Unlocking Supply Chain Success: Innovations in Warehouse Management | Interview with Jonathan Porter

Ryan Purvis: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Digital Workspace Works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host, supported by our producer, Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field, stories from the front lines, the problems they face and how they solve them, the areas they're focused on from technology, people, and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts for the Digital Workspace inner workings.

So welcome Jonathan onto the Digital Workspace Works podcast. Do you want to introduce yourself, please?

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me here. So my name is Jonathan Porter. I'm the founder and CEO of PorterLogic. We're a supply chain operations platform for mid market assembly and distribution companies.

Ryan Purvis: Awesome. how'd you get into that? Was that your background? Sorry, I'm just curious though.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, no. So I started at Manhattan Associates right out of school, which is a big WMS player. So I went from Georgia Tech studying industrial engineering, which has a supply chain focus definitely. But Manhattan is, you know, tier one WMS [00:01:00] provider.

And so I learned a ton about how warehouses operate and supply chain software. And so. That really started me on this journey of diving into warehouses and just how the software can optimize the way that they operate. So worked at a couple of startups. So I come from a really entrepreneurial background as well.

My parents have owned a construction company for 40 years and grew up around, you know, dinner table conversations, making deals and whatnot. So I've. Always kind of known, I would do something myself, but it was just down to getting the timing, right. And I really, I subscribe to the mentality of you need experience at other places before you try and do it on your own.

I mean, I had side businesses in high school and I used to build websites for people and all, you know, all that kind of stuff, but I wanted to get experience on, you know, seeing how other companies operate. So went from Manhattan to a startup and then actually to a third party consulting firm before then I went out on my own and did a contract work to start.

And then, yeah, in 2020 started PorterLogic.

Ryan Purvis: Brilliant, brilliant. We

are very similar probably ethos, I'd say to life did very similar things. But let me ask you the easy question that we can get into that stuff. So what does the digital workspace mean to [00:02:00] you?

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, so when I hear digital workspace, I mean, I think about how much just working in general has changed over the last couple years, right?

And I think that like, we've all kind of gotten to a point where the way that we operate as companies and the way that we, you know, just interact with each other has definitely changed. I mean, we're sitting here on a team's call. I don't think that those were things that were 100 percent common, even just, you know, five or seven years ago.

So. You know, we work in a very hybrid way now, we're a startup and, you know, we have an office we're all co located in the same place, but then at the same time, we are a very hybrid kind of company and, you know, I'm remote today you know, my, most of my team's remote today, so and we have contractors all over the world, actually, we just hired a web developer out of Pakistan and yeah, so I think that there is a lot of opportunity that opens up when you kind of, you know, open yourself and your company up to some of these kind of just, yeah, newer ways of working.

Yeah. The most interesting one, too, on our side is we do not use email. Internally or almost externally. We use Slack for just about everything and even now Slack Connect with all of our customers. To run a company. And yeah, [00:03:00] we just basically don't send email almost ever, which is just a sign of the times in a lot of ways.

Ryan Purvis: Wow. Yeah. So that is awesome. So we actually did an episode right in the beginning of this podcast. I think it was like probably in the first 20 with two other, it was, it was actually, it was about four of us, I think on the the recording, which is very unusual for us, and it was about getting away from email.

And you know, I'm not as ruthless as I was then, because unfortunately, just the people still send me emails and not everyone is on Slack or Teams. You just have to reply, but, you know, it is email list. And then someone else sort of later on taught me something. And he said, you know, you got to think about email, like you would deal with mail.

So when someone sends you a bill. You put it on your desk. Mm. And you pay it when you get, like every week your payments. You don't necessarily sit there and pay every bill at the time because Sure. If you do that, it's context switching, it costs you time, et cetera, et cetera. So I've become much more batching around email, which is, you know, 'cause I, I definitely don't get as much as I used to get.

I used to get like 2000 a day. Now I maybe get a hundred a day. And not all that's, you know, most of that's noise. You knows, and, you know, [00:04:00] whatever. But now I find because I've got two businesses and then I got. Half the people on slack and half the people on teams, I've had to turn those all off because otherwise you just get message, message, message and you don't do any work.

So I don't know what the solution will be, but I do feel like asynchronous working is the way to end up

as the majority.

Jonathan Porter: It's amazing. You say that because actually some of what you've just suggested I have in the last few months implemented and it has made a drastic improvement. So I actually have a time scheduled on my calendar now for checking email.

I used to leave my email up. I don't do that anymore. I leave it down because you're the same as you, right? We still get emails inbound and you know, there are some things that are longer and that kind of stuff is still on an email. but scheduling it and only checking it once a day and then yes, slack.

I turn off notifications for only so I only get notifications on mentions. Thanks. Insert channels, so similar kind of thing, you know, I batch that just as you're describing. So we use loom a lot too, and there's a couple that are similar, but so, you know, for your asynchronous point, you're recording video and being able to just see how somebody expresses themselves and [00:05:00] talks is always so much more helpful.

So, yeah, but just, I'll, you know, do something, record a loom, explaining it, send it to my co founder and, you know, she can look at it whenever. So.

Ryan Purvis: that's going to be the product hack of the year for me is, is Loom, because you know, as I said, I'm building two products at the moment and my focus is on the wine at the moment.

Like, like 90 percent of our time. So the only way that I can work with the guys building a product, we have like half an hour call every day. And then the rest of it is just new because if I sit here at nine o'clock at night and I'm looking through this stuff. The one guys in India are the guys in South Africa.

So there's like a plus two and a plus three and a half hour time difference, so they can't be on the phone with me, but I wouldn't expect it to be. And also just doing the loom quickly in less than five minutes. Cause I'm not paying for yet. But it's amazing how like even be able to watch the video back to two X time.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, and then, you know, waste time, get on the phone and then chatting and then the guy can't replicate it. It's like this happened. I was just doing a thing and I saw it and this is what I think exactly. It's amazing. So, I mean, [00:06:00] tell me something more about your team as it stands that I mean, you guys are going global now as a company or you still very US centric or.

Jonathan Porter: We're primarily US centric. So yeah, we're a venture backed company been around about three years. So team of just over a dozen that split between full times all here in Atlanta and then also contractors spread kind of, yeah, around the U S around the world, there's still definitely a heavy concentration of us here in the Southeast of the U S so we primarily build out kind of our.

I'll call it ancillary functions with contractors. So you know, product and customer are kind of our core. So we've hired developers, we've hired customer solutions, folks. Those are full time team members here. And then things like marketing and things like content creation and things like web development.

Those are things that we've started bringing in contractors as we've grown. We have a graphic designer that helps with things like, you know, slide decks and presentations and whatnot. So, kind of as we've found needs in these various places, we've started plugging, you know, gaps with part time contractors.

But we made the decision when we, raised money for the first time about a year ago. We were bootstrapped for the first two or two and a half years and then raised venture funding kind [00:07:00] of end of last year, beginning of this year. So that's really when we kicked up our hiring and it was a very conscious decision to build a co located team.

We just, we don't, as I mentioned, we don't go to the office, you know, every day. We actually have no requirements on office visits at all. However, naturally the team ends up there about two or three times a week. And we have a cool office space. It's in a, you know, not a good area of town and but from that perspective, it is a, you know, We just trust our employees a lot.

I think that's the biggest thing. You know, we know that people are going to be where they need to be. If it's more efficient to get together, you know, it's not a big deal for us to go in just for a couple hours, maybe. Personally, I also have a I'm a very much creature of habit, so I have to do a stretching routine and yoga and working Pelotoni in the morning.

So I end up working pretty late into the evenings. I'll work, you know, 11, 12, 1 a. m. kind of Eastern time. But so we actually are able, that's part of what we were talking about earlier, right? Being able to hand things off and being able to work asynchronously. All of the team is kind of that way too.

So we have a team member that has young kids and works kind of earlier so that he can then spend time with his family you know, in the [00:08:00] evenings and that just level of trust. I mean, like I, I've read a lot about Netflix culture deck. I don't know if you're familiar, but they shared publicly a lot of their culture and part of it was trust about, you know, if we're going to trust you to make multimillion dollar business decisions, we can trust that you're, you know, be online and working when you need to.

And, you know, we don't. I'm not going to nickel and dime you over a T& E policy or something like that. So yeah,

Ryan Purvis: yeah, think that's 100%. I mean, it's, it's quite funny how you still have, even after COVID and COVID was just that validation that most of us already had that you could work remotely, but you know, there were still people that needed to be forced in a sense.

But, you know, I'm hearing now still of companies trying to force people back into an office and, the reality is they're adults and if an adult's not going to be doing their job and it'll come out in the wash, you don't have to, you know, eyeball them every day at their desk to see if they're working.

So I love it as a concept that you guys are doing that because, you know, I have the same thing. I mean, my kids are young five and three. And if I want to get a workout in the only time I can get a workout is when they're not here. There you go. But then I can do the work at night, most nights or early morning, whatever [00:09:00] it is to catch up.

But at least I've got the workout in, which there's nothing worse getting the end of the day. And you're like, geez, I didn't work out

today.

Jonathan Porter: Well, I used to actually, I experiment with my schedule all the time. And I used to work out at the evenings. It was kind of like a break between my, we call it third shift, my co founder and I joke about when we get back online at night, but so it was a break between the main work day and third shift to have a workout time and dinner.

But. Yeah. I found that that just got squeezed so much, right? Like the, you know, the workday inevitably is going to push out. And then yes, you're trying to fight this battle of, you know, well, do I work out and cook dinner and eat at 9 PM? Or, you know, that is just, so yeah, switching that and doing into the morning and yeah, I mean, it's true with startups in general that we're constantly experimenting and I take that with my personal life and my schedule as well, always trying to tweak and change and make adjustments to, you know, how I work and then I kind of, you know.

Set that tone for the team as well, right. It's that they are also hopefully doing the same kind of things where they're, you know, optimizing their schedule or figuring out what works best for them. I look at it as a productivity thing, you know, right. I want them to be [00:10:00] as productive as possible. And if that's in this particular fashion, I'm not the one to tell you how to work.

Ryan Purvis: remember when I moved to the UK. And I moved to the UK 2012 and I grew up in a family where my dad worked for an airline. So we travel a lot. So it wasn't like a place never been coming a lot of times. And I'd come, I'd just be working for a was an American company bought by a Canadian company at the time.

And you know, we were selling business process management software. So most of what you would do is go and see a customer and listen to their problems. And you'd Use the tool to show them how you could solve the problem. But because the majority of the customers were South African customers were Africa or Middle Eastern customers, I would be traveling a lot.

I'd be at home. So there was no, it was an office, but you know, the office was sort of pop in there, to get something or see something or whatever it was in the office, it wasn't a thing, but I got into this habit of like getting up at four in the morning, doing an hour of work, like.

Whatever for the day, hit in the gym or go and play nine hours of golf or even 18 hours of golf. Then going to see customers, going and having meetings, whatever it is, and then being home by like three, four o'clock, [00:11:00] doing some relaxing. So we didn't have kids then. So it'd be like, you know, chat to my wife, do whatever.

And then do the, because it's an American company, you do the, you do the calls into the evening. So even this nice routine, but you're not in a, sort of factory mindset that you've gotta be on your shift. I mean, I like to think about the third shift. 'cause we all, we all do it. Kids go to sleep, you close your eyes for 10 minutes with them, so you get a little bit of a refresh and then you Yeah.

You go back and work. And then I moved here and I went and worked for a bank and it was a great experience for you. Don't get me wrong, I love doing it because I had the choice between pre-sales again and some other coming, going to the bank. Mm-Hmm. But I had to be in the office. Like every day and the irony for me was we were building all this tech to allow you to work on any device anywhere anytime we were allowed to work remotely and I get why they didn't want us to but it was like this culture shock of not only were you commuting you know and I don't know if you've ever been to London but You know, everyone commutes in right?

Then you spend the whole day, then you commute out. So your day is a very long day. Right. And I did that for about, I don't know, three years, four years. And by the time you get to a Friday, your brain is just mush. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Saturday and [00:12:00] Sunday is like, like my wife, you're like, well, I want to go do stuff.

I'm like, yeah, but I'm tired. I don't want to go do anything. I just want to sleep, you know, because you're on someone else's schedule. Cause that's the other thing now to catch a train, you're on someone else's schedule. Cause that train's delayed, that cascades your whole day. Yep. And then I refuse to take tube underground.

Okay,

which is great. I get a lot of which is not.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, no, I walked to our office as well. It's like a 20 minute walk through the park. It's just amazing.

Ryan Purvis: So yeah, but now now we are now, which is this. And the irony for me is all those guys that I worked with JP Mormon who worked at UBS UBS went the other way around.

Like five people to a desk, hot desking, all that kind of stuff. So now everyone works mostly remote and stuff. And it's interesting how, I mean, there's still guys that go to the office every day. Like you say, you're adults and you can go, but now that you get used to working from home, going to the office becomes a necessary thing.

When you have to go like an it's like an adventure. Yeah, We're gonna go find the treasurer, which is the brainstorming session or whatever it is and I just feel like that creates such a momentum and a Motivation for people because now they're like going to the office because I haven't seen Jim or John or Jane or [00:13:00] whoever it is Catch up build some energy Solve some stuff whiteboard or whatever it is and then everyone goes home to their families and they're back into the routine and they're all happy and

motivated

Jonathan Porter: That's very much what we experienced.

And yeah, it's funny. It's, it resonates so much. You're describing your bank experience when I was, I, you know, previous life as a consultant and traveled almost every week. So, I mean, there was a period of time where I was on the road every week and I would get to the airport at 6 30 AM for a flight and then wouldn't get home until Thursday nights around midnight.

So yeah, by Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you just want to lay on the couch. You don't want to do anything. You're just too tired. So. But I will say, and I'll totally agree with kind of the point. I think you were driving it there that there are absolutely times to be in the office and be together. I don't think that the digital tools have quite solved the collaboration and the water cooler talk.

And this, the, you know, even being able to sit around a table and have, you know, small side kind of glances and conversations like that's what, especially for brainstorming. So like product design, we almost always do product brainstorming sessions in person. You can do them over, you know, teams and whatnot, but.

It's just a lot more [00:14:00] fruitful when you're all kind of sitting around the room and our office actually has big glass walls, but we use them as whiteboards. So the whole walls are covered with writing and diagrams and whatnot, and that's just really hard to replicate digitally.

So. We use Slack huddles a lot too. So Slack has rolled out their internal like video calling feature. They're they have puddles. And we just given how much we use Slack for communication and huddles actually has worked well, just because you can, you can huddle per channel. So you can, you know, we have a channel for every customer and if two people need to talk about a customer, they can just huddle in that channel.

And then, you know, if somebody else needs to jump in, it becomes very easy to kind of pop in and out of, you know, conversation. So. That helps, but yes, at the same time, being in person and being able to, you know, yeah, to your point, camaraderie and culture and team building and all that stuff, yeah, you still really need that, and I think that companies that are 100 percent remote probably, you know, suffer to some degree.

My girlfriend works for a completely remote company, big, global, multinational, and they've done, you know, one offsite a year where they all got together and she met the team, but she was just saying to me the other day that there's people that she's worked [00:15:00] with for a year plus now and she's never even seen their faces.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, well, this is the other thing. I mean, so, a couple things. So I, in about March, I think I read a report study that they did you know, functional MRIs on bull. And it was a, it was a mother child. Was it a son? It might've been the son. So mother son. Across. So what they did is they would, they would put mother and son together in a room with the sensors on and measure their responses to each other, then they would do a mother and son, two different rooms with on a phone call audio only, and then one where they did mother and son on a video.

And what's very interesting is. this is why you have to go into the office. It, it answers the question. So a mom and a son who are obviously linked and they, and I think they, the criteria was these were close families. you know, there was no sort of dysfunctional Sure.

Per se. I mean, obviously Sure. That a mother and son, their MRIs obviously face-to-face with each other. Every, the whole brain lights up, you know, it's full engagement of the brain. When they went on audio. It was like 25 percent of the [00:16:00] brain that up and then when they did video, it was like 2 percent of the brain.

So, and I'm kind of making up the thing, but it was definitely that video calls were, were not as good as we thought they would be now. Now, I mean, this is obviously as I studied back then, but I think the thing that I don't think I factored in, and I can't remember how old the son was, but I definitely believe that you don't get the body.

Yeah. your brain obviously interprets someone else's body language, you know, as it sees it and then forms it, you know, so you could tell if somebody's into what you're saying or not and all that kind of stuff, which you may pick up on a phone call video conference and as you get to know people, so when I used to work in banking, the argument always was to travel just to go and meet somebody so that you could connect with them a little bit. So when you had to have a tough conversation, you'd met with him before. So there wasn't the starting from nowhere conversation. Yeah. what I think that didn't take into account is that when you get used to Doing video calls all the time.

And I'm one of those people, the camera's got to always be on regardless of if I don't know it's going to be on. If I've done a workout, I'll come in, you know, straight camera on, et cetera. [00:17:00] Sure. And because it's a trust thing, you know, you want to see people's reactions, the eyes, et cetera. And I would love them to do the same test, but with people that have been on conference calls regularly like this, if you get, maybe not, maybe not the 2%, maybe it's 25%, or maybe it's 30%, 40 percent response, because I still think you can.

You know, you can pick up something. I mean, you won't pick up everything, but you'll pick up something.

Jonathan Porter: It's just interesting because I definitely prefer video as well in the same way. And just, yeah, even though it's not, it's definitely not as good as in person, but it just, yeah, you can definitely pick up more intonation and face, you know, expressions and things like that.

And just on a pure audio.

Ryan Purvis: my sort of feeling is you either be all video or all in person. I think the hybrids are bad in that respect because the people in the room are always over, over the people who are on the phone. Yeah, unless you get a very strong personality.

Yeah. And then I think the rules still apply, you know, if you've got too many people on a call, you won't have enough interaction.

Also very true.

Yeah, so the other thing about the brainstorming, I don't know if you use Miro, but I find the Miro boards have been [00:18:00] huge.

Jonathan Porter: Interesting. I've definitely used it before, but no, we don't.

That's not part of our kind of standard workflow right now. I'd say that's interesting. How do you use it?

Ryan Purvis: Well, you might have something that's alternative, but I mean, it is basically a big virtual whiteboard. Fair. And they've got templates and stuff, you can just think of it. But the main thing is that you could, you know, send everyone the link that you're going to work on.

Everyone can open up on their screen. You can see all their little mouse cursors moving around. Sure. And then you would have obviously the you're drawing something or you, so we use it obviously from product design point of view and it's a nice thing to, and I was actually talking about UX guys today because you can zoom out and see your whole, we actually going to use for product plan, see the whole product planning, new roadmap.

And then you can zoom back into where you are in the stuff. So you can have this huge, I mean, you know, the board can actually get too big to be honest. But it kind of, it's kind of this transition from this very structured Excel world that people like, the table, and everyone loves Excel for the table, but actually it's very difficult to use the table through state [00:19:00] as the state changes.

True. Yeah.

Jonathan Porter: So you end up with x, you know, file version three dash four of, you know, 0.5, and you never can figure out exactly which file is right and all that,

Ryan Purvis: or corrupts or you know. Sure. You know, there's always some issue. But anyway, so, so I just, yeah, I thought those were interesting things based on what you said that were worth bringing up.

Jonathan Porter: yeah, absolutely. It's not. We use Figma for what you're describing Miro for. It's obviously not a one to one, but yeah, the same idea that you can kind of, yeah, yeah, I'll be in there at once. And yeah, that's it. It's you need something like that. So

Ryan Purvis: yeah, so, so we've used Figma, FigJam for like user experience reviews and that with customers.

But I think it's just a learning curve. Once you get used to a tool you just get you just become a bit bit loyal to it. And I think we get a bit of Microsoft credit as well to use mirror now. So it's kind of even more worth it. For us. tell me more about your business and how you guys help customers.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah. So really the main thing that we focus on, it starts with warehousing and inventory. So all of our customers are selling physical products [00:20:00] and really more specifically, they are bringing raw components in and assembling those into a finished good. So part of our insight was that what traditionally falls into a warehouse management system.

Does not actually fit very well for companies that do these complex assembly processes. So I'll tell you about one of our customers. There are a company called this old, they make ready to eat food. So they bring in all the raw ingredients, you know, arugula is a raw chicken and things. And then in their facilities, in their warehouses, they have massive commercial kitchens where they're cooking and preparing these ready to eat kits that they then deliver to their customers on a subscription model.

So that is a fundamentally different challenge than if you are just a big Distributor or three P. L. That brings in a finished box of shoes and ships that out the door. So you need a lot of things that are procurement driven. So demand planning and things like P. O. And vendor management. Those traditionally fall outside of what a warehouse management system does.

You also then on the other side of it, most of our customers are [00:21:00] selling across multiple channels. So getting orders from your customers from Amazon and Shopify, but also maybe you wholesale accounts that are emailing in and maybe you have Some legacy system that's an E. R. P. Or something that's also doing some ordering getting all of that into your warehouse and making the decision of how it should be fulfilled is another challenge that again falls outside of what a typical W.

M. S. Does. But we see that you need this if you're this type of assembly customer. So we make a platform that does all of that in one centers on managing your warehouse so we can be your full W. M. S. But also we can just do parts of this. So that's another our platform is Built on this low code engine that we've developed and you can do just cycle counting or just demand planning.

And we're able to kind of build up in a much more modular way. To really just fit the way that customers are working kind of, I mean, some, some similarities to kind of the conversation we were just having, but companies are working very differently now and fulfillment is the same. You have a whole host of new fulfillment options, things like [00:22:00] four PLS and fulfillment networks and things that just weren't around, you know, 20 years ago, but companies that are doing complicated kidding and assembly processes typically are having to still do their own fulfillment.

So putting, you know, cooking something is not something that you're necessarily going to pay a 3PL to do. That's, that would not fall into a typical, you know, fulfillment operation. So you're having to do your own fulfillment, but then finding systems to fit all the different pieces that you need is a real challenge.

So yeah, we wrapped all that up into one simple system that customers can implement very quickly and easily. Very nimble, very efficient. So yeah, I can talk about it all day, but there's the

Ryan Purvis: I mean, I'm very interested in the no code piece because so the one product Finxone is a no code low code platform as well for fintechs.

And I'm curious if you stayed purely no code, so there's no like. JavaScript you could put in there or something like that, or is it

Jonathan Porter: we call it low code specifically because yes, you can interject things like SQL queries and that's kind of, that's actually a big piece of kind of how things operate is yeah, being able to do visual [00:23:00] configuration, but then pair it with some of the more complicated technical pieces.

So and we actually, the way that our delivery model is, is we have a team that's doing all of the building and configuration for our customers. So to the end customer, it is a finished, ready to go warehouse management, order management, procurement management system. But we're able to deliver a, you know, much more tailored experience and do it for a much more efficient price point because we're built on this low code engine.

And frankly, that's really the IP that we're building. So we get, we're venture backed, you know, we have bigger ambitions and kind of the core of what we're building here is this supply chain low code engine. But yeah, it's just really a delivery mechanism kind of now to, you know, build a WMS that actually fits the work that you're trying to do.

Ryan Purvis: So are you enabling your customers to build things themselves, or do you guys do the build for them?

Jonathan Porter: We can, absolutely. So yeah, customers can learn. We have a whole training, you know, documentation module, like they absolutely can build on their own. Just interestingly, what we typically find is customers are wanting us to build it ourselves.

So we, yeah, started a lot more of this, you know, developer [00:24:00] focused route. But then just given the customers that we're talking to, we try and get as much feedback from customers as we can. And even some of our customers that have highly technical teams. It's just a nuanced you know, set of requirements that what, you know, what a WMS is and how to make it operate and how inventory needs to interact with cycle counts and allocation and order picking and that's a, it's repeatable, but at the same time, it's also slightly different for everyone.

So that's how we're, we're able to use our platform to. Define your own boundaries and kind of tailor it to the way that you want to work. But really, you know, you're wanting to go out and buy a WMS that just fits the way that you, you operate. you're not buying a development platform necessarily with our product.

So, and that was driven just a lot by feedback from this particular customer segment that we go after.

Ryan Purvis: So did you make the decision from day one to be no code, low code, or did that kind of become a. consideration after the, you've got some

Jonathan Porter: friction. No, I actually have a, I somewhere of saved, I have like a screenshot of a drawing I did at the, the way before it was even a product of like this concept of yes, low code, visual configuration.

I have [00:25:00] just always had this thesis. That code is not that complicated. It's the synt. It's the remembering all these nuanced words and symbols. And I mean, I'm the technical one. I, I built the majority of the product. And so, but that is the, that is the challenge with code is that, you know, it's just really difficult to remember all this and I Google stuff all the time.

So how can you deliver that? But in a visual way that anybody can follow and, you know, a CFO may not know, you know, the details of how an API functions, but if you have a block that says API call and it says get data from this data source, like. Anybody can basically follow what that says, and then we are fairly intentional about how the way that we've constructed the platform so that there's different layers.

You can look at just the workflow level and see kind of just the visual part if you're, say, a DBA or slightly more technical, then you can get in kind of the next level of configuration, which is actual writing the queries or defining the API calls. And so we've tried to be intentional about delivering a experience to kind of each type of user that logs into the [00:26:00] system and, you know, just let them see what they need to, but then also don't, you know, give them guardrails.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, it's it's amazing how if you do that from day one, how extensible it becomes, you know, take on new, you know, expand your use cases

Jonathan Porter: beyond that on the base. Yeah, we find that every day and I think that that is the fundamental shift that we've made with warehouse management. There's a million WMS is out there, but they're all fundamentally a box and you have to make a decision.

If you're building this off the shelf thing, you have to define statically. What it looks like to allocate in your system or to pick or to pack and you may have you know configuration options You might have some checkboxes that can affect how the system works But fundamentally if you're built as this static system, you're limited and that was part of yet.

We were from day one this very composable underlying layer that allows us to achieve these outcomes that would just not be possible in You know, a static system. So part of the, the nasty secret with WMS is everything is customized in the [00:27:00] enterprise world too. That's how enterprises solve the challenges.

They write custom layers on top of their WMS. And that's millions of dollars of development, but, you know, if you're 10 billion company, you can support that. That was another part of, you know, what we're driving at is mid market customers can't, you know, that's just not an efficient way to solve this problem.

Ryan Purvis: yeah. And I mean, do you still write code now?

Jonathan Porter: I do. Yeah, I don't, I don't write enough code. I wish I got into more often. My perfect day is 12 hours in a room with, you know, just coding. Yeah, probably 10 or 20 percent of my time is spent doing, I still will jump in there when I can, but yeah, we have a development team now.

Yeah, I mean,

Ryan Purvis: it's, see it with my co founder of Finxone, when he loves to get involved as a CTO and it's not a bad thing at all, but sometimes you, you know, it's that, you have that urge. To and you've got to fight yourself on it sometimes. And I'm the same, you know, you could spend hours solving this problem yourself because you enjoy it, but you're actually not doing the right thing for your business because you know, you've, created in insight, you know, because you've leading the business, you're gonna lead the business and that need to [00:28:00] delegate and to give it to somebody else is tough because you know, you'd rather, like I'm going to do something now for our other product and it's always fallen down the priority list because there's other priority stuff to do.

But I don't want anybody else to do it because it's like, really the thing that I want to do. Yeah. Yeah, you've just got to, sometimes you've got to give yourself that reward.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, I totally can relate to that. And that's been a journey that I've personally been on too of, you know, how to give up some of these things that, so, I mean.

We, our website, our public website is built in a system called Webflow. And I absolutely love building Webflow websites, but we've recently hired a developer because yeah, that was a, you know, just business decision that is just no longer worth my time to do that. And frankly, that was. I had a huge priority list.

My co founder wanted me to update on the website and I just wasn't ever getting to it. So finally we were like, all right, we got to get somebody else to do that. So I've also though found that. So I think that I got away from having personal hobbies for a while when I first started the company. And I mean, it makes sense.

You know, you're a one man show for a while. And then even after you get two or three people, it's still a huge amount of time that you're having to put in. And [00:29:00] so. Anytime that I wasn't working, I was basically sleeping, but I found that having, reintroducing some of my hobbies, and specifically, I code for fun.

I mean, as crazy as that sounds, I write, I have a personal website I build on, and I just kind of, you know, that's an outlet for creativity for me. But so, even though I'm not getting to code as much on the business, I'm still, I take one night a week off, I let myself code. You know, maybe on a Sunday afternoon or something, I'll let myself code on a personal project.

That's been a really good outlet to continue getting that code. But, you know, even though I don't get to do it, you know, at the business as much.

Ryan Purvis: think we're all the same in that respect in this sort of thing is that you, you need to keep your hands on something. And I've done exactly what you've done you know, and I can see it by the amount of reading I'm doing.

So I would normally read about 50, 60 books a year and I think, and I think about, I'm about 32 now. Okay. Still pretty good. No. Yeah. It's not terrible, but, but I'm seeing it that I'm struggling to like, you know, let's have the book that are like an author I really like where I'll, I'll crunch that book in a day or two.

I'm struggling to just sit down and read a book because there's just so much to [00:30:00] do. Yeah, you know, you're sort of saying, well, I could spend, you know, I read before bed, but, you know, sometimes I read for two hours before bed. But because you've got to spend an hour doing a roadmap or designing something or whatever it is, you know, because the business needs that, then you don't do it.

But you know, it's a short term sacrifice for a long term gain. Hopefully that's what that's how we tell it.

Jonathan Porter: Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Purvis: So what would you pass on as lessons learned to anybody who's, who's going down this route?

Jonathan Porter: Ooh, that's a great question. I think that the listening to your customer and getting unbiased feedback is one of the things that is challenging, especially early on.

So, I mean, you know, looking back a couple of years now. I, there was some real inherent bias that was in our initial customer discovery that we didn't recognize until we got a couple of years in. So specifically when I was first doing customer discovery, I was talking to a lot of people in my network, right?

You're first starting out, you're just talking to anybody that'll take your call and most of the people that I knew were other supply chain consultants. Which was really helpful and insightful, but I did very little talking to direct in customers at that [00:31:00] point. And that influenced, you know, how the product was built and how our go to market mission was built.

And it's things that we've had to now kind of learn and, you know, address in different ways. We, you know, it's an immense amount that we've made progress on that front from a, okay, you know, listening to a customer and getting real feedback and trying to, you know, okay, let's build a product feature to solve that or, you know, build something, you know, into something else.

But yeah, I think that trying to get unbiased feedback early on is going to be really, and, you know, that's the thing I would say pass on. Everybody's going to tell you it's a great idea too, right? That's the other thing. It's so hard to present something to someone and. Especially if it's somebody you know, they're going to want to encourage you and want to, but that's actually really negative.

you don't want somebody to just tell you, oh, it's great and go do it. You need to figure out ways to get unbiased feedback. So there was two books I read early on the mom test and then talking to humans. Both of those are ones that like, if somebody's saying they're trying to get into product or startup or entrepreneurship, those are two of the first ones I say, just because.

You've got to find a problem that customers are going to care about paying for.

Ryan Purvis: I heard about the Mom test. [00:32:00] What was the other book? Talking

Jonathan Porter: to Humans. I believe it's written by somebody called, I believe his name is Giff Constable or something like that, it was just it's it's another very short read.

Both of those are like less than 100 pages or so, but it's just getting that candid conversation going and getting somebody, you know, figuring out ways to ask questions that you can actually get real feedback on. I just think that that's crucial because that sets the foundation for everything, right?

If you get some feedback early on that, you know, sets you down a particular path. You could spend a lot of time and energy and money going down something that, you know, might not be right. So, yeah,

Ryan Purvis: it is the challenge. And I mean, I saw it with we started building Valuu to begin with. My original plan with it was to build it for certifications of, in the information security world.

So because I, you know, I done a lot of ISA 27 K. Certification audits and it's again the same process and I looked at all the tools in the market and they all, I don't know, they just didn't feel like it to me. they answered core problem that you're trying to solve with the certification.

They were very, they were very much, you know, [00:33:00] doing it. Each one had a different thing. But anyway, so, so that was where I started and then other stuff started coming up. Then all of a sudden you start seeing all these different edge cases that you, you know, you get a bit But magpie in the sense that nice dining, you're like, Oh, that's a good idea.

Let's do that. Oh, that's a good idea. Let's do that. And we've had to come back to the core thing, which is what we're doing now, which has made a lot better, but getting that, those early pilots in and those early feedback sessions some of it, which are, you know, if you're very sensitive about your.

You know, products, a child in some respects, your child's ugly. But that's okay. You know, the first thing I got told, you know, it's really ugly to look at. I was like, yeah, but I built it. Right. I'm not a designer. Like I don't care, like I care, like in terms of usability, but, but I always pick colors just to show contrasts and whatever it is.

I wasn't trying to make it look pretty. And then you get a good designer and he does nice imagery and then it makes. You know, it makes it look like a professional product, you know, once you, once you accept that feedback and you just, it was a very good calling it a guy's name. He's quite a well known YouTuber interviews, CEOs and leaders and all that kind of stuff.

And he did someone the other night and she said something, a way to [00:34:00] deal with motivations. The motivation is not the thing it's. You've just got to let it be. So if someone gives you bad, if someone gives you something that affects you, you just say, I'll just let that be. And then it'll just switch brain off the emotional attachment to the response.

But let me think about what they said now, you know, a bit more objectively, a bit more compartmentalized and then you can process and deal with it. Right. You know, I think that's what makes, I think that, that ability to take feedback and iterate on it without being emotional about it is what makes successful things versus.

You know, plateauing or even not successful things.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, a hundred percent. I agree. So, and the other thing you touched on too, you made me think about, and it's something we still are working on today, but the, like you have to have such a tight focused, narrow goal and mission and problem too, because so you mentioned about like just you know, shiny object syndrome almost though, let's do that, let's do that, let's do that.

And we personally have found that like we had this proliferation of use cases and problems that we're solving and like the message got muddled. And like, I think. Every startup goes through that. But yes, trying to get [00:35:00] back to, okay, what do we do? What are we best at? Like, who do we help? And like, just make it as clear and simple as possible.

Ryan Purvis: So yeah, you know, and I think it comes down. I mean, this delegation thing, and I see it, you know, happens often you start delegating, you know, people doing the work suddenly accelerate things. They're able to deliver stuff faster. But then, you know, the thing that doesn't always happen is your expectation of what they were delivering.

In your head, doesn't always match up what they've actually delivered. So you think, you know, if I built it, it'd be built this way. So when you say, have you built it when you, have you built this thing? And they go, yeah, I built it this way. And you're like, okay, well, I wrote the story. I just designed. So they've done it that way.

And it's only when you go look at the thing and you realize, Oh, hang on. They actually built it like 25 percent of what I thought. So now you've like banded another 10 ideas on them. Cause you thought you had the things you designed. Do and they haven't done that. So now you've created this momentum around the new things, but you haven't even built the, actually haven't built the first thing to do the other things.

Yeah. And that's where you run into the. You know, the challenge of, you know, writing the ship again, [00:36:00] you know, and you have, you know, avoiding overwhelming people in your team and that kind of stuff. So yeah great. It's been great chatting with you. I know I've talked a lot, but is there anything you want to talk about more further?

Jonathan Porter: Oh, no, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed getting into the conversation and I love when these kind of things just, yeah, just get into a flow state almost and we keep going. So yeah, no, I love talking about warehousing and supply chain. I'm honestly a super nerd about, I think warehouses are beautiful, especially like automation and conveyors and, you know, robots going like I just would sit there and watch it all day.

So yeah, love chatting about technology too. You know, been building websites since I was 15 and it's just, it's, yeah, a lot of fun. So. Yeah. It's funny you

Ryan Purvis: mentioned that because when I, when I was studying engineering at the university I was, that I went to was called Rao, Randolph Ricard University, now it's University of Johannesburg, but they just built a roboticized warehouse management supply chain thing at South African breweries, SAB, but what's the other one?

It's the coca affiliates it's the coca, it's the coca cola name. Okay. What the coca cola's real name is not, not the brand is actually a [00:37:00] company that they actually put it in and, and it was interesting, you know, we had this one engineering hall where this thing was running all the time.

And I mean, in those, I mean, you're talking, you know, 2000s or 23 years ago, you know, that's probably ancient technology now.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah. Okay. That's. It's amazing how fast everything's moving, especially on the fulfillment. And I mean, transportation is the same way. It's just like, supply chain had been building a lot of momentum as robotics and new technology came out.

But then COVID just accelerated that tenfold, right? I mean, we couldn't, nobody could ship anything and you couldn't get the right product and there was no, you know, poultry at the grocery stores and all that. So. I think that the investment that we've seen in supply chain technology overall has just proliferated.

And it's really cool to see the new robotics that come out and, you know, how you can, you know, more efficiently optimize you know, particular processes and. There's been a lot of like blurring of the lines between a lot of legacy systems like that's specifically something that we've seen too is that, you know, there's these legacy silos of [00:38:00] data that are warehouse management or this or that, or just, you know, whatever.

And that doesn't really work anymore. I mean, things are way too interconnected and move too fast and like. You know, that's the same true. That's true with a lot of warehouse automation as well. So conveyors, and that was like the main way that you automated a warehouse for a long time, you put in massive conveyor systems that people who just throw boxes onto, well, that is, you know, years to two, you know, two plus year projects and millions of dollars, and then you put it in and you can't move it.

So what happens when you have an e com rush over the holidays or something and you need to staff up like that? So that's where robots come in, where you can, you know, like add five or ten robots during peak season. Or you can, you know, really modularly pull things in and out. It's just, it's neat to see that and need to see the amount of investment and time going into that.

Ryan Purvis: Well, well, I think you think about just in time supply chain. I mean, I think that's the only way to really do it because you need to have things sequenced you know, that, that imagery control system needs to know where things are and be able to, you know, I just think as good as humans are, I [00:39:00] think for that kind of mundane, repeatable stuff, the bots are better.

So if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best thing to do? Go to your website or LinkedIn or? Yeah,

Jonathan Porter: you can find more about the company on our website PorterLogic. com I'm pretty active on LinkedIn though and yeah, love talking about this kind of stuff so feel free to find me Jonathan Porter and then yeah, you can, I'll definitely chat back or you know, reply to comments and things.

Ryan Purvis: No, we'll do it. It's been great chatting with you and I look forward to chatting with you again in the future.

Jonathan Porter: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on, Ryan.

Ryan Purvis: Thanks, Jonathan. All the best.

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