Rodney Morris
Welcome to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. My name is Rodney Morris. I’m an Associate at Valor Ventures. I’m a co-host today. On today’s podcast. I’m joined by Lafayette who’s also an Associate with me at Valor Ventures. Lafayette, would you please introduce yourself?
Lafayette Julius
Hey, how’s it going, guys? My name is Lafayette Julius, also an Associate at Valor. We’re excited to have Julius Bryant with us on this podcast as well. He’s one of the top finalists from our recent cohort Startup Runway.
Rodney Morris
Julius is a finalist of the ninth cohort of Startup Runway, which is an extremely competitive achievement. Julius, you beat out hundreds of other applicants to be recognized in that way, just to be able to be one of the finalists. We would love to get an introduction to what Jax is and some of the milestones you’ve achieved thus far that led you to be a finalist.
Julius Bryant
Yeah, thanks for the introduction. So at Jax, we are creating inclusion in the gig economy by renting cars to college people and empowering them to make money and through good work. That’s what we do as a business. We’ve been around for about two years, business is going phenomenal so far. We’ve been able to grow our fleet to about 60 vehicles, we’re running at about 97% capacity. So that kind of proves that our business has some value to this market and to our customers. So it’s going well. And we’re just gonna try and continue to grow it.
Rodney Morris
Awesome! And let’s talk about Startup Runway a little bit. What did Startup Runway do for you and Jax and would you recommend it to other founders? Why or why not?
Julius Bryant
Yes, it was a huge help. I always say that although we’re competing for a cash prize, I think the value in the sort of competition specific to startup runaway is always more so in networking. So obviously, you hope to come away with the cash but the network and new connections that you come away with at the conclusion are always equally as valuable, if not more valuable. I was able to connect with other founders of businesses that are local to Atlanta, that all saw their really tough problems and did a great job at it. So that was helpful. And then also the board meeting that we did as finalists before, the actual programming of Startup Runway was extremely helpful as well. So that experience was essentially made up of, I think we have four different board members there. We as founders, were able to present them with a real problem that we were facing, and then kind of get their feedback on it and understand, from an investor perspective, how they might kind of think through that problem and solve it. It actually brought it to a vote at the end of the conversation. So that was extremely helpful. I think, as founders, a lot of times we get caught up in the day to day, right? We just want to make sure that we’re serving our customers and making enough money to make it to the next day, right? A lot of times don’t think about those long term strategic initiatives. And then also, depending on the size and size of the company, even if you are thinking about those strategic initiatives, a lot of times you’re making those decisions in a silo with just you and maybe a co-founder or early employees, and not bringing in the perspective of people outside of your business who might think about things differently. I thought that was extremely valuable to be able to have that experience with the board members and get some feedback on a real issue for the company. We’re all already using some of that feedback to kind of build out our roadmap for the rest of 2020 and beyond.
Rodney Morris
That’s great! I definitely agree with you there. I think as an early startup and as an early startup founder, is usually just you composed of another co-founder and like you said, maybe the early employees. Being able to have that advisory type of board for solder runaway, I’m sure is very, very helpful. Lafayette, I know he has a question that he wants to actually [ask] specifically in regards to this.
Lafayette Julius
Yeah, definitely. I had the chance to be in those meetings and those boardrooms and talk to some of the top VCs. What specifically for you were some of the best advice you got from some of those VCs in those rooms?
Julius Bryant
Yeah, so specific to Jax, our business is based on kind of the ownership of very capital intensive and depreciating assets and vehicles. So, we’ve been able to over the course of the past two years really model out the math to make sure that we are buying cars at the right prices and renting them at the right prices such that the revenues are outpacing the depreciation so that it still makes sense financially. But even with that being the case, we’re also looking at some different alternatives that are less capital intensive and that would allow us to essentially leverage other people’s assets. So we kind of were discussing with the board members some different options regarding that, as far as I’m essentially going with a platform model, instead of just being the owners of assets. But also, I’m going to a platform model where people can either essentially lend us their cars, so to speak. And we’ll rent those out to our database of drivers, or potentially stand up an entire new platform where dealerships or small fleet operators will be able to license software and essentially start up their own rental car business. So we’re able to kind of get some feedback from the investors on which of those they thought made the most sense, from a financial perspective over the long run which was really helpful.
Lafayette Julius
Nice!
Rodney Morris
Julius, also, we would like to go in on the virtual experience. This year, because of the pandemic, it was all virtual, usually, it’s an in-person experience. But we want to talk about that and just ask, was that a better or worse experience for you?
Julius Bryant
Well, I’m a fan of in-person interactions. Personally, I think you have a greater chance for saying serendipity. When you’re meeting in person and you’re more likely to run into people that you don’t know already, I think. But one of the things I think Startup Runway did really well that’s not been the case in a lot of other virtual events I’ve been to is making sure that we had time to do breakout sessions with other people that were in attendance of the event. Doing the breakout rooms, I thought that was really helpful, it’s not quite the connection that you would get in person, obviously but it’s a more direct connection with a smaller group of people as opposed to being in a large virtual room with dozens or even more hundreds of people, sometimes in some instances in having to click through the attendee list and figure out who’s who, and things like that. But those breakout rooms allow you to actually get in a small group setting and actually exchange conversation with other people who potentially can help you or you can help. To you guys [goes the] credit that I thought that was great. That allowed me to make some connections that I may not have made otherwise without that, so I thought that was awesome.
Rodney Morris
Got it. Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the in-person experience. We appreciate the feedback. We try to do as best as we can to make it to the point where you can actually connect with people. And from there, they could actually stay in your network to help you continue to grow your business there. In regards to your business, we’re interested to know, what’s your motivation behind Jax? What’s the passionate factor for you and what’s driving you to continue to build a business and the product?
Julius Bryant
Yeah, so I’m really I can start by saying, my kind of my personal motivation in life for just about everything I do is freedom, right? So I want to be able to kind of move how I want to move and work on the things I want to work on, go to places I want to go, and be with the people that I want to be with. That same mission kind of trickles down into the mission for Jax. So the foundation of this business is that a lot of people are excluded from the freedom and income that comes with the gig economy because they don’t have access to the tools that they need to participate in. In this instance, the tools are vehicles, right? So if you don’t own a vehicle at all, or if you own a vehicle that doesn’t meet the body type or model year requirement for some of the ride-hailing or delivery services, then you are effectively excluded from those opportunities, right? So we’ve had customers who had decent-paying jobs, but they wanted to still be able to participate in the gig economy just because they needed to be able to pick their kids up from school at 2:30 when they got out of school, right? So in that instance, there’s a level of freedom that they didn’t have before because they had to physically be at their jobs at a certain time, for a certain amount of hours, during certain days of the week, and that prevented them from doing something that we might deem insignificant or simple. But then wanting to be able to be there for their children when they got out of school, something as simple as that, and Jax is kind of enabling them to have that freedom to do that. And there are many other use cases around that. But essentially, we’re just trying to create freedom and allowing people to participate in the gig economy who might not have that opportunity otherwise.
Rodney Morris
Got it. I think that’s so powerful. One of my close friends has been discussing that term which is exactly for what you speak of freedom and autonomy lately and is definitely one of those driving factors. Lafayette wants to discuss things in regards to the customers that you may be looking for.
Lafayette Julius
Yeah, I think you touched on it a lot, Julius. Especially what your customers are currently looking for now is freedom and saving time per week, or just an income increase all around our lifestyle. So, when you mentioned those things, what do you want your customers to think and feel about Jax now that you know that you’re looking for that kind of customer?
Julius Bryant
Yeah, I think, overall, I want our customers to feel like Jax kind of just presents them with opportunity. I touched on a little bit earlier. But it’s honestly not fair that only certain people can participate. I think overall, what we’re doing is we’re trying to identify people who have been excluded, for whatever reason, there’s a multitude of reasons. I mean, I touched on some of them, but even things like maybe you’re here on vacation for a little while, maybe you flew here from another city and you want to be able to make some money while you’re here, right? Well, if you’re here for a short time, you’re not going to be able to go get a job probably while you’re visiting Atlanta for a short period of time to visit family or something like that. So even someone like that, we’re providing them with an opportunity to make some money during their downtime when they’re on their vacation. I think that’s really it. Regardless of who the customer is, or what the circumstances are, if you need our service, then we want to be able to provide you with the opportunity to use our service, and then on the back end to be able to make some money for yourself. That’s the goal. So overall, we say it is really just about opportunities for our customers.
Lafayette Julius
Great!
Rodney Morris
Julius, you spoke on the milestones you’ve achieved thus far, and congratulations on that. I’m interested to know, what would you like to achieve by the end of this year going into next year, the milestones that you would like to achieve?
Julius Bryant
Yeah, so for the past couple of years, we’ve really been kind of scrappy in our approach. We’ve leveraged like some existing third-party software to handle our booking process and billing and things like that. A really big milestone that we’re actually about to achieve hopefully within the next few weeks is the launch of our customer-facing app. That’s been a long time coming. We were able to find some developers finally that could offer the product that we were looking for. So we’re in the final stages of developing the app, we’re doing user testing now. And the goal is for in the next few weeks for us to bring that process from a booking billing process, bring all those in-house, and kind of run those through our own app as opposed to third party services. So that’s one milestone that we intend to hit within the next few weeks hopefully. And then the next one I would say is really to kind of flesh out the idea I mentioned earlier as far as being less dependent on the assets and the vehicles themselves and figuring out how we can kind of leverage existing assets. There are their cars out there, all over the place that are sitting kind of collecting dust, right? Whether that is a car dealership that has vehicles on their lot that they’re not able to move or fleet operators or taxi companies or what have you. There are tons of use cases and examples out there. But there are assets out there that are not being used that could be used to empower people and give people opportunities and to make money for the owners as well. So I think the next major milestone is to kind of put a stake in the ground around what that looks like for Jax as far as leveraging other people’s assets to scale up the size of the fleet and to help more people who need these vehicles to participate in the game.
Rodney Morris
Got it. And I think that makes a lot of sense, especially the second milestone that you mentioned. And I think one of the things I was very impressed by is that you all were able to gain a lot of traction without that mobile application thus far. And that’s one of those things that kind of just raised my ears when I came across the business for Startup Runway. I was like, wow. I’m very interested to see what you all do after the launch of the mobile application and play around with it myself. I know a lot of people, especially in the African-American community, that can definitely use a platform like Jax in order to generate some income for themselves.
Julius Bryant
Yeah, absolutely. We’re in the final stages of testing. So as soon as it’s done, I’ll make sure I shoot you guys a link so you can download it and play around with it and give me some feedback.
Rodney Morris
Got it. That would be great. And how can people reach out to you, Julius, if they want to talk to you about Jax and are interested in Jax?
Julius Bryant
I’m pretty open on the internet and accessible. The first name, last name pretty much everywhere. So I’m probably most active on Twitter and Instagram. I’m @JuliusBryant on both of those platforms. For Jax’ social media is @ridewithjax. So you can follow what Jax is doing on those. I actually need to be a little bit better at posting on social media for Jax specifically, so I’m working on that. But yeah, first name last name for me. And then @ridewithjax across all social platforms.
Rodney Morris
Got it. Lafayette, do you have any remaining questions?
Lafayette Julius
Yeah, just as a founder myself and I know you mentioned building out the mobile platform, juggling things from day to day life, what do you feel Julius is just the hardest thing you have a hard time doing? With the mobile app, one of the hardest things or just what was one of the hardest things building Jax thus far?
Julius Bryant
I would say the hardest thing is just prioritization, right? And that’s not specific to Jax I think that’s kind of just like a founder thing, right? But right now, we operate it very lean. It’s just myself, and my co-founder, and it has been an entire time, we will be looking to bring on some additional people onto the team in the near future. But right now, it’s really just being able to narrow a scope around what’s the most important thing for me to do today, right? So I think as founders, you probably can understand, the to-do list is never complete, right? As it just continues to get longer and longer and longer, my challenge has been really just being able to understand what I should be spending most of my time today. So I’ve been trying to get better about that, as far as prioritizing the most important things that are either going to directly impact the customer, or kind of be pivotal in the long term growth in the business. So that’s really what I’ve been focused on. And then also, I think it is really going to be important for us to hire someone, because I think I spent a lot of my time doing things that I could hire someone, someone else to do them, right? I could teach someone else to do them, and be able to implement more scale into the business. I talk about scale a lot on social media and as founders and investors, we talk about scale the wrong way. I think the scale is a lot more about efficiency than it is about growth. So a lot of times when you hear founders or investors talk about scale, they’re talking about growing your business, in a kind of mayhem. But the scale is really a measurement of efficiency, right? So if I can get more of whatever my output is, if I can get more of that output, for less work, then that’s scale, right? So for me a lot of prioritization, it’s really building systems into the business so that I don’t have to physically be somewhere to do something for work to get done. Whether it’s in my case, it might be getting cars washed, or I might be getting old oil changed on the cars or whatever. There are just simple things that are required for the basic maintenance of a car. I’m implementing systems so I don’t have to be physically present for things to get done. I would say those are kind of the two biggest hurdles that I’ve been working on both the prioritization and just the scaling of the business.
Lafayette Julius
Wow, that was great! You definitely touched on that. Just to wrap it up, we know that this market is a big market, and there’s a lot of competitors in this space. What do you feel like Jax is way different from doing the same thing? What do you feel is the most important way that you are different from others in this market today?
Julius Bryant
Yes, so I think it’s pretty well known public knowledge that if you want to be an Uber or Lyft driver, you can go rent a car directly from Uber or Lyft. Lyft has its own program, and then Uber partners with another rental car company, and you can go rent from them. I would say the biggest difference is kind of the driver centricity around the payment structure for the rental, right? So Lyft, or Uber, at least the last time I checked, neither of them charged a driver upfront for the cost of the car, what they do is they take the cost of the car out of the earnings that they make from their ride. So let’s say the week starts on Monday, and the cost of the car is X dollars, those first X dollars that you make beginning on Monday, go directly towards the cost of the car. So in many instances, it depends on how much you drive, obviously, but in many instances to drivers, when they rent from those platforms, they’re not saying any money actually hit their account, potentially to the middle of the week, right? Which is not good for the driver when they may need money in the short term to handle business and live life as we all do. If you have to wait till the middle of the week, every week before you see your first dollars, that might be problematic for the driver, right? And then secondly, Uber and Lyft pay the driver a reduced rate if you rent the vehicle. So drivers make money per minute and per mile when you drive for Uber or Lyft and a lot of people don’t know this, even a lot of drivers don’t even know this but when you rent a vehicle from those platforms, they pay you. It varies by market, but they pay you up to 30% less on your mileage rate than they would if you own the car. And they claim that that’s to cover the cost of insurance and things like that but the numbers and the math kind of just doesn’t work, right? They’re taking a lot more money out of these drivers’ pockets, that they should be keeping themselves. So when you rent from us, you don’t get docked on your mileage pay, they pay you as if you own the car when you rent outside your platforms so that’s tremendously helpful for the driver. I think those are the biggest ways that we kind of complement the needs of drivers is really the payment structure. On the first point with them taking the money out of your account for the cost of the car, what we do differently is we charge the driver on a daily basis, right? So you rent for two days upfront to start and then every additional day that you want to extend the vehicle or extend the rest of the vehicle, you use them for one day at a time, right? It’s better for the driver because they want and not getting that money taken directly out of their account before they see any other hit their account but also it’s a short-term cycle for the rental. You pay the cost of the rental for the day, you go out and you work and everything else you keep doing. You use that money for whatever you need to use it for. And then you do it again tomorrow. So just kind of payment structures is a lot more conducive to kind of the schedules and the lifestyles of our renters.
Lafayette Julius
Wow, wow. Those are some really special benefits and features that Jax offers all day long. Thanks for sharing that.
Julius Bryant
Yeah, of course.
Rodney Morris
Yeah, and I guess you learn something new every day. I really didn’t know that Uber or Lyft allows you to rent vehicles from their platform. So that was quite informative. I was like, “Wow, why don’t I know that?” But yeah, thanks for that. Julius, we just want to thank you for joining the Atlanta Startup Podcast with us today. Thank you for taking the time out to speak on your Startup Runway experience and telling us a little bit more about Jax. Is there anything else you would like to say?
Julius Bryant
No, thank you for having me. Thanks to all those involved in me having the opportunity to be a part of Startup Runway. It’s an awesome experience and looks forward to more engagement interaction as we move forward.
Rodney Morris
Sounds great. And for everyone listening, please go check out Jax. The mobile application is coming soon.
Lisa
The Atlanta Startup Podcast is produced by Valor Ventures as a service to the startup and investor community. We couldn’t do it without the support of our sponsors–Atlanta Tech Park, the global innovation center, and Write2Market, Atlanta’s favorite tech, and healthcare marketing firm. If you’d like to get your information on the Atlanta Startup Podcast, our share a message with our listeners, visit us online and check out our affordable rate card. All advertisements here are tax-deductible donations to the Startup Runway Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investor.
