenges, a lot of focus was placed on building the infrastructure for a sustainable and scalable sales funnel that is mainly driven by self-onboarding customers.
Kudos to my team members, who have contributed immensely to the funnel that we have today – the majority of our customers managed to find Detrack, try it out, and then onboard on their own – all without a single support ticket!
How did you acquire your first customers?
J: The profiles of our first few customers were totally not what we expected. Coming from the online florist industry, we initially built Detrack to solve the last mile delivery issues that florists in Singapore faced. Never did we expect to solve a problem for a much bigger market.
When we first put up Detrack’s website, we started receiving a lot of interest from businesses all over the world as there weren’t similar solutions out there that could provide SMEs with an affordable but yet intuitive proof of delivery solution.
We quickly rode on the wave and created a global-ready version. Once that was released, we got our first customer – a distributing company from South Africa. The next customer was from the UK and the third was from Dubai. The ball has continued to roll ever since.
What aspects were most important when you were first building your team and why?
F: Hiring with an unorthodox mindset was critical for us. As a SaaS company in the logistics industry, there was no existing talent pool with experience that we could tap on. We therefore relied on a hiring philosophy that was based on attitude, personality and passion.
We hired people with passion, not experience, and gave them time and resources to pick up the skills they are passionate about. Then, we give them room to try new things, and fail, and try again until they succeed. We are a team of entrepreneurs in our own ways.
Some interesting stories to share about our hires – our Creative Lead was a trained programmer who had not been trained in creative work prior to joining us. Today, she heads a team that produces all our marketing collateral – video productions, photoshoots, banners, posters and artwork. Our Support Lead was formerly a PA and we have a Support Engineer who was a former chemist. We also have a Senior Software Developer who was formally an engineer specializing in designing manufacturing machinery and systems, while another software developer was trained as a Maritime Engineer. We also have two marketing team members who are former cabin crew!
Despite not having prior experience, our team members bring with them a strong desire to learn and the courage to do things differently. This diversity and passion enrich Detrack and have created a unique culture that we hold dear.
On hindsight, if you to build your team again, is there anything you would do differently?
F: There is absolutely nothing I would do differently! Our team is everything. People are the core of Detrack. Who we are doing this for, and who is doing this, are very important to us.
What sets you apart from other startups?
F: How Detrack works is very simple. In fact, that is what sets us apart from other platforms.
Imagine you are a business that delivers (e.g, online florist), and you’re currently using paper delivery notes and obtaining pen signatures from recipients. Your workflow would probably be very cumbersome, especially in the event of a delivery dispute (e.g, a customer claims its delivery did not arrive). Also, you will lack visibility of your delivery operations in your day-to-day operations and will not be able to answer customers’ queries with regards to delivery statuses.
With Detrack, all you need to do is head over to our website, sign up for a free account, add your first driver (free too!), and bam! Within just 5 minutes, you can add a delivery job via your favorite web browser, dispatch the job to the driver (via our free Detrack iOS or Android app), track your driver along the way, and your driver can complete the delivery by simply capturing the signature via the mobile app (sign on glass), take photos, and capture many other useful information.
Once the driver taps on the Submit POD button in our app, a PDF proof of delivery will be generated and sent to all stakeholders including the customer and back-office staff in real-time. Everybody gets full visibility of what’s going on and the progress of all your deliveries throughout the day. This reduces disputes to nearly zero, and any discrepancy can be swiftly resolved.
What really sets us apart is that we’ve designed our Detrack mobile app to be so easy to use, to the point that even drivers who are not tech savvy will be able to navigate the app functions like a pro. In fact, we have a business client who on-boarded our solution from signing up, testing, downloading the app, and dispatching all 20 drivers equipped with Detrack in less than 2 hours. That’s how fast and easy it is to digitalize your last-mile deliveries with Detrack.
Any other words of wisdom that you would like to share?
F: In our day-to-day operations, there are always hiccups that surface in an otherwise perfect plan. Over time, we’ve learnt to have a Plan B, and not get too affected when things don’t turn out the “perfect” way that we wanted.
Personally, I’ve learnt to adopt the same mentality. Always have a Plan B for everything, and don’t get too affected when things don’t turn out exactly the way I wanted it to. In this way, I can focus on executing Plan B to salvage the situation.
And oh, always reflect and learn from past mistakes. In this way, we can avoid repeating the same mistakes again.
Stay tuned for next week's episode of Founders Friday
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