The following interview is a conversation we had with Patrick Visintainer, CEO and Co-Founder of REPOWR, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13 Million Raised to Build the World’s Largest Commercial Trailer Marketplace.

 

Patrick Visintainer
Thanks Brett, for having me. Looking forward to our conversation. 

Brett
I’m really excited about it as well. Let’s go ahead and kick off with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Patrick Visintainer
Absolutely. Well, my name is Patrick Byzantiner. As Brett said, Co-Founder of REPOWR, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m married to my beautiful and supportive wife. Supportive is a key word there, Brett, named Lacey. We met my senior year of college at Auburn University and been married for five. Know I had no idea what I was wanting to do in college when I was at Auburn and I was actually at the time failing accounting, I had a budy who was in supply chain and I decided to hop in with him, follow him, and I quickly fell in love with supply chain and logistics and I’ve always loved problem solving and that’s something that I was able to do and see. Being in transportation and logistics every day is a problem. 

Patrick Visintainer
It’s a big puzzle piece that you walk into and you have to sit down and put those pieces together. But there’s multiple people involved and I really enjoyed that. And so I guess the problem solving and providing a solution aspect kind of further drew me into the supply chain and logistics world. I get in trouble a lot with my wife at home. She comes home from work and she’s wanting to vent and she just wants me to listen and comfort her. But I always try to help find a solution and a lot of times that’s not what she’s looking for. But that is something that I love and I found in supply chain. Besides that, I’m an extremely passionate person, really passionate about growing personally and developing my business skills and tools. Found that I’m most successful when I set goals for myself. 

Patrick Visintainer
I’m very goal oriented person. I set goals, three goals every day and then goals every week. Every month, every quarter, every year. And I write those down and I put them in front of me somewhere where I can see them every day. I also have just notes on my phone full of goals and things I want to do. Me and my wife, I’ve gotten her into that we’ll go to dinner once a year and we go over our goals and talk about our upcoming goals for the year. And it’s become one of my favorite nights that we have together. I’ve also going through the whole startup phase. There’s a lot of things that you’re not sure of. You’re trying to figure things out. And one thing to help combat a lot of that is your brain. 

Patrick Visintainer
And so I continue to your attitudes and your thoughts that are coming into your mind. And I found that the more I feed my brain with exercise and positive things and motivating things like podcasts and quotes, quote of the days, those really help push me forward and become better and keep pushing forward every single day. And a lot of that I think, comes from sports. I grew up playing sports, baseball, basketball, football, always kind of on that team sport. I like having people around me. I’m not good at some things, but my Co-Founder, somebody I work with, I know that is something that they can help me improve on or we can work well together. And that’s what I found in my so I think, you know, those early days of figuring out your co-founders, that’s something that’s really critical. 

Patrick Visintainer
And then the last thing, Brett, about me, sorry to make this lengthy, is one thing that I carry with me every day is just what my dad taught me, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but he told me I can do anything I want and anything I set my mind to as long as I work hard. And I truly believe that. And I live by that every day. 

Brett
On the topic of goals and just dig in there a little bit. How are you looking on your business goals and how are you looking on your personal goals? 

Patrick Visintainer
Yeah, great question. I was looking at that and where I stood, and I tend to set my goals a little ambitious, which is a good thing, but also a bad thing. I’m not behind, but I’m not ahead. I’m kind of right in line in a way, but I can do better in a lot of things and I still have some things I need to improve on. So overall, I feel pretty good. 

Brett
What about founders that inspire you? When I ask that question or when I say that, who comes to mind. 

Patrick Visintainer
Immediately coming from the supply chain world. Going back to that and what we’re doing at REPOWR, I’ve gotten to see just this industry and this market kind of go through a digital transformation. And there’s been a ton of really solid founders that have come through, people like Convoy and Dan Lewis and what they did. And I know that things have changed recently with them, but they really set the tone for the transportation space, and they’ve opened a lot of doors for people like REPOWR and new visibility tools and platforms. And so I would have to say, choosing somebody in that field, any of those people in the last five years, as well as Malcolm McLean, who invented the intermodal shipping container, he completely revolutionized the maritime shipping. He’s got a great story. 

Patrick Visintainer
And then from a marketplace standpoint, Rich Barton, he’s the Founder of Expedia and Zillow and REPOWR. We look at ourselves similar to both those, Expedia and Zillow. So I’ll probably go Malcolm McLean and Rich Barton. 

Brett
What about books and the way we like to frame this? We got this from an author that I have a feeling you’ve probably heard of him, but it’s Ryan Holiday. And Ryan Holiday calls him quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind? 

Patrick Visintainer
Yeah, I guess the one that I would choose, as I’ve been talking about, like, your brain and mentality and the way you look at things, that’s a powerful aspect. When you’re starting a business, there’s a lot of people saying, no. Your friends, your family, they don’t want you to do it. And the book that I found in those early days was a book, no limits by John Maxwell. It’s really a book on just leadership, growing your capabilities through your attitude, your energy, and just creativity that you have and you’re born with and how to use it. And so that’s kind of one that’s really helped me out. 

Brett
I love it. Let’s switch gears now. Let’s dive a bit deeper into REPOWR and the marketplace that you’re building there. So just to kick things off, can we just maybe focus on the problem? What problem are you solving with this marketplace? 

Patrick Visintainer
So REPOWR focuses on the trailing asset, aka the semi trailer. Why did we do that? Well, if you look at transportation, there’s millions and millions of shipments that are being transported every single day. And 80% of those shipments that are being transported are being hauled in a trailer. So we started off in trailers. And the three big problems that we’re really solving are fragmentation and fragmentation, underutilization of those assets and those assets being inaccessible. And so, starting at fragmentation, 92% of the trucking companies that operate in this industry are small fleets, six or fewer power units, six or fewer trucks in their fleet. On top of that, though, the flip side, 97% of the trailers in the market are owned by just 3% of the fleets in the market. 

Patrick Visintainer
And so that creates a lot of the fragmentation in the space, and then that also creates a lot of those trailers be underutilized. Great Dane, a trailer manufacturer in the space, says that 75% of a trailer’s lifespan is spent detached from a truck, meaning it’s not moving, it’s not making money. And so that’s an astonishing amount of waste and poor asset utilization that the industry has every single day. And it was crazy to see that. And then the last one, they’re all inaccessible. Tax. As a trailer trucking company, you have to have the trailer location verify if it’s the load status, the schedule for it, if you have the authority to use it, you have to pay to use it, provide proof of insurance, all the documentation. And on top of that, they have the name brand on the side. 

Patrick Visintainer
They’re just for their network and their business only. And we’re trying to change the way people look at those assets. So that’s kind of the main three problems that we’re solving today. 

Brett
I’ve interviewed a number of marketplace founders, and all of them described to me that when it comes to the marketplace business model, you have this chicken and the egg problem. So which side of the marketplace did you spend the primary attention on? 

Patrick Visintainer
Oh, man, that was the hardest thing. You have to have the supply to have the demand. And so we started off trying to find the supply, and then we realized that the supply needed to have demand, so we actually kind of reversed it. And went out and found demand, and we started calling people and saying, hey, we have these carriers, these renters that want to use your assets. Do you have any not being used? This is how much money you can make and showing them the money. And so we actually found the demand first and then supply, and marketplaces and just supply chain is very volatile. It flips one quarter, we’ll be looking for more supply the next quarter, more demand. But we’ve kind of found a little small niche that can kind of help us get both how we’re doing it today. 

Patrick Visintainer
From those early days, you did have to find the chicken and the egg, and the demand supply. But today we found that we can go after these large enterprise fleets who make up the majority of our supply, and they own that 3% of the trailers in the marketplace. On top of that, they not only have the supply, they have the shippers that they’re working with, where they’re working. They’re all over the country. They have a large carrier network. Not only their drivers, but they have asset light side that has third party carriers they work with. And so being able to tap into their supply, but also their third party carrier network has really opened a lot of doors for us. To find that chicken and egg and put them all together and let them play together where it benefits everybody involved. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. What were the early days like for you? Did it feel like you had a viable business here right away, or did it take some time? 

Patrick Visintainer
It definitely took a little bit of time. I think that, Brett, we are very lucky. Really. Kind of where we started standing up and running with REPOWR was coming out of Covid-19 everything was dead. And then in 2021, the economy went crazy, and people were buying more and things like that. And so we saw a lot of that activity in the trucking space. And so within that first year, yes, it was hard to get the first two, three, four customers on board and find that chicken and egg that we talked about earlier. But coming out of COVID the demand for trailers was out the roof. And no leasing companies had inventory to give manufacturers of trailers. They couldn’t produce the trailers fast enough. 

Patrick Visintainer
And so we found opportunities with trucking companies that own these assets, and they had to rebalance their trailer pools, and so we would just post them onto our platform. And people were renting these trailers for way too much money. And on top of that, we’re turning an expense into revenue for these trucking company owners and getting those trailers to a market where they actually needed them and rebalancing those trailer pools. And we started building up a large network of demand, and more demand came onto the platform. Because they needed trailers and moved freight, and we took that demand and we’re able to capitalize on more suppliers and showing them that case study that we did with that first big enterprise fleet. And I think we did half a million dollars in the first six months. 

Patrick Visintainer
And we’ve been kind of living off that and growing and digging deeper. 

Brett
Did you always know that you were going to raise external capital or when did that come into the picture? 

Patrick Visintainer
I didn’t know anything about that world when we started REPOWR, but we knew that we would need capital for what were trying to do. One thing that we are always very strategic, and we wanted to make sure we are strategic about was we don’t want to just take anybody and everybody’s money. We want to make sure that it is strategic money that can help open doors, that can help us really build a business for the future, and that can be long term growth. And I think we’ve done a really good job of that with our partners today. So they’ve been extremely helpful. And I think it’s helped us get to where we want to be a lot quicker than if we didn’t raise the capital. 

Brett
When it comes to traction and adoption, are there any numbers that you can share? 

Patrick Visintainer
Yes, I would say the market right now in terms of transportation, companies are really struggling, and there’s a lot of companies going out of business. But what’s been really cool to see is, as I mentioned, in 2021, when the market was the best it’s ever been, that’s when we saw really quick growth. And now we’re at a different point in time where the market has slowed down, but the demand for trailers is still there. And so we’ve been able to grow month over month during these tough times when we’re seeing our peers in the industry struggling and we’re finding new value adds, we’re spending a lot of time with our customers. We’re asking them questions, how can we better? What do you need from us? 

Patrick Visintainer
And we’re kind of building our product around their businesses to continue to help them generate revenue and help them optimize their operations. And so not only spending this time building out new products with them, but understanding the market and seeing how we’ve been able to play in different types of market conditions has been really cool to see. But I think we’ll be finishing about 200% year over year growth in terms of GMV this year. And we’re working with 18 of the top 25 largest asset based fleets. I think we have now over 10,000 carriers on our platform. And that’s growing every day. So it’s been a lot of fun. 

Brett
What do you attribute to that success? I’m sure any Founder that’s listening in would love to come on here and talk about that type of growth. What have you gotten right? 

Patrick Visintainer
We’ve gotten a lot of things wrong. But it’s when we have gotten them wrong. We’ve done a really good job of understanding how we got them wrong. But I would say the biggest piece to our success brett is we’re all about the trailer. Our product needs to service that trailer. Service our customer on the supply and the demand side. But what we’ve done a really good job at is spending time with our customers. Especially the early customers. We never started REPOWR to just say here’s our technology. Here’s how you can use it. But instead we spent early and every month time with our customers. And we wanted to hear from them how do we become better? And they’ve really kind of helped us build our product for us. And we’re learning from them and learning the systems that they have in place. 

Patrick Visintainer
And so I think that spending time with customers and having relationships is critically important as you’re starting a company in the early days especially. 

Brett
What about your messaging? How have you seen that evolve since launching? 

Patrick Visintainer
Messaging change based on market demands and what’s going on in the market. If we need more demand. If we’re looking for more supply. But overall selling REPOWR is different. We’re not selling just hey. Here’s what we’re doing at REPOWR. But we get the opportunity to ask questions to our customers and say what problem are you trying to solve today? And here’s a solution that we could provide by using REPOWR. There’s a bunch of different ways you can use our service. And it’s been cool to see that. You might start off as when you sign up in this field of REPOWR. But you can evolve and start growing them in different aspects and give them different use cases as they get developed and start figuring out the process and the product and things like that. So it changes. 

Patrick Visintainer
But it varies on customer and size and things like that. 

Brett
To go back to funding a little bit. As I mentioned there you’ve raised roughly 13 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this entire journey? 

Patrick Visintainer
It’s something that you need to spend a lot of time on. It’s hard to delegate time to that after you just raise. But staying in constant contact with investors even when you’re not raising. Because one thing we’ve learned is it’s helped us grow our network. Even the people that we’ve talked to that haven’t invested in REPOWR and they’re not a capital partner. They’ve been helpful introducing us to a future investor that might be interested. They’ve been helpful introducing us to customers. And so I think that staying in contact, building those relationships when you’re fundraising and asking them questions, hey, do you know this person? Do you know this company? Their networks are big. 

Patrick Visintainer
And so being able to tap into those, even if you’re not fundraising, it’s really good to start that and to keep that going so that when the time is right, you can really bring on a really solid partner that understands you and knows what you’re looking to do. 

Brett
Let’s imagine you were starting the company again today from scratch. Based on everything that you’ve learned so far. 

Patrick Visintainer
What would be the number one piece. 

Brett
Of advice you’d give yourself? 

Patrick Visintainer
Don’t wait. A lot of times you have the idea, you have to gather the research, the data and things like that. But I’m a big believer in testing things out, whether you have what you need in place or not. And so I wish that a year earlier, when we originally thought of the idea, on the way down to the beach, me and my Co-Founder and I was explaining to him and were talking about what he was seeing, what I was seeing, and the vision of REPOWRs being created, I wish that we would have gotten back from the beach and started the company then. And it’s harder to say that, but the longer you wait, I would just start earlier, I guess, is my answer. 

Brett
Love that answer. Final question for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. So, three to five years from today, what’s the big picture vision that you’re building? 

Patrick Visintainer
At the end of the day, we’re a product and a technology, and we want to continue to build a product that’s easy to use. It’s an API first approach that’s built on collaboration and connecting people to feel like they’re in a community and really just continue to grow the relationships that we have today, explore new things and just continue to enhance our product overall and be customer focused and just keep working hard. Because I know that we’re on the cusp of something big and it could be tomorrow. It’s laying around somewhere close and you never know when that day is going to be. So just continue to evolve the product, build customers existing and people that we’re working on, get them on and just keep growing. But there’s a lot of fun things in the pipeline. 

Brett
Amazing. Will have to save that for part two and bring you back on in a year or two to talk through all the exciting stuff that you have in the works. Now, Patrick, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and they’ve just been inspired by your journey and they want to follow along as you execute on this awesome vision, where should they go? 

Patrick Visintainer
Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. Patrick Visantaner they can check out REPOWR.com. I think we’ve got a blog that will be updating more. They can check out the REPOWR LinkedIn page and then my email is patrick@REPOWR.com reach out. Feel free to ask questions. I always love meeting people and talking shop. 

Brett
Awesome. Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Patrick Visintainer
Thank you, Brett. 

Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.