Brendon Beebe: SAAS Product Development & CTO Insights

Transcript:

JARED WARD: Hey guys, Jared here, CEO and founder of Luminous. This is the Ops Unfiltered podcast. I started Ops Unfiltered because I know what it feels like to be in operations in ecommerce. You're handling every single part of the business. It's easy to feel siloed in. It's easy to feel like you have to find a solution for everything. I hope that by bringing raw conversations from other operators in e commerce, That you can extract some value and not feel alone. Many of the operations leaders in e commerce are running into the same problems that you're running into. So I hope that maybe their solutions can be your solutions. Maybe you can feel not so alone in the warehouse, in purchasing, in your supply chain. So that's my hope. I hope this can be valuable for all of you. Let's dive in to have some raw conversations. How did you 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: approach the building of that product? We knew the industry very well. We knew all the players in the industry. But we took a customer first approach. I would say our best strength is our entire product team would Hey, we're this massive system, we'll grow with you. You'll become huge and we'll be with you the whole time. But the truth is, it's doing too much. These softwares are built for companies with thousands of employees. We understand that a lot of these operators They haven't done this before and they like the guidance and the help. 

 

JARED WARD: What are you most excited about in the future of the product?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Excited is like this, it changes constantly. Right now the big hype is like AI. Yeah, I think something we've done better than anybody we've talked to. I'm sure there's people out there, but.

 

JARED WARD: I want to start with your background real fast. And then how you came to Luminous. So how, qualify yourself as like a product head or like a CTO, what was your background in product and coding? 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: So before I came to Luminous, I had just spent probably about six or seven years at a company called 4UP. Golf management, golf course management software. And so it was a complicated beast. Golf courses are kind of small businesses generally doing between one and 3 million a year, but they have this complex business of reservations. They have online bookings, they have membership management, they have inventory, and so they need an ERP, but obviously they can't afford to purchase a net suite or a, an old branded ERP system. And so they have to go and find their own and there's this big space. And so I came into four up as a really early employee as the CTO heading up development and product at first with just, I think we were like eight or 10 employees at the time. We had about 80 to a hundred golf courses and then we expanded the product from there.

 

So we were building a product that could service. The smallest golf courses to the largest golf courses. 

 

JARED WARD: You guys had a decent sized exits. So obviously you did something well. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Forb ended up becoming the number one software in the industry. So it's a very crowded space with probably five or six main service providers. And Forb ended up reaching over 2000 golf courses, and it was the software of choice by cities, by management companies for years. We had a 0 percent turn, practically speaking before we were acquired in 2020 by an, a larger company who liked our product and wanted to expand even more. 

 

JARED WARD: Knowing you now, I feel like that's because the reason why Forb was able to have that much success is probably how you approach product. That has to be a big part of their success. So how did you approach the building of that product? And why do you think you guys were able to rise to the top? 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: There was a lot of people involved and it was just, wasn't just me, but we had a take of, we knew the industry very well. We knew all the players in the industry. And we also, But we took a customer first approach. So for up as a whole, was this, our goal was to help small businesses like golf courses succeed when golf running a business, wasn't maybe their number one concern. This is where I think it parallels with e commerce a lot is e commerce operators get into this, not being MBA is not knowing. Finance, not knowing the minutiae of what it takes to run a business. They're just creators. 

 

JARED WARD: In the golf industry. Back then was NetSuite trying to go down market or acumatic or no. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: No, no. Golf courses there. They don't have much more money to spend. And it's actually a fairly crowded space. There's a lot of. T Sheet companies in that area that are building very similar products. And so standing out, it's very difficult. And so you take a generic one like NetSuite, who's just built for everybody, and it doesn't really mesh really well at all. 

 

JARED WARD: Got it. How did you approach, since you guys are customer centric, how did you approach building decisions? Because if you're customer centric, I know you guys probably took a lot of feedback on the product. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, everything was super, we had I would say our best strength is our entire product team would scope out features and interview 20, 30, 40 customers from various size golf courses to different types of courses. And they would take that feedback, compile it, go back to the customer over and over again. And so what the end user ended up getting was what would deliver the most value and not what, a tech guy created in the corner. 

 

JARED WARD: Got it. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: And and we, I think we saw that a lot is that a lot of the core, a lot of the competitors in the space were building just generic scheduling software. They weren't at the course. I would say, I've just remembered this. One of the things we would do is we'd actually go on weekend trips. And spend several hours in the pro shop at these golf courses, just watching them work. And you start to notice things that they're doing that are annoying, that are, take a lot of time that are repetitive that you're like, Oh, we can actually just make your life way easier. And that's the approach we're taking here at luminous as well is it's, Hey, we understand how operators work. We have these ideas, but let's fly out to these courses. Let's see how they're working. Why doesn't a big, and we're asking the questions like, why doesn't this big ERP system work for, the small five to 10 million company?

 

JARED WARD: Let's backtrack just a little bit. Just to close off your days at four, our professor, so you. You guys eventually, obviously it was a team effort. You're a big part of it. You were the CTO for up. You guys became the number one ERP in the golf space. Eventually exited, you're acquired by a private equity form firm. Then you moved on to Luminous. So you were highlighting a couple of parallels that you see between building an ERP in the golf space. And then also building a big system of record for e commerce. Obviously the market is much bigger for general e commerce. What were, what are some of the parallels that you saw and why did you join Luminous?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yes, so the people who run and operate a golf course are people who love golf. They don't love running a business. Nor do they really understand fully how a business, how it should be run. They get in and they learn on the spot. I feel like e commerce is a lot the same way. Not that people don't have the same passion about selling online as they have playing golf, but I think they have the, they fall into it accidentally. And so they love the idea. Maybe it's becoming wealthy or starting their own business that drives them, but then they fall into this business. It's all of a sudden doing decent revenue. They have 50 to a hundred employees, and they've never been in that situation before. And they don't know how things are supposed to operate. And you start throwing out words like POs and transfer orders and pick lists and pick orders and location bin locations and some people have an understanding but it's all very surface level and they don't want a big system in the place. 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah, and I think a trend that we are that we're seeing right now is massive ERPs are going down market. So we see, you and I see this all the time, NetSuite is really jamming their product down these e commerce founders throats, like you're running into all of these issues that modern e commerce companies run into, implement NetSuite, we'll solve all of your problems. What do you think the issue is with that?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: I think the promise is that, hey, we're this massive system, we'll grow with you, you'll become huge and we'll be with you the whole time. But the truth is. Just, it's doing too much. These softwares are built for companies with thousands of employees. And it's built to, around the processes that a massive company should have. And not the processes that a small company actually has. And what a company needs is, they need software that melds to what they're actually doing right now. And can grow with them at a rate that makes sense to them. 

 

JARED WARD: Mitch Sanders from Thread. He had a great quote where so Thread is like a perfect ICP for us. They went to NetSuite before we even existed, I believe. But he was just like, our tech stack, our inventory management and everything is like a Toyota Corolla. Ah, like we didn't have all the features we needed, but it was reliable. He's like we went to NetSuite and it just feels like we, we upgraded to a Ferrari, a Corolla to a Ferrari. And it's I feel like when people, that was such a great analogy because think about the maintenance of a Ferrari. And that's what people don't. Get when they upgrade to NetSuite, yes, it can go 250 miles per hour. That's true, but it also requires so much service instead of like you brought up transfer orders instead of a, a copy and paste on Google sheet. No friction. All of a sudden you have to customize NetSuite through approval processes and polling and warehouse groups. And if it does pick and pack and like it pretty soon, it's just wow, like this was a lot more complicated than we thought. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah. A lot of things it does. So I think we see this in like NetSuite and Deere systems and a few others where they're built for accountants as financial systems. And accountants are great. They know how to do financial models, but the operations of a business don't necessarily fit into the strict structure of accounting. How we ran into this all the time at 4Up accountants would say it has to be this way, but then you talk to the operators and they're like. We don't, that's too much. We don't need it that complicated. It's easier just to build a system around what the operators need and let the accountants finish, figure it out later. Maybe you get to a point where that doesn't make sense and you need all this strict structure in place, but for a small company, it's just. It's way too much. 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. And also the companies that we target, yes, everybody's trying to grow, maybe their ceiling is just a 20 million a year brand or a 50 million a year brand. And, if that were true, then why do you need NetSuite? They're just leeching off of you for the rest of eternity. Yeah. Obviously building a system that can or has as comparable breadth of features to a NetSuite or an Acumatica, it's really difficult for us to, it's got to be really difficult as a tech head to handle that. How do you approach the building of Luminous to make sure we build what our customers need, but we're also building for scale.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, there's a model we look at, and it's, we want to introduce as few, as little friction as possible in order to implement the product fully for them. So a business probably needs the full set of tools, but the accuracy changes. Oh, I'm trying to think of a good example. It's like picklist, for example, we'll talk with customers who don't have bins by location by bins. They don't have official picklist. They don't have a QC process, but their inventory is completely accurate or 99 percent accurate. And so if we come in there and we're like, here's the right way to run a business, you have to print out a picklist. Then you have to go pick it and then you have to go stage it. And then you have to print out the label. 

 

JARED WARD: And you have to scan it. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: You have to scan everything. It's just like you have to add all this unnecessary friction so they can get that extra 1 percent of inventory accuracy. So we build it for those people. Like we want the operators to be able to decide how much friction or how many processes do we want to add and then measure that with how much benefit are we getting? Because eventually those businesses will scale to a point where maybe their inventory is only 80 percent accurate. And it's like, all right, we need something in place. That's it. In order to increase it by 15 percent and so the increased costs of doing QC verification and pick and pack and location by bins all of a sudden makes sense. And so we build a product that scales with them as they need the right features. 

 

JARED WARD: And I feel like internal. In the clients that we service, there's pull between the executives or the founders who they want as they're growing, they want more high level views of like, how efficient is my warehouse? Let me pull together an actual forecast. Let's make sure we're getting the best cost. And then you have the operators who are doing everything. So it's, I guess just my commentary on what you just said is. How can we give the founders and C suites of these bigger ecommerce companies that high level visibility that they're craving now to scale more while also giving the least amount of friction and processes to the operators? Cause for example, Hey, we really need to get our order defect rate down or our order inaccuracies, like the pickers are putting in the wrong bins at scale, that becomes more of an issue. And the founders are like, yeah, we need to do something about this. Luminous, the cool thing about that, like QC verification, how you built it is you can manually verify. You can toggle it on or off where I like it won't come. It won't force you to do it unless you wanted to. You can verify everything in the order manually, or you can scan everything like it's very flexible. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, and we want to be able to come in and we understand a lot of these operators. haven't done this before and they like the guidance and the help. And we'll offer our suggestions and tell you this is how we've seen other companies do it. But we never want to do is to come in and say, this is the right way to do it. You're doing it wrong. You have to follow it. And I've talked to so many people who take that approach. They come in and say, this is the way you must follow. And it just breaks. I think we even did it for a while. Yeah. We'd come into a business and say, that's not the right way of doing it. 

 

JARED WARD: Yep. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: And it's just, it's not the right take. I don't think. 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. Cause ultimately. The people using the software have to adopt it and what pulls people back from adoption? It's if they don't agree with the process forcing. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, if you have to pivot the process a hundred percent, and then you have to, and it adds more friction, it adds a whole bunch of extra steps. That's the last thing you want to do. is to have a list of things you have to follow just to keep the system intake.

 

JARED WARD: One thing I'll say about you is, I think there might be some higher level tech minds who might listen to what you're saying and be like, Oh, so you're just customizing the product for every single person? No, we're not. We're actually, we've seen in other markets. People challenge the status quo of rigid processes. So for example, like product management and managing a development team of a tech product, Atlassian really disrupted the industry. Like that, that you can come in at an. You can come in for free as an Atlassian customer and you can grow to like a massive team. Same thing with HubSpot, what HubSpot did to Salesforce. Like they've proven, they challenged the status quo that no, it doesn't have to be super rigid. That's what I actually think we are just challenging the status quo of supply chain inventory systems. Ecommerce is just highlighting, no, this old, antiquated, rigid way of doing things. You don't have to do it that way. And the systems haven't changed yet. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: And so the counter argument I would hear is Oh, X, this X brand already does this. They have automations. And I think what we find is people build this super structured, this is how a business should run. And then they bolt on automations on the end. And so if anybody's listening, I guarantee they've talked to a sales rep who's Oh, we have automations. It'll make, they'll fix it all. And what you end up with is this like automation soup that like melds the rigid structure, but then you have these automations that are doing something in the background. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't work. And I've talked to. I don't know, probably 20 or 30 small e commerce companies who all have that same feedback. Automations just seem to be this big thing, and every company does it. And we'll, while we have automations, it's not, it's almost part of the foundation of how everything works. Is we have small components, they're meant to work together independently or with user input. And that's how we're trying to do things differently. Because we want to work for that. Company, that's two people as well as we work for a company. That's 1000 people. 

 

JARED WARD: Exactly. Yeah. And that rigid point of view just comes from the belief of it comes from the belief of you should do your picking flow like this. You should do counts like this. You should receive like this. You should purchase like that. And where e commerce is just like busting the door open on all of that is an e commerce company can purchase. They can send something to a 3PL, kit something within their warehouse, like it's no longer so rigid, those lines between supply chain. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Some experience you don't, I don't think you know that I have, is for a year I worked as a JD Edwards consultant.

 

JARED WARD: What?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: JD Edwards is like a NetSuite-esque ERP system. And so we would go in, implement JD Edwards, and the client would then spend You know, probably at the end of the day, they spent millions of dollars customizing JD Edwards to do what they wanted to it was just, it's very similar to how the NetSuite approach where it's, all right, let's take this really rigid box. You can spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and let's customize the ERP to meet your needs. And the end of the day, you get something that works. It's great if you're a big multinational corporation with, tens of thousands of employees, but it's just so overkill for us. 

 

JARED WARD: Something that you and I have, we talk about this all the time, but to bring it on camera, it's like another reason why NetSuite will eventually be out of date for e commerce is these e commerce companies, they do everything ad hoc, and especially with the introduction of AI. And building like we're saying this flexible product, like that is not. NetSuite, like 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: it can be, if you have the money, right? It can be, if you have a few million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, you can customize NetSuite. That was, that's one of the nice cities and that's why NetSuite can apply to so many different industries because it can be customized if you have infinite money and.

 

JARED WARD: Yeah, I think where we're really hoping to emerge is like that we want to be the number one inventory and supply chain tool for e commerce companies. And what we're building towards, which NetSuite, they can't scrap their product and redo this is we're building to be the most flexible in the industry. This concept of Hey, come as you are with your processes. If they're broken yeah, eventually I have to fix them, but no, our product can service a wide gamut of processes and it can, we, we can fit those and more importantly, we're building towards e commerce companies and their needs.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: I think how we're doing it effectively is we have a huge gamut of. Types of e commerce companies, whether it's meatpacking or fish, or whether it's, vape and controlled substances to, super customized products or three PLS. Yeah, we already, we have this wide gamut of customers who we've all been able to service very well. And it forces us to really build everything in a way that's super flexible because we already have a base of really varied customers. 

 

JARED WARD: What are you most excited about in the future of the product? Is it introduction of AI? Is it building our tables to be super flex? What are you most excited about in the next five years where we're really going to disrupt the industry?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Excited is like this. It changes constantly. Right now the big hype is like AI, but there is something really cool there. Because we already have this product that takes in your data from wherever it's at. We have this cleaning engine that will clean it and make sure it's mapping to the correct orders. We have an alert feed that will alert you when, problems arise. So we have this really clean data set where all of a sudden having a large language model. Generate the queries to get you the data you want is Oh, we actually have prototypes right now that can do that. And so all of a sudden the owner, the operator doesn't have to learn how to use the complex system. They're asking the system, Hey, what should I sell to this wholesale, to this retail client? What haven't they purchased before? And our AI large language model is answering them based off their really clean data. And it's, I think the possibilities there are just really awesome. The only, what's limiting us right now is just pure resources. But as our resources scale up with the number of clients, the ability for a large language model to plug in is just really endless. 

 

JARED WARD: I think that's what I'm most excited for too is, because if you pair a very flexible product, meaning think Airtable or Monday.com, where I can literally take a data set like from a page in the software Drag copy, put it into a custom report or something and do a prompt based AI hey, how much should I buy for this customer? Like, how much would you forecast for this customer this year? I'm excited for the prompt based AI to be embedded in luminous eventually. And I also like, I like the pace we're going at because. Right now, we are growing reasonably fast right now, but we can make massive changes in our products. And it's not like we have thousands and thousands of customers where that would totally screw the customer experience if we made those changes. We can be nimble, and our customers like us so far, and We're, we can make changes and we can things can, we can be nimble. We can actually be nimble where our competitors can't. When you take a look at like a Skubana or a Skuvault, Lenworks they had like decent products. I think we're going to have more breadth than them, like very soon. But we can be much more nimble than them. I think what's on our side, what's on Luminous side is timing and then our understanding and curiosity of the market and what we're building towards. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, I think something we've done better than anybody we've talked to, I'm sure there's people out there, but we understand the market fairly well. Whether that's sin seven or whether it's deer or whether it's order hive or so stocks or, the smaller ones that are just scattered around regionally, we have a pretty, pretty good take on the market. And the question that we're trying to answer is like, why don't those work for people? Oftentimes we'll meet with a customer. We're like, this seems like the perfect use case for Katani. ERP or Katana. Katana. 

 

JARED WARD: We have a client named Katana. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: That's right. Katana ERP. Like we're like, why and so we're able to ask them like, why aren't you using this? And every time there's legitimate reasons why people aren't using a specific system. And so I think with that understanding we're able to take it into our own product and be like, alright, how do we not commit that same.

 

JARED WARD: I think you're bringing up something super important if somebody actually wants to know the difference between luminous and other companies or like our approach to building. I really feel like that is it. You get so many founders who are tunnel visioned and they like a competitor pops up and just let's, I want, let's just keep focusing on what we're doing. We're going to grind. We're going to outgrind them. You can't do that in this market. It's like we just, reciprocity pretty damn quick. There are, I could literally, we could sit for an hour straight and just keep naming competitors. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: We have an excel spreadsheet of hundreds of competitors. Like it is, it's the most crowded market I've ever seen. It's insane. 

 

JARED WARD: And it's, ah it's so interesting. We just ran across a pretty damn quick and there is awesome product. Yeah, it's a cool product. And we were asking the question okay, why couldn't they service this potential customer? And it's okay, like we quickly find out what they can do and what they can't do, what they're building towards. And it's okay they're just an OMS. I don't even know if you can call them OMS. They plug into Shopify and they help with quick deliveries and transparency through your Shopify card. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Do you know what we're able to do now that no, very few systems have been able to do in the past? We're able to take the best aspect of all these smaller comp, of all these other companies. Like we love the, transformers and so stocked, or we love the forecasting over here. We love this over there. We don't have to actually create anything brand new. We're able to take this feedback and say, we can take the best pieces of all these and bring it together in a single system. 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. I, that happens all the time in the sales process too. Like you just said, where we need a really clean forecast and we have a 3PL and we need built materials. And this, and it's Okay, why don't you use Cogsy? Cogsy is a really cool tool that we've tested. And again, we've they try it and it's Oh, you know where it broke? Oh, they can't hook up with Etsy or like they can't forecast for our wholesale stuff. Or they're forecasting from products to a bill of materials breaks. We start finding the gaps in the market Oh, like there's there's little niche tools everywhere, but like they break for like different subsets of the market. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah. Lots of people are doing a real, they have some really cool ideas that work really well, but they're just disconnected.

 

JARED WARD: It's best to be first to market, like even patents, you can get around a patent. And I do believe that. Just be better like, and unless you have something truly proprietary like I'm the one who invented this very proprietary piece of this technology and somebody stole it and that algorithm and there's, I feel like most of the stuff that you build, even in the consumer product world or in the software world, it exists like a thousand different ways just be better, be a better brand, be a better marketer, go to market differently. I don't -

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Nothing we're building is unique. I guess that's what I'm getting. 

 

JARED WARD: It's like even Cogsy Oh my God, I could say five other competitors that like, that, that do forecasting, that's like very similar. They just have a cleaner UI. It's not like they're doing anything crazy.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: We are in this unique place where we don't actually have to revolutionize the world. We don't have to come up with a brand new idea that nobody's ever come up with. It's just a matter of putting all the pieces together. 

 

JARED WARD: In a flexible way that can be digested by any ops team, no matter where you are in the e commerce space. Yeah, so I, here's how I'll end who does Luminous work best for 

right now? 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Absolute best, any small to medium sized company that's still using ShipStation and are looking to upgrade to the next step seamlessly. Those are the customers right now, where within two days, we can migrate you. It doesn't even have to be a full migration. It's essentially, you can roll out Luminous in parallel with your existing processes and slowly pivot things over as you need them. 

 

JARED WARD: Ah that's another thing. Most software implementations It's rip and replace. It's, there is a go live date and that's it. That's actually something that I think, I'm glad we've challenged because, like you said, because of how ShipStation, we get a lot of clients It's so common in Utah. You go from ship station and Google sheets and maybe another tool to net suite. Yeah. And it's that Corolla Ferrari thing. So what we've done did intentionally with luminous to adapt to that was instead of forcing somebody to rip and replace their existing processes, like we just, we sit really well on top of ShipStation. Like eventually you could cancel it like, and that's fine, but. We can actually come in and you can actually start using modules and luminous almost immediately. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: And we have a customer they had 100 plus stores in their ship station instance. Can you imagine having to switch all those over to a new OMS?

 

JARED WARD: Yeah.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Making sure all your tags, all your automations. It's everything is identical, everything's synced up. You don't forget anything like that headache would prevent me from ever leaving. But our methodology is all right, just implement us in parallel. You can actually do both. We can pull orders over, you can fill them in for up in luminous or you can fulfill them in ShipStation. Yeah, I think it's a cool way of doing it. 

 

JARED WARD: I want to ask like a more philosophical question though do you believe in God? Do you believe in God, Brendon? What do you think of Jesus? No uh, obviously you're a builder. You're a builder of products. Why do you build? That's that actually is an important question for me. What actually motivates you to, to build something as so we're really. We're really going after it. Wow. What keeps you motivated to actually keep building? 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: For me, the coolest thing It goes back, I think for me the coolest thing is seeing somebody using your product and just enjoying it. Or they're using it every day and it's just part of their life. And it started, I think, in I built this app that helps students register for classes and it was this, it it went viral for a few semesters and it was the best experience to walk through campus and to see my website open up on laptops, on cell phones, and be like, dude, I did that and nobody knew who I was, but just seeing people use It was a cool, it's what you live for.

 

JARED WARD: You gotta give us that story. What did you build again? 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: So it was a, so at the time I was going to BYU and to register for classes, it was a first come first serve online. And so there was a night my roommate came up to me and he's dude, I forgot to register for this class. I don't know if I'm ever going to get in because it's packed and everybody wants to get in it. So I built a quick script. That would like just pull for an opening and as soon as it was open, we'd get him in the class. And the next morning it got him in and we're like, shoot. So we built a website around it and it became so popular. There was probably 10, 000 active users at the time. 

 

JARED WARD: Oh my God. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Out of 30, 000 students. 

 

JARED WARD: What?

 

BRENDON BEEBE: It got to a point. If you weren't using my app to register, you weren't getting into your class. So I had a monopoly on the entire system, but there's something about that, like walking around and seeing people pull up your app. It's just, it's really cool. 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. And not even knowing it was you, it's not like your name was plastered everywhere. Like Brendon Beebe.. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah. And it was the same thing with 4UP. Like all of a sudden, everybody who's ever golfed has used what I've built, which is like a really cool, it's probably the best feeling. 

 

JARED WARD: I feel like that's actually where we're aligned is I also, I want to impact e commerce. In some way, like I, for me, I see myself in the founders. Like I also, I love to launch products. I'm launching products right now. And so I really resonate with how they run business. It's so ad hoc. It's they're just gunslinging entrepreneurs that like, just very reactive to what's happening, but it's, I really respect that. And to see that we're able to build a product that resonates with that market more. And that they can actually adopt even at an early stage is if we can get the modern ecommerce company to adopt to luminous and early age because we bring so much value. We are the flexible, the most easy to use system. That's, that really motivates me.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, I think one of my, I would love it to log on to Reddit somebody, sometime. On the e commerce subreddit and somebody asked what software should I use? And Luminous is that answer. While at the same time, we're servicing a company with, a hundred times the employees of a startup. And it's We did it. I think that's what would be amazing. 

 

JARED WARD: I would say the person who has been first to market is Odoo. That's what I would say. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: First to market? As far as Why don't you say SIN7, Deer, Odoo. They're all in the same kind of sphere. 

 

JARED WARD: That's where it gets complex, though. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Odoo is like 

 

JARED WARD: Even Brightpearl, like Brightpearl, they started off as an OMS, which then acquired an inventory system they became an ERP SIN7, they started off just as a basic inventory system, same with Deer Odoo's the only one who started off they raised a shiz ton of money, like 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Who'd the other business software ERP that's people use it for, oh, what's it called? On demand use it for the billing? Zoho. 

 

JARED WARD: Oh, Zoho. Yeah. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Zoho and Odoo are in like the same bucket of come use whatever you want. We have every single product. 

 

JARED WARD: Similar. Yeah. Odoo, I would say Odoo was the first one who like tried to take on the ERP space. And with like good funding behind it. Zoho was an older company and they start off as like a CRM. If I'm not mistaken, 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, I think we've been around for a long time. 

 

JARED WARD: I would classify Odoo as the first big disruptor that came to market. And so what Odoo is for those who don't know go try it out. I've downloaded some of their apps. So it's basically an open source, buffet style, self onboarding ERP. So all of their technology is, like I said, it's open source, so you can code on top of it. And it's very cheap. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Odoo was founded in 2002.

 

JARED WARD: What?! No way. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: No. So Odoo and Zoho, I think we're the same route. They started. Wow. I didn't know that. They started down a specific vertical, but most companies will start in a vertical. And at some point their software can become generic enough to cross apply. 

 

JARED WARD: Okay. So let's do this real fast. I think there's two, talking about the market and like the booms and back in software, I would say it's early, there's an, there's a boom in the early 2000s where like Zoho and Odoo are founded, then there's like the 2011 through 2015 era. Where that's where all of the most recent competitors were founded, like SkewVault, Linworx, Deere Systems, Syn7, all those. Everything from purchasing, receiving, fulfillment, even OMS, like an order management system. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah, Odoo falls, I would say Odoo Fall is in line with the NetSuite era. Of softwares, they're trying to become modern. They have a really old stack. They're trying to go down market and make it as approachable as possible. But from the beginning, Odoo was like this open ER piece. I think that's what was the original name, actually. But, NetSuite was probably, what, 90s? 

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: And you have a lot of the -

 

JARED WARD: And they got acquired by Oracle in 2015. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah.

 

JARED WARD: Again, part of that big boom of the next -

 

BRENDON BEEBE: JD Edwards, same idea. Old ERP, attempting to go modern with Web 2. 0. But just really slow, still very bulky. 

 

JARED WARD: All of our competitors that you just named, like one of the biggest differences is they're comfortable with a certain amount, we call it churn in software. So Deer Systems or Odoo, they expect, because it's self onboarding and they don't really they don't approach every implementation as we want to solve this company's problem. They're okay with if a hundred companies come in, they try to self onboard and 80 fail. 20 succeed, like halfway, they adopt like 40 percent of the system, that's a win for them. That's not a win for us. We don't want to be the self onboarded system until we like actually have a case for that. If we're seeing 80 percent churn, like it means we're, we didn't miss our mark.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: We missed our mark.

 

JARED WARD: Yeah, we missed our mark. We're not targeting the right people. It's not flexible enough. If we didn't build the flexibility in the right way, and I think that's the, that will be the difference with Luminous is we're, we are going to nail it before we scale it. And we already are doing that. We're not just going to become the next, like. where we're just driving like hundreds of thousands of business in there every single month and just expecting 80 percent of them to leave. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: But I like to think that we have something that's called latecomer advantage, where we are able to see we have the legacy systems of the 2000s. We have the web 2. 0 revolution of the 2010s, 2015s. And we're able to come in now and take the best pieces of those eras, the best pieces of each of the software that people love and combine into a single system that works really well together. And I think that's ultimately what we're doing. That's why it's working right now.

 

JARED WARD: Yeah. And there's a couple of trends that are in our favor right now that people haven't quite figured out. So I'd say the first trend that I would say is you have these direct, obviously, e commerce has been on this perpetual rise. Okay, the boom in e commerce, I would say starting like around, I don't know, 2015 to 2017, that's when people started to, ecommerce brands that were like normally just digitally native, they would just sell on Amazon and Shopify or like online platforms they started going to retail or they started doing specialty wholesale. That became a thing in the past, like five years, and it broke a lot of systems. A lot of those 2013 to 2017 systems, like SkewVault, Linworks, blah, blah, blah, it broke their systems. And then I'd say another trend that we're following really closely is with the boom of ecommerce. There's also the COVID pop. And the COVID pop, these historical Manufacturers or brands in preservatives or -

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Controlled substances. 

 

JARED WARD: Controlled substances, animal products. Historically, that could, like, why would you go direct to consumer? And then COVID happened. It's whoa, we can go direct to consumer. Those brands popped off in the past three, three to five years. And They're super complex, they can't use a 3PL, and they need a system that cares about implementation because they need somebody to help them, and it needs to be cost effective. And it's wow. 

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Yeah. 

 

JARED WARD: So those are a couple of the trends that we're following right now, that we're really excited about.

 

BRENDON BEEBE: Agreed.