Profile For Anton

How much of your time have shippers and receivers wasted in the past month? What about past year? Entire career? Have you ever wondered how much truck drivers time is being constantly wasted because some companies cannot create a solid logistics management at their locations? My modest calculations start with several millions man-hours per year. Just so you know, it took 7 mln man-hours to build Empire State Building.

Right now this roughness in company vs. truck driver interaction is there, but there is no real solution for it. What can one driver (dispatch manager, owner of a carrier) do to improve the way company works? Call and tell their logistics people that they suck? Write a feedback to headquarters telling how they can improve their locations? Only the most dedicated people would go for these methods, most would just feel some anger for the lack of professionalism in this world and move on. And problem will be waiting for another driver to come and be trapped. And the cycle will keep on repeating itself.

My name is Anton and since the beginning of 2014 I've dedicated myself to solving the problem that truck drivers have with shippers and receivers. Together with a carrier from Illinois, active truck drivers from all over the U.S., developers, designers and content-managers from literally all over the world we created a platform and named it Loadingspot. Besides desktop version, we created iOS and Android applications. At the moment I'm writing this post, we've added 66,666 profiles of different shippers and receivers. And we keep adding more every day. As a registered user, you can add new companies (if they are not in the database yet), write reviews, check companies for additional info - overnight parking, appointment policy, lumper service. We have a goal - to gather under one roof all the knowledge about shippers and receivers (good and bad sides of them). So that truck drivers will know a lot more about a company prior to coming over. We have a dream that one day a shipper/receiver will pay attention to what drivers have to say and tune their performance based on driver's reviews.

There is something that I would like to ask you all about. Please give me a reason why you don't care about Loadingspot. If you have more than one reason - feel free to dump all of them in comments below. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks.

Funny, MRC beat me to the punch. Stereotypical beard = slob, lazy, unkempt, DIRTY. CLEAN-shaven is a term used for a reason, hence, you are CLEAN if you shave. Damn those Romans. At least the Greeks could rock a beard without being looked at as uncivilized. Little history lesson there.

Let's get back to rocking a beard - EVERY ABLE MAN!!!!!

Seriously though, you want marketing input / advice Anton, I'll give it to you. Your service will only apply to owner operators or independents. Company drivers have no choice where they are sent. So, honestly, your service is pretty much irrelevant unless you're reaching out to drivers that have a choice where they are dispatched, viz. o/o or independent truckers. Are there more company drivers than independents? If so, then now you're really limited.

This website is not really the place to reach out to your targeted audience. If anything, the moderators on this forum strongly advise new drivers to NOT pursue being an owner operator. You should find forums and websites where independents and owner operators congregate. There's your audience and potential client base.

I appreciate your thoughts, input and advice. The reason I asked everyone for opinion - see how people react and what they think. By the way, person on the left is not sloppy, and I honestly think that his beard is well taken care of. He is just tired of the inefficiency in the trucking industry, which makes him sad..

Another thing that I'm interested in - does this illustration catch your attention or leave you indifferent?

Heres my opinion, its the same guy. Pic on right is him getting loaded, then he stopped at every all you can eat buffet on the way to receiver. Gained 40 lbs, Never shaved or showered and ran out of good clothes. He was so late they took foever to unload him.

What do you think about the quality of the illustration? Do you like it or you don't?

Oh, so they have a problem with beards?

What do you mean?

The stereotypical truckdriver being a slob with a beard, compared to the more often portrayal, of a clean shaven, uniformed driver, usually figured as union worker. The beard comment was a Joke, dude. I get the premise of an unkept driver, How many days have you felt like driver #1 after driving your brains out to get to an appt. time, just to get put into a line. What is the diff? It is the individual that determines there own fate. If I show up at a receivers on time and looking like I just ran through the bowels of hell, as long as I have the attitude of, "Here is your shipment, Sir" I should be treated like the "Pretty boy" . right?

Seems like there are no problems with understanding the issue that this illustration is communicating. Would you visit an online service that tells you an average waiting time at locations after seeing this ad?

Oh, so they have a problem with beards?

What do you mean?

Hello everyone - tell your thoughts and critics about this illustration. Do you understand the idea that this image is trying to communicate? All opinions are welcome. Thank you

Hey Anton, I am starting to get a better picture of where you are going with this. I am intrigued. I still wonder about OPSEC (OPerational SECurity though. Maybe I`m over thinking it.

What about OPSEC? Could you please give me example of what you mean?

I had thought of this same idea myself a while back but I haven't tried to execute on it. I figured I could use crowdsourcing (drivers entering information) to get directions, hours of operation, and comments on things like which entry to pull into, whether or not they have overnight parking, are they appointment only or first come first serve, and things like that.

The main challenges I thought of were:

1) The scale - this would be a massive amount of information to collect. Even with a rather large army of drivers it would take a considerable amount of time before you had enough information for the app to be helpful. It could take years.

2) Unmoderated user feedback from the general population is complete junk. You would have to verify every piece of information that came in because inaccuracies would make it useless. So this would require heavy moderation.

3) The major trucking companies already have this. They have directions to their customers, comments, hours of operations, and all sorts of information in their systems already. But there are still plenty of drivers on the road without this at their company.

4) Drivers have access to so much already for free on the Web with Google Maps, business directories, existing apps, and the like.

The scale is the main problem. I just don't know how you'd get enough shippers and receivers into the system with quality information that people find helpful and can't find easily anywhere else. It's certainly not an impossible task, but from a business standpoint I don't see how you'd make money from it. You can't consider selling the app until the app has a great reputation and it won't have a great reputation until it's filled with useful information. So how do you get the information in there in the first place? You'd have to hire an army of drivers to take your blank slate and start filling it in. That will either take years to pull off or a really large up front investment to pay everyone. Sure, you can fill in the basics from business directories to get the ball rolling but that isn't helpful, unique information. So all it would be is a Phone Book in the beginning. You couldn't even release that publicly because it would get slammed by low ratings.

I don't know man.....this would be a tough one from a business standpoint. It would likely take years to build it into something really effective and it would take a huge pile of time and money. If done really well it would be incredibly helpful. But getting it built up to that point would be challenging.

Brett, thank you. All of the challenges listed above make sense. But. Having considered this idea yourself, you admit that problem exists. Now the question for me is - what strategy to use in order to create this product? I agree about quality of information - it is the main value of the project. There should be a way to make data flow into project.

I don't care if you make a million dollars off this info or use to to wall paper the white house. Either way it's no big deal. Your going to be dealing with truck driver opinions. And you might get some facts but they will be colored by the opinions of the person you are talking to.

One of the number one complaints of all or almost all refer drivers is any and all Walmart dc's is wait time. Now you ask someone that actually knows how Walmart dc's work and I will tell you it's not that bad. Sure the wait times can be long but most trucks come in with 2k to 3k of different products and Walmart wants to make sure it's all there and the got what they paid for. Can't blame them. Hence the long times. So no I don't thing it's that bad.

You have millions of businesses trucks delivery to everyday. And yes I said millions. Even if you could get around the issues of people giving you opinion versus fact how would you go about even getting a quarter of them?

Here is another issue. We have all been to the same places time and time again. Or we know other people that have. We talk to each other about places and share what we know. Whether you do a book or website or whatever form of media you will use how will you make your products so much better than actually talking to our peers about this info?

How would you market it to make people want to spend money on it verses turning on the cab radio and getting that info for free?

We already have apps on our phones that do this sort of thing you are speaking about. We have truck stop apps to rate truck stops. Yelp is a awesome app to read how other people rated a place. There are tons of rating and opinion giving website that are with in reach of our fingers on our smart phones.

I know this is not what you wanted coming here but I felt you needed to know what your up against.

We say here on this website all to offer that one person's experience is theirs alone and it will not be the same for anyone else. A prefect example. I drive for Werner. Hardly anyone has anything good to say about them but I happen to think they are an awesome company to drive for. I get more than enough miles and some I can't do which is a good problem to have. Excellent insurance. Great equipment. Great support staff. But then again that is my opinion based only on my personal experience.

Now if your going to base your research off of truck drivers opinions and views..... Well good luck cause there are about 3.5 million drivers and you will never hear the same view on a subject more than once.

Well however you plan to market it I wish you good luck and perhaps we shall see this project of yours in a few years.

Guy, thank you. Have a question. You said it is easier to call your peer and ask about location you are going to. And you also mentioned huge number of businesses out there. How likely is that your peers know about a shipper you are going to now? Unless you all are going to the same places all the time.