Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you guys heard me speak with Paul Singh, who sold his disruption company, and I asked him a simple question. Paul, did investors actually make money when you sold disruption to 1776 up there on Crystal City? All right, Top Tribe, today our guest is Cam Doody.
Now, Cam is the co-founder of Bellhops, a Tennessee-based tech-enabled platform for moving and lifting help that brings affordable, hands-free experiences to the DIY mover. So all you listeners, I know you're entrepreneurs, you move all over the country, you're going to love this episode. Cam, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, man, let's do this thing.
So first off, tell me, Tennessee, tech company, do they go together?
Yeah, they do, in fact. So we're based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is becoming a tech hub in the southeast. We're kind of geographically located in between some really strong engineering programs with Vandy and Georgia Tech. And, uh, we actually have good, or it's not Google fiber, uh, but it's EPB fiber, fiber optics and a smart grid throughout the city.
So we've got a lot of the infrastructure that we need to, uh, to really start bringing a lot of, um, tech-based companies, uh, into the city. And it's, it's really started to happen.
Did you grow up there or did you go there to college and then drop down and focused on the business and you're staying there now?
Yeah, no, I actually, I grew up in Knoxville, which is about an hour and a half north of Chattanooga. And then I went to school at Auburn, which is down in Alabama. And I drove through Chattanooga, you know, 800 times during college, but I never actually, you know, the only time I'd ever been was when I was a kid.
And we raised our first round of funding from a group called Lamp Post Group, which is a venture incubator in Chattanooga. How much was that?
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Chapter 2: How did Cam Doody start his entrepreneurial journey?
It's been, you know, one of our challenges obviously being based in Tennessee is recruiting, you know, top tech talent. And, uh, the fact is Chattanooga really is an amazing place to recruit to. It's just, you know, there's like world-class mountain biking, rock climbing, hang gliding, like anything you'd ever want to do outside.
It's, you know, it's right there and it's really beautiful, clean place.
Interesting. Okay. So walk us through bellhops is the idea. Is it walk? Give me the 60 second pitch. What's it do?
So Bellhop, as you mentioned, is a tech platform for moving and lifting help. And basically, we sell muscle. And so can you give me some metrics? As I'm sure you can relate to, 35 million Americans every year move themselves. And that's just a piece like self-storage, a $26 billion industry that's only, you know, attached to moving 50% of the time.
So this, you know, there's like a, you know, between a 40 and $50 billion market out there of people that are just like moving themselves. Whether that's like moving from one address to another or like taking some stuff into storage. And the thing is about, obviously, DIY movers, they don't want to move themselves. Obviously, moving is a horrible situation, as you probably attest to.
But they just don't have any options for hands-free experiences because moving companies are expensive and tough to book and just, frankly, overkill for their needs.
And so what we started Bellhops for was to create a really simple, easy to book, almost like an Uber type platform for moving and lifting help where you can tap into your local, we exclusively contract local athletic college students. um, that, you know, they're sitting there playing video games and you book a job, need somebody to come help you move a couch upstairs, whatever it may be.
Uh, you know, they get a ping on their phone and say, yep, I want it. And they claim it on their phone. You know, everything is, is through the app, the online platform, um, totally paperless. And is it seamless?
Is no, as every, like, it doesn't seem like there are many pricing options. It seems it's just the hourly at 40 bucks an hour. Is that consistent pricing across all the work that you do?
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Bellhops face in recruiting talent?
I don't. Dude, come on. It's time for the famous five. You ready? All right. You're a big reader. In fact, I see you trying to convince lowercase capital and Chris Saka to read Not Fade Away, which it looks like you're working your way through. What is your favorite business book?
Yeah, Not Faded Away. Actually, Saka and Mazio, they encouraged me to read that. Oh, got it. But that's not so much a business book. You know, the one that I would really go for is it's kind of a really kind of tough to swallow. It's pretty intimidating. But the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. is just absolutely exhilarating to read.
I mean, he goes through, it's a true window into what it's like to be the head of a high-growth tech startup that is constantly going through change and all the things that you deal with, with funding issues, with structural issues, like everything that you could possibly go through, he outlines in that book.
One of my favorite parts of that book, I was reading on a plane, I'll never forget, I about spit my coffee out and laughed. I forget where it was, but he said something about failure. And he's like, listen, he's like, if you're going to eat shit, don't nibble. Like, just go all in, right? And he made me laugh so hard.
So I love that book because it's got so much personality, but so much smart business savvy mixed in.
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Chapter 4: How does Bellhops operate as a tech-enabled moving platform?
So again, we'll link to that in the show notes. Cam, number two, which CEO are you following or studying right now?
Uh, you know, it's, it's, we, we're in such like mode right now. Um, this is a very, very busy time for us. And, uh, I honestly can't tell you one CEO that I'm studying right now, but you know, I think, uh, I will say I love following Aaron Levy on Twitter. He's pretty funny. Um, box.net CEO, right? Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah,
Aside from that, I think one person that is actually a good friend of mine, a guy named Travis Truitt from Ambition.com, which is basically a software platform that turns your sales team into a massive sales fantasy league. So your sales members are showing up and competing against each other based on the key performance metrics that your company tracks. And it's doing some really cool stuff.
And he's a pretty big thinking guy. I encourage following him.
That sounds like an intriguing story. I'm going to reach out to him and see if I can get him on the show. That would be interesting, combining fantasy with sales. Very cool. Okay, number three. What is your favorite online tool, like Evernote?
Yeah. You know, I have to give a shout out to Front App. I don't know if you guys have heard of them. It's essentially a direct replacement for Zendesk that has been literally a game changer for our company. I mean, it's cheaper and better in every way. I mean, it's made our operations and customer experience team so much more effective and fast.
We are a customer service company at the core, and Front has allowed us to reduce our response times for everything from chats on the website down to support tickets. Everything just makes things so easy. It's an amazing tool for any company that's running any kind of operation. Frontapp.com.
Great. Okay, number four, Cam, you're building an empire. You're crushing it. This is a busy time for you. I want to know if you're doing it in a balanced way. So yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
Yeah, I actually do. I'm married, and my wife is pretty radical about making sure that I'm home at a certain time for dinner. We're actually expecting our first child in October. So I do get eight hours of sleep now, but I'm expecting not to be getting eight hours of sleep as soon as the baby comes.
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