How Tim Higham Bootstrapped AscendTMS By Focusing On Customer Need

Update: 2022-04-06

Description

How Tim Higham Bootstrapped AscendTMS By Focusing On Customer Needs

Today on Minimum Viable, Terry and Will are joined by Tim Higham, CEO and Founder of AscendTMS. They discuss how Tim bootstrapped the business to over 45,000 monthly customers by utilizing a freemium model focused on ease of use and customer experience.

To those learning about transportation software for the first time, TMS stands for Transportation Management System. They often include core features that enable carriers, freight brokers, and shippers to run their businesses. AscendTMS, also known as The Free TMS in the industry, boasts their easy onboarding process and 13 second account creation time as a key-value proposition to serving the 10s of thousands of small logistics companies around North America.

AscendTMS offers a free solution and a paid option with pro features for those looking for a complete experience

AscendTMS built one of the most unique business models we have discussed so far on Minimum Viable. The freemium model is normally reserved for companies operating in the consumer gaming and mobile app space. AscendTMS has translated it to millions in MRR as a B2B SaaS product. Tim first encourages all potential customers to try AscendTMS either as a free member (up to 2 users and a smaller feature set) or as a premium member with a 1-month free trial. He is confident that they will love the solution so much that they sign up as a paid customer in the future. Their model is a stark contrast to TMS competitors in the marketplace that offers older technology and expensive integrations.

Here are a couple of key lessons that we took away from Tim:

A maximum of 2-3 pricing options is necessary to reach the tail end of the market and smaller customers
A simple onboarding experience is a key to acquiring new customers
Cost-saving measures such as group training versus individualized support teams benefit customer experience.

Resources to learn more about Ascend TMS and fremium

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06 ] Will: Welcome to Minimum Viable, the podcast, where we talk about product ideas, that work, that don't work, and those you may not even know about.

As always. I'm your host Will Green joined by my cohost Terrence Wang. And today we're joined by a very special guest Tim Higham, CEO of Ascend TMS, a transportation management software system, and he's here to talk basically about how his product started to growth and, uh, we'll get deeper than that.

[00:00:33 ] Tim: Well, it's very nice of you, I'm not quite sure how special I am Will, but thank you very much for that nice introduction.

[00:00:39 ] Will: Yeah. So I guess basically to start it off, uh, can you tell us kind of a high-level overview on what Ascend TMS is and what this industry is that you're working in?

[00:00:49 ] Tim: Yeah, I'll try and do it in 10 seconds flat. Ascend TMS is a online software that allows trucking companies, freight brokerages, third-party logistics, anything to do with logistics and shipping. It allows people to manage that entire process from pickup to delivery and everything inbetween.

[00:01:05 ] Will: Great. And so is the Ascend TMS kind of an overall solution? Do you fit all of those check boxes or is there a specific area that you specialize in?

[00:01:13 ] Tim: Yeah. I often say that TMS software is like, uh, like shirts. There's a different one for every occasion. Um, so, you know, while, uh, a TMS product itself will basically be, you can shoe horn, almost any kind of freight into it. But generally speaking, if you're in a certain type of freight, as drayage or uh, intermodal, maybe air freight imports, exports, they tend to be more specialized softwares.

And then you've got software like ours, which is more general freight. Although we do have people doing import export business, but it tends to be around the edges. So you'll use something like ascend to manage, you know, 90% of your freight, but you obviously don't use a separate system to do you know, your dray work from the ports or from your import export work, you tend to shoehorn it into the system.

There is no one TMS really, truly that manages everything perfectly well. Um, and we are one of, many of the TMS is out there.

[00:02:11 ] Terry: So that's really, really interesting that you spoke about this. And I actually spent a little bit of time in the TMS space. So I'm fairly familiar with how ascend TMS works. Like a lot of people in the TMS industry, you didn't start originally from the freight brokerage industry, even trucking, right?

Uh, where did you end up getting your start?

[00:02:30 ] Tim: Yeah. So the vast majority of people in his business, so it did not set out. Woo. I'm going to be in the freight brokerage or the logistics world. We all find it by complete accident. Right. Um, so you know, mine is from a world in the mid nineties of online banking, uh, online insurance. I had a company that allowed an insurance agent -

If you Terrence, if you walked into any agents in 1995 and said, I want a quote for my car, they'd ask you the details. And they would go into five separate green screens and enter your information five separate times to get you five separate quotes. And I realized there was this new thing called the worldwide web.

Um, and I wrote software that allowed the agent to write, to basically enter the information one time. And then the software itself would go to each different web, you know, basically old mainframe systems. Let's be honest, that would bring back the quotes. And, and that was the very early days of, of online banking and online insurance and I sold that company, uh, April the 16th, 1998. I will never forget the date. Um, it was an important day for me because I made a lot of the money that day. Um, and I sold it to a publicly traded company. Um, and, and that's how I got my start because I kind of semi-retired after that, um, I knew about this internet thing.

Um, and I met a girl and she was. Uh, essentially I say, girl, I guess we were very young then. Um, and she was shipping plant material, uh, meaning trees, shrubs, et cetera, from Florida all over the Southeast of the United States. And she used to have trucks show up every day to come pick up all of her stuff.

And she used a local freight broker. I that's the first time I discovered what a freight broker was. And the guys would show up and they would never have the right paperwork. They didn't know where they were going. It was a complete cluster. And I said, hey, you know, do you have Microsoft Excel on your computer?

And of course everybody did, if you had office. And, um, I wrote a bunch of macros that, uh, essentially built a very, very embarrassingly, so, but a very basic TMS. Um, and when I look back now about how basic it was, it was ridiculous. But of course, you know, it at least allowed the drivers to come in and check in and see where they were going.

And you just fill out the right information so that we could keep things on track. And we started shipping for the local nurseries around because we would go to Atlanta on Tuesdays and Birmingham on Thursdays. And so they will do, what's called load to ride. They say, Hey, have you got enough? Uh, for four pallets to go up to this place.

And, and we built this consolidation algorithm that would allow us to consolidate the freight. Next thing you know, I've got a TMS company. Right. Um, so, but that wasn't the TMS company came later. Because, you know, I realized that in order for us to ship other people's freight, I had to get a brokerage license.

And that's exactly what we did. I became a broker, we had some trucks that we own, so we have assets. Um, and then that just grew and grew and grew, um, until we got to about $40 million in revenue and, uh, sold that business successfully to a private equity group. Um, but as part of that transaction, I took out the, the TMS software that we wrote, um, and essentially decided to market that.

January the first 2015. And, uh, and here we are today, 45,160 some customers later.

[00:05:50 ] Terry: Yeah, that's an incredible journey. And I think it's one that, uh, it's very unorthodox. A lot of people. I think when they start out to start a tech company, they start from the tech. And then they work backwards towards a solution. one of the patterns that we seen both on this show and kind of just through our own experiences, people like you, who started off providing a useful service to solve a pain point, and then eventually transitioning that over to software, right?

[00:06:16 ] Tim: Yeah that's a great point. Yeah. A lot of people that they might, you know, have degrees from MIT, they might be in a really good at, you know, computer programming. Um, but unless you truly understand the business, the actual operations of an actual industry, the actual business, it's very difficult to write software for that particular industry from the outside.

So, you know, I think that, you know, sometimes you find companies of all different kinds of, um, that write really good software for an industry, but you'll find that, you know, the founders or certainly many of the staff, they came from that