Travis Mariea
Flxpoint
Travis Mariea, CEO and co-founder of Flexport, has cracked the code on new hire onboarding. By deploying AI to codify senior knowledge and structure learning around measurable milestones instead of time, he’s cut ramp time from 90 days to 14 days. His approach reveals something deeper: the companies winning with AI aren’t replacing people. They’re evolving roles, creating new ones, and building systems that let talented people move faster.
The old rule was simple: expect 90 days before a new hire felt productive. Mariea rejected that number not because it was conservative, but because it was backwards. Calendar time shouldn’t be the measure. Knowledge should be.
Flexport now structures onboarding around milestones. The product is technical, customers use it in different ways, and support reps need to know its edges and quirks. Instead of having them sit next to a senior person for three months, Mariea used AI tools like NotebookLM to convert senior knowledge into structured curriculum. New hires work through material, hit milestones, and move to live customer work when they’re ready.
The result is concrete. The last hire hit milestone three in 14 days. The company now tracks metrics, improves the process, and knows exactly what “ramped” means.
It shouldn’t be based on time. It should be based on when their knowledge hits a certain point.
Travis Mariea, Flexport
One of Flexport’s most useful AI applications came from an internal problem. Support reps can handle bugs and configuration issues. But when a customer asks for a feature that doesn’t exist, support hits a wall. The company didn’t want to become a feature factory, but it also didn’t want to miss customers about to churn.
Mariea’s AI operations coordinator built an automated system that reads every incoming support email, flags negative sentiment, and surfaces frustrated customers. When someone writes something like “This is the third order missing this. Super frustrating,” the AI flags it, creates a ticket in HubSpot, and alerts the account manager. The human then decides: Is this churn risk? Does this customer need a workaround discussion? Is support handling it fine?
The output is two-fold. Operationally, the company prevents churn. Strategically, they track sentiment trends and see which topics frustrate customers most. It’s early warning wrapped in reportable data.
The AI reads every email, judges the tone and language, flags the frustrated ones, and sends a Slack alert so we can decide if we need to intervene.
Travis Mariea, Flexport
The SDR role is one Mariea sees getting eliminated. AI can now do initial outreach. But he doesn’t think it stops there. Account executives will become more full-stack, handling personalized outreach themselves but with AI tools that make them faster and more efficient. The job changes. The role doesn’t disappear.
The new roles are the proof. Flexport hired someone from Chile as a support rep. He mentioned being interested in AI in his interview. Once onboarded, he joined an internal AI Slack channel Mariea created for anyone curious about AI. He started working on AI projects, got mentored by an external AI consultant, and was formally promoted to AI operations coordinator. Now he’s rolling out support sentiment detection, building SDR automation workflows, and managing the company’s token usage across multiple LLMs.
That role didn’t exist before. It was created by recognizing opportunity and enabling someone to move toward it. It’s the difference between AI replacing work and AI creating new work.
It’s going to be a huge opportunity for people to leverage it to make them better at their job, to gain more leverage within their company for knowing these tools and being more efficient.
Travis Mariea, Flexport
Mariea screens for personality in the first interview. When Flexport expanded to Latin America, many worried about cultural misalignment. He didn’t. The trick was simple: the recruiter and the company aligned on what culture they were looking for, asked the right interview questions, and trusted the vibe check.
Time zones and dialect matter too. A support rep in Colombia can jump on a Slack call with a US customer at 5 PM their time. A developer in Latin America can attend standup calls and cover evening shifts. The infrastructure of hiring matters less than most founders think, especially if you work with a recruiter familiar with the region.
The payoff is tenure. Flexport has people who’ve been there three, four, five years. They grew into new roles, got promoted, and stayed. That’s not luck. It’s the result of hiring for culture and then investing in people to grow into expanded responsibilities.
I personally believe in a good vibe check over anything else.
Travis Mariea, Flexport
Flexport now hires in Latin America first for almost every role, including developers. That wasn’t always the case. The shift happened because of time zone overlap and the ability to be customer-facing across multiple zones. Having an India team is still valuable because they’ve built infrastructure there and it spans different hours. Adding Latin America isn’t replacement. It’s leverage.
For entry-level support roles, India still makes sense because the company has recruiting systems in place. But for mid-level and senior hires, Latin America wins on time zone, dialect, and ability to scale without massive cost jumps. When hiring internationally for the first time, Mariea’s advice is pragmatic: start with what makes sense logistically, vet for culture fit, and let the team evolve from there.
The decision to expand into Latin American talent markets taught Flexport that geography is less about where people sit and more about what hours they work and whether they can add to your customer-facing capacity.
Mariea’s hiring philosophy is aggressive but specific. He does as much as possible. He pushes his team to do as much as possible. Then he looks at what’s not being executed on because there isn’t time. That’s where the hire happens.
Partnerships is a good example. Early on, someone could do it alongside other work. But partners need years to generate deals. You need someone dedicated. Yet ROI is hard to quantify in six months. These “luxury roles” are expensive and speculative, which is why many founders skip them. Mariea hires them anyway when the opportunity is clear enough. The alternative is execution that stalls because it’s no one’s job.
The question isn’t “Can we afford to hire?” It’s “Can we afford not to?” If something isn’t being done well because no one owns it, hiring fixes it. If it’s being done fine but stretched thin, hiring gives it space to grow. That’s the threshold.
It will change roles. It will eliminate some roles. I do believe that. It will eliminate some roles, but it will evolve. It takes 90 days to hire to onboard a new hire, right? To feel like really good. I just felt that was always too long. It shouldn't be based on time. It should be based on when their knowledge hits a certain point. It just took this last new hire 14 days and they got past milestone three. We brought on someone from Latin America from Chile through you as a support rep and he was really passionate about AI and he's now our AI operations coordinator.
Got promoted to Iroha. That's amazing. He was cowboy coding, vibe coding. We've seen a lot of the guys that we competed against go out of business, which is crazy cuz they raised millions of dollars. It's going to be a huge opportunity for people to leverage it to make them better at their job. Every company is shaped by the people behind it. This is who we hire. I'm Luis Sen. Today I'm joined by Travis Marye, CEO and co-founder of Flexport, a SaaS platform helping brands and retailers manage and scale their e-commerce operations. This conversation is about how being a CEO shapes how you think about people, judgment, and culture. Travis, thanks for doing this. Yeah, of course, Luis. Happy to do it. So, Travis, you've been CEO long enough that your views on people didn't come from theory. What do you see in people now that you didn't earlier? Yeah, um so what do I see now in people that I didn't earlier? I mean, I you know I think I've always seen a ton of opportunity in in people in general and you know, I think one thing that you've been able to to do for us is allow us to expand that not just outside of, you know, we've always hired in the US and India, but, you know, into Latin America. Um just seeing how the different cultures can can really treat their career, their job, you know, very similar to how we might, but also different in many ways as well. Um and be able to leverage kind of that international um, all those international differences and I I you know, I think seeing that and recognizing it and leveraging it is something that we've evolved to understand over the over time. Love it. I think, you know, one one of the really interesting things about you is, you know, there's a there's a lot of you're in Flexpoint, a lot of companies they either say, "Hey, I'm going to go fully remote or we're going to go full in office." But you're able to make it work where you can attract people to a great place in Jacksonville and attract top talent in Jacksonville to go in office there and and really be part of that office culture, but you're also a leveraging, you know, remote workers all over the world. How, you know, what have you done to keep that balance and not, you know, let's say the people out of the office make feel left out or, you know, it have an event like what How have you managed to to keep that culture going so well? Yeah, so it's tough. I mean, obviously because we do have a good core culture here in Jacksonville Beach. Um, we always have. That's where we we started and you know, there is a a good handful of us here. So, there is our own culture here and and it's funny because we have little microcultures, if you will, or not, different areas. Um, you know, we have a lot of people in Colombia. We've got a lot of people in um, you know, I think Brazil we're adding more. We've got someone in Argentina. And then we have a whole team in India as well. So, we we've been used to it since the start of the company with a a big team in India. Almost like a 50/50 split initially. Um, so we've been used to kind of having people, you know, whether it's whether it's gifts in Slack or jokes, you know, within uh, within Slack groups or on Zoom calls and things like that and just really kind of taking time to connect um, and joke around at the start or the end of calls. Um, taking time to be more personal just in your Slack message back and forth. Where there's little things that that can help kind of bond that culture Uh, over a Zoom call or meeting, things like that. So, you know, we we've seen different iterations of it. We've seen the evolution of of us being kind of just a 50/50 India US and now adding Latin America and like seeing that culture evolve as well. But it's, you know, it's always a work in progress. What was it hard? Like every time you had a country, you mentioned like Brazil, Argentina, you know, you were used to 50/50. Like is it Are there significant differences that people should be aware of? Is it, you know, does it slow things down before it speeds things up? So, I you know, I think the first thing to to recognize that might be on people's minds is that because Latin America is used to the independent contractor kind of structure and so being able to just bring them on from a independent contractor where we're invoiced and just from the, you know, it's always easy to bring someone on from Latin America than it is from a different state in the US as a W-2, right? Because from a taxes and and that kind of procedure and process. But so, you know, that's not that's not as difficult as some people might expect, but you'd almost understand that like, you know, the the cultures are are not going to be wildly different. I think as long as you hire and as long as you have your right interview questions and you're working with a recruiter, you know, kind of like you guys to be able to like outline, you know, here's the kind of culture we're looking for. Here's our culture. Here's the kind of people we're looking for. You know, my big thing is is screening for, you know, personality in that first interview that that, you know, the recruiters do and before we even jump on our first call. So, I think it all comes down to that is it's initial screening and I personally believe in a good vibe check over anything else. So, that I think we have a a good idea of what what we're looking for when we hire. Yeah, I mean it's the vibe check is it's real, right? That that is a very There's a lot of scorecard mentality out there where hey, candidate A has a three .9, candidate B has a 4.7, candidate C has a 4.6, so we got to go with a 4.7. But, you you do need to look into personality, right? Cuz this this is somebody that you need to enjoy working with and you know, it is going to fit the vibe of your culture and I think that's something that is a testament to y'all where you have really great tenure. There's so many people on your team that have been there uh three, four, five, five years uh since the beginning and have grown into um new positions and you know, was that So, like as you were, you know, founding your company and growing, were you intentional about those career paths or did that those start, you know, later down the line? How, you know, how do you keep your great great talent uh happy and growing and uh would love to learn more about that. Well, it gets easier if you got the good foundation of the culture kind of solidified early, right? So, we have a great, as we mentioned, a great crew here, a great culture here and we we bring these team members over from across the world in and they just instantly become part of the culture because we have this good foundation. If And if they don't, they find their way out very quickly, right? And And that does happen just like any other company, but No. when it comes down to that, you know, the those that do stick around have very tight bonds with the people they work with closely and they they get the culture instantly and um you know, you just got to have tight feedback loops not only in your company when it comes to product and sales and that, but like with your employees and and you know, I think just having small teams, which we've been lucky enough to not have to grow super big and we've done it, we've kind of gone big, we've come back to kind of a good medium small to medium size. We've got these teams of four to five, right? Across departments in a lot of in a lot of cases and you've got like one leader over those four to five and um and that's like a real and that's really strong bond that those four to five people have. And then we do try to make sure and we bring in, you know, this we bring in our Latin American team into the office at least once a year. And uh I love that. Yeah, we've been over to India multiple times as well. And I think that's because with India uh as a as a core part of our company, we we have saw the value in, you know, making the trip to India once a year. Um And and and doing that that we were like, okay, well, Latin America's easier. They can come to us and it's cost effective. You are far away, right? The plane tickets aren't crazy expensive and visas aren't always too crazy depending on the country. So, yeah, ultimately um we we saw that early from just our our DNA of being a split US and Indian company. And then uh bringing Latin America was a natural like, yeah, it's value to get face time in. Let's bring them in. And I'm still I'm still shooting for a good um US team down to Latin America here soon, maybe next year.
That's fantastic. So, you you mentioned something there that I want to go deeper into feedback loop. So, how, you know, how are you doing that? Um you know, and and how especially in the beginning when you're onboarding somebody new that's remote versus in office, how is that different? And and you know, how does that work? You know, onboarding remote employees it forces you to have a good onboarding process um because you know, it's very easy to bring someone in the office, sit them next to the most senior guy, have them talk their ear off, slow them down for a few months. And uh and you know, just jump on all the calls with them and and do that that kind of thing. So, you know, we got to really structure and SOP out our our new hire process um because you know, we have a very technical product as well. We have a product that is very technical. It's hard to sell. It's hard um to support right out the gate because there are so many different customers using it in so many different ways. And ultimately it it we can't spend 90 days ramping someone up before they can start making an impact. So, uh we want to shorten that down to like a 30-day, you know, 45-day window where they're, you know, in front of customers and and and making the natural impact. So, uh, with that we've had to refine out our process of how to get them on board. We've used AI a lot as, you know, it's a good use of AI. Like, AI's been Sure, a lot of companies, we've really made a valiant effort to like try to integrate as much as we possibly can in our company. And sometimes it's harder than it seems because you're used to grain in what you do. But, onboarding and new hire onboarding specifically, it it's been a good use of that really just cuz you can take all this knowledge that you can get from your senior guy and you can take it, throw it into, you know, your favorite AI app, and you can use like a notebook LM or whatever to just put it in materials that are consumable by a new hire. Whether it's a podcast format or Q&A or make a test to spin up, um, a quiz with, you know, cursor or, uh, any of those out there. So, yeah, that's that's kind of how we've been looking at it. It's a little bit more refined use of tools to make sure that we're deliberate in our new hire onboarding process cuz you can't just bring someone in, have them sit next to the senior guy. Wait, am I hearing this correctly? So, you've With AI, you've cloned your seniors and now somebody onboarding ramps up with it on faster because all that knowledge is, you know, in the model where they can seek it out. That's the idea. We just have our our, you know, recent two onboard, uh, new hires going through it and and we're feeling good about it. It's early stages, but yes, we have we have used notebook LM exclusively. We spun up, I think, a site with Replit, uh, for like a new hiring site. We've done, uh, a bunch of different stuff just to get, you know, really my thought is we always talked about it takes 90 days to hire to onboard a new hire, right? To feel like really good, they know all the little parts of the app and all this stuff, especially from like a support perspective. And I just felt that was always too long. And well, not only too long, but also, um, it shouldn't be based on time. It should be based on when their knowledge hits a certain point. And so, I think just Love it. taking that information that we have that of all the knowledge about our app and all the little looks and crannies of how things work and taking that down and putting it into like a a curriculum to then have them pass milestones. And then if they hit milestone three or four, you know, if it usually takes them we said that usually takes 60 days and wasn't even defined at one point. Now we just know it it just took this last new hire 14 days and they got past milestone three, right? And we can keep watching that, we can put metrics around it, we can improve on it. So it's it's it's kind of putting down on its head is like it would just take as much time. No, it takes these many milestones to feel ramped up. Yeah, and everybody wins, right? You win, your new employee wins, the your customer wins, every everybody ends up winning in that scenario. So going going deeper in that like, you know, into AI and how you're using it, everybody's saying hey AI is going to replace support, it's going to replace customer success, account executives, developers, um I I beg to differ cuz I'm seeing it on the other hand and we we worked long together enough to see that you are still hiring, but what do you think the next year five years is going to look? Do you really think AI is going to start replacing people or you know, what do you see that evolving to be? It will change roles. It will eliminate some roles. I do believe that. It will eliminate some roles but it will evolve and add new roles. And when I and so the biggest part is evolving the current role. Yeah. What gets eliminated? What gets added? So I'm consolidating down, right? Like I mean, the SDR role for us always in general was was a tough one. I see that one potentially getting eliminated, right? It's it's already been eliminated in our company, right? And Same. We didn't have a big push for SDR. I never believed in it too much, but um, with that said, I think there's still an opportunity to you know, there's one you can replace that way. It's not going to be a one-to-one replacement where we're now instead of an SDR calling an SDR emailing, it's just AI. That is happening today, but it's going to work. And I think it's going to work less and less. Um, it does mean that AEs now might need to be more full-stack AEs that can do more personalized outreach, but are more efficient by using AI tools.
Yes. And so, I think that is the evolution of it. And so, um, I I think it is a new tool. It is going to disrupt things and people that will evolving will, you know, potentially lose a job. I'm not saying that's not It probably has already happened, is happening, but it's going to be a huge opportunity for people to leverage it to make them better their job, to leverage uh to gain more leverage within their company for knowing these and being more efficient in knowing how to use these new tools. And uh and then yeah, we we've hired new roles that we didn't have prior. So, we brought on someone from Latin America, from Chile, through you uh as a support rep. And he was really passionate about AI, and he's now our, you know, AI operations coordinator. Oh, wow. I didn't He got promoted to that role, huh? That's amazing. We did make the final uh the formal promotion promotion and you know, he is now, you know, rolling out end-to-end workflows and my means Wow. end-to-end and he's rolled out our uh our support avatar and he's even rolled out our SDR uh AI SDR that we were leveraging and and still are kind of testing back and forth on on how much how we want to leverage that. Um, rolling out reporting of our AI and then the new hire stuff I talked about, he rolled out. Um, reporting on our budgeting for our, you know, token usage and things like that across all the different AI LLMs we're using. So, I mean, yes, so that there you go. There's a brand new role that we would not have hired to
I love it. Yeah, I'm getting goosebumps just thinking like he started in support. Was this I I to know more. Was this uh you know, what was this planned like during the calls and during the onboarding or did he jump in and say, "Hey, I want to you know, I want to do more." I would love to learn how how this transpired. You know, it's a good question. I'm trying to remember, you know, I don't think when he was hired originally we had plans for him to move into any kind of AI role. He might have talked about having a passion for AI Yeah. in the interview but
remember that through the process that he stood out for that. Okay, maybe that's what it was. Maybe there was like in the back of the mind kind of like we can maybe at one point leverage him in this way and and we did bring him in and and so That's amazing. I have to it might even be like operations enablement or something. I don't even know the title that we have CEO on it, but like ultimately um you know, I we launched a like a AI pod Slack channel and we just started bringing in people that were interested in AI. Great idea. I'm going to borrow that. Thank you. He was in it with one of our developers. We actually brought on an AI consultant that I had met through another Slack network of just like you know, entrepreneur slash consultant slash guys that follow this one podcast. And uh I saw him posting about AI, so I brought him in to do kind of like consulting to help uh mentor our new hire and and help make
it. He was bringing it. So, he was rolling out stuff. He was cowboy coding, vibe coding, right? Love I've heard cowboy coding before. Love the enthusiasm, but let's let's bring someone in that is a former developer or is a developer and but is also um for like AI forward to make sure you're putting in good infrastructure and technical practices even though you're just learning how to vibe code. So, we did all that kind of stuff to kind of formalize it. We've got our COO also in that AI pod. We have a weekly Monday meeting with these us four to five. Um and then we uh and then yeah, we have an AI notion board now of AI projects that we're helping enable sales support product whoever
Wow. um through this team that is like AI specialist. Yeah, I definitely feel behind on our We we had our company all-minds meeting today and we discussed a AI, but there's so much more we could be doing and I, you know, the You weren't joking when you went all in. You said you really you went all in. And I feel like I'm behind, right? Like it's like I think everyone just has that, you know, it's like the I don't know it's what what you want to call it, but it's just There's so much opportunity. You're always reading some blogger. Gosh, it's always changing. Like why am I not up on the new this or that? And it's like, you know, ultimately I think as long as you're asking your asking the question you know, of a big problem trying to solve my company, how can I incorporate AI? And if it's not glaring, I don't think you need to force it. Right? Like I'm not using AI to recreate all my presentations or sales pitch docs, you know, I'm I'm leveraging it in some pieces maybe, but like I'm not having to force like I need to use AI for everything, but I do stop and say I have this big problem trying to solve and there's traditional ways of solving it, but I should really look hard at AI and should be up to up to snuff on the newest AI technology to really make an assessment on should I be leveraging AI here. So, yeah, I think um from what I've seen you guys doing, you guys are as long as you're making the effort, right? That's that's the thing. But you know, going back to that story, it's amazing what being AI curious can get you, right? He joined a channel, he asked for more opportunity, he went and learned and you know, you don't really get to do that in uh you know, many other companies and you enabled him as as a leader and you know, your VP of CS to grow into that path and and you know, to go and hire somebody to go and you know, and and coach him and train him. I think that's huge and it buys you so much time and you know, puts an investment in them. So, I it's not every company that does that as effectively and and can really grow somebody like that. So, I definitely think that's a superpower of Stewards. I don't know if you read the book Multipliers, but that's what you're doing. I may have. That sounds familiar. I can't I can't forget the ones that I've read. But, that does sound familiar. I will say the best just to kind of drop this like the best thing he's done his best project so far that I've been really excited about um is uh something called we we call AI sentiment. Um I guess we call them AI sentiment alerts, but not the best name probably is a better name. But, ultimately like yeah, but basically I was just like, "Hey, we need a way to understand like what customers are raising their hand and are are frustrated and like where they're sitting currently with support uh and they're not getting the answers they need whether it's and this is typically because like, you know, it's a it's a more of a feature request type thing which is hard to bubble up. Like, support knows how to handle a bug or a misconfiguration or, you know, whatever it might be. Uh but, when it comes to like, "Okay, it doesn't work that way and I need it to work this way and can you like modify your whole app to do it?" Support is kind of at a loss there on how to escalate that properly and we want and we don't want to go and build a have be a feature factory type company where we just build out every feature. We've seen how that can get you in trouble. But, we also want to hear who's who's loudest about this about the frustration they're facing because the app isn't working a certain way and bubble that up accordingly and then make an assessment. So, we uh so, he rolled out a it's a Zap Zapier Zap right now, but we're moving over to an A10 currently. But, it basically reads through all the sentiment of all of our customer emails that come in and will bubble up a negative sentiment uh email where there's frustration there and it will send it into a Slack message for us all to see and it will also create a uh ticket in HubSpot for the account manager to
All right. Love it. manager can decide is this something that needs to be worked or I need to intervene and step in or support handling it fine and it's just you know, it's needs a little love. Maybe I'll send an email, maybe I won't, whatever. They can make a call on that, so they're not just bogged down. Um most time they're going to reach out and just go like, "Hey, I'm here for you, you know, this is how product feature requests work or or you understand your frustration. I'm happy to like talk through how this will work around." And then also myself and other management team members can look and be like, "Man, this Slack channel is blowing up today. People are not happy, right?" And we can keep a thumb on the pulse to make sure that people are staying happy. And then we can also, lastly, report on that because that's that's like you know, how many negative sentiment emails do we get in a week as a metric that we're now reporting on and saying like, "We need to make sure that people are happy and if they're frustrated, why are they frustrated? What topics are they frustrated around and what do we need to do to improve on that uh experience?" So, that's one thing that he rolled out, you know, never doing AI limitation prior to us and it's something that's been a huge game-changer for how we make sure our customers are happy on a week-to-week basis. Love it. And for that, are you proactively seeking their opinion or are they writing in and is more like an NPS and then you're aggregating the sentiment behind it or what is
Every single email into our support inbox and it reads every single one and it judges the tone and the language used to say, "This customer is uh just answering a question or just saying, 'Hey, I'm wondering why this order looks this way.'" And and that's and that's fine, that won't be picked up. But if they say something like, "Hey, this is the third order that is missing this number. This is super frustrating to have to go back and add this in manually every time." Something like that, that will auto- The AI reads that, not a human, right? The AI reads that, flags it, tags it in HubSpot, sends an email or sends a Slack alert, and then creates a ticket for and assigns it to the account manager to say, "Okay, I need to make sure is this person at risk of churning? Is this person, you know, frustrated but just needs like more of a high-level discussion around workarounds or a different integration. You know, so basically it's an escalation method uh that we can also report on. Love it. That Yeah, I mean that ties directly back to revenue and you know, pre-turn prevention. So, that's that's huge and uh really, really exciting. And then you're still leveraging the human to go build that relationship to go and find out, "Hey, is it do you actually have a feature request or do we have a workaround or a better way to actually accomplish your goal or you know, what the use case is?" So, uh that's that's amazing. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So, uh you know, what like for somebody thinking about going and hiring internationally for the first time, they've never done it before, they don't know what roles to choose, how do you choose? How do you say, "Hey, this is a role that I need next to me in my headquarter verse hey, this is a role that can be done from anywhere. I choose India because of this. I choose Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Latin America because of this." You know, to be completely transparent, we have just always looked at Latin America first now um for most roles. Um there are some management, senior-level roles that I'll throw it out to both Latin America and US, but we've been so impressed with Latin America that we always kind of start there. Um we don't see a huge advantage in having someone in the US verse Latin America uh for any of the roles we're hiring currently. Um I will say that if they are an entry-level support person in our support, you know, pooled support team, India typically makes sense because we have that infrastructure there, recruiting and hiring and all that. So, we we did just hire an additional person there. Um but we're looking in Latin America first for everything, even development now, which um was not always the case, but because
Why did that change? Why did you know, like why do you need you know, developers in India that are going to be more cost-effective? like why? Yeah, you know, ultimately we we like the um we like the time zone uh side of things, really. You know, and and and I think investing in people that are uh in this time zone, I think is is one of those it's a it's one of those benefits that it's just hard to quantify. Um You know, we have the Indian uh team as well that's in a different geography and the time zone's not a major issue there, but there I think if anything, we're more or less just unlocking the ability to get uh development support where, you know, if we didn't have the Indian team, I don't know if I would feel the same way where it's like, "Okay, we probably should have Let me put it this way. I like having them both." Right. So, we already have the full uh blown Indian team, we've got that. It's been working well for years, decades. Um and then now we're building our Latin American team and I think there's value in both of them in different ways and the time zone being one. Also, um the just dialect and just dialect and just having them be able to be a little bit more customer-facing uh as well and being customer-facing not only just from a dialect perspective, but also from a just the time zone side of things.
Yeah, I know. Feel like that night time and and dark and you know, it's 12:00 here and they can jump on a call with a customer. And so, we're not saying all of our developers are jumping on calls with customers, but for those that we want to see progress into different roles or to just have it uh that available to us, it's very nice to have that. Love it. Love it. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that. And as a CEO, you have done probably every role in the company. When you started, you were doing a different role than than you're doing now. What you know, when you started Flexpoint, what were you spending most of your time on and you know, how has that changed over time and it you know, figuring out who to hire. You one of the CEOs who, you know, you hire before it's time or do you go into it's like, "Hey, I can't handle this anymore. I got to you know, I'm doing the role. I got to go hire for it now." Um well, how how do you think about that? Yeah, so originally when we launched Flex Point, um you know, a lot of focus was on product and and go-to-market, as you'd expect. Um but that was only for like the launch. So, we did like an early adopters type go-to-market where we made this big push and brought people on and they you know, annual up front but significantly lower lock-in lifetime kind of thing. So, like the the marketing of it, the go-to-market, but then also every everything from picking the name, you know, the colors of the logo, the what the logo looks like, right? So, like that was a big focus in the first 6 months or so, and then what the product should look like, the UI and the functionality, and grabbing screenshots from other apps I like, you know, and and sending out to our developers and things like that. But that quickly shifted once we were live, and once we had built out a couple features, uh it really I just shifted to 100% sales. Um we had a built-in, you know, I by this point we already had a built-in support team that um I could rely on, and we had two account managers that I could rely on, and really put them through the ringer early with that, you know, beta product, but they've uh they they've done great, and uh one of them is still with us today. So, you know, I'd say we were just all kind of figuring it out, hiring sales people along the way. So, I did a lot of the initial sales of it, like the first 50, right? Um and then brought in two sales people, eventually three then transferred that person to partnerships. Uh but to answer your question, how we hire, it's it's really about I try to do and I push I try to do as much as possible, and then I try to push my team to do as much as possible, and then I look at what's not being executed on completely because there's just not enough time in the day, but there's a huge opportunity there. Uh so that That's That's how we've hired in the past. It's like everyone's covering it. They're doing it fine, but they're not able to do it and we don't blame them because they're stretched so thin. So, let's just let's re-look at it and let's bring on someone to dedicate that. Partnerships has been a big one where we've done that once or twice as we've kind of gone up and down with the COVID boom and looked at like how important You know, it's kind of a luxury role to some of the I haven't heard of luxury roles the It is everything we can work when a market share my solution architect, you know, can jump on calls he's already on all these partnership calls cuz he's doing the technical stuff. So, he can do it and like why I call it luxury roles it's it's nice to have it. It really is hard to quantify it because you know, these partnerships are they're hard like, you know, we have a couple really good ones and we just had a great deal come in from a partner today but when it comes to like getting new partners it's hard to really look at that and get go, "Hey, go get some new partners and show they can bring us in deals and like do that within 6 months, right?" Like it's kind of hard to do that because Yeah, it's a year or two-year long play. Right, you never know when they're going to have a deal for us and and you know, maybe for other companies it's a little bit easier if you're like a that bot or like a reviews app or something, but where everyone needs us that's on Shopify, but we're we're kind of niche in that you know, only certain customers need us and when an agency has one out of their 20 deals that needs integration to drop ship vendors and automation across multiple channels and whatever they might need from our app they have to remember us. So, it's just like a stay in front of them stay top of mind kind of role that you can really really never quantify their ROI that great. So, and they're usually expensive cuz they were sales people and they want to make more as partners people. So, so yeah, that's that's kind of you know, it's a caveat there, but also that's a great example of one where it's like, "Hey, we could really crush it if we just you know, if someone was dedicated to partnerships, as an example. And that you know, even like after you're talking about AI empowering folks, like well, maybe that's a role where, you know, those luxury roles don't exist anymore because you have somebody on your team that can use AI and, you know, do it well enough until it doesn't become a luxury role and and you need to hire for it. Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe and and I think that evolution I think will go with the what I think is is probably possible today in a lot of ways. It just hasn't been packaged up enough for like people like me and a lot of my team members have been in the business world for a while, the sales world that's so used to the tools that we have. For the guys coming up now, the hackers you might see on YouTube and the kids, man, I'm I just turned 40. Like I'm just, you know, I feel like I feel like I need to stay fresh. Technology, thank you. Um, but like there there probably already know how to, you know, create a quick Python script via Cloud Code and never had written Python before and then they'll scrape all these websites and pull down every agency and then, you know, send that into a clay list and and enrich the data that gets like the content. You know, there's like a marketing engineer role. Right, they've got I love that role. I want that role. And I'm we're kind of looking for it to some extent right now, me and you, right? You know, but we're looking for that role to some extent. It's just I think it takes AI to package it up or at least get Someone needs to get out in front, almost like the Shopify of the go-to-market engineer for for the AI tool set to really kind of make that a reality for all of our team members to be using on a day-to-day basis. I I love that example, the Shopify, right? Just make it so easy that that everybody can adopt. I don't want to go into a I don't want to go into Cloud Code, write a Python script, figure out how to like Or even like I was a big Zapier guy when I was running an agency in the past. I loved building those apps, but you know, so I'm definitely the kind of person that loves that kind of stuff, but like I don't want to go do that right now. I'm too I got too much other stuff and then I don't want to when it breaks I have to maintain it. So, it's like I need to Yeah, it really comes out that's why I bring up like people like our you know, AI operations um um engineer I got to get this title right. Zar, we've been calling him the AI Zar honestly, that's why I don't know it.
That is the best title you could come up with. What do you Yeah, he's you know, it takes people like him and him adopting I think like N8N honestly to to as a good example that they're kind of they're kind of like leading the way in a lot of these like AI workflows and then he needs to you know, be able to facilitate it and give that out to our sales team our partners team whatever, but that's how the those roles will evolve is once they have that kind of tool set in their hands uh it's easy enough for them to use those those will change. Love it. Yeah, it's taking the the business problems and then how can we solve this with AI is uh and and you get to go create new opportunities for you, which is which is super exciting. Well, Travis I know we can chat hiring all day here. Really appreciate the time and you know, going through your brain and on how hiring has evolved for you throughout the years and you know, how how you were able to manage multinational teams uh and can contain and and create a great culture. Before we wrap, if people want to find you or follow you and and what you're working on at Flexpoint, where should they look? Yeah, I mean the best thing is I don't check it as much as I used to, but you know, LinkedIn is probably the best way and I I do pop in there probably once a week twice a week to just check that stuff I do run through and find the one out of 15 spam messages. So, I understand. It sounds like you you know, the outbound it's funny I just hired this quick caveat. I just hired a guy who did an outbound LinkedIn message to me and it was it was it something you're looking for and you're you're in it, it still works, but but yeah, so I am still on LinkedIn and if you want to shoot me a quick message, you can find me there. Get creative with your copy and uh you'll get through to Travis and uh we'll thanks again. Thanks so much for doing this, Travis. Great chatting with you as always. Yeah, thanks, Luis. Appreciate it, man.
