I believe technology will change how freight moves. Building Cargado. Former founder/CEO of Forager 🇺🇸 🇲🇽 🇨🇦 (acq'd in Jan 2022 by Arrive Logistics).
Chicago, IL
Joined February 2009
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We're making our Mexico market update a monthly series. The September edition is out.
Once a month: where the trucks are, where they're tight, how I'd price it, and what to watch next month. 🧵
Even if you aren't running cross-border freight, if you're a carrier who wants to see what a modern freight marketplace actually looks like, you should check out @Cargado_ , register, and fill out your profile. It only takes a few minutes now to get through the majority of the flow (pending references).
You never know what might pop up that actually fits the lanes you like to haul.
It's free for trucking companies and you can set it up so that you save your favorite lanes and just get email or WhatsApp alerts when something fits your preferences.
Oh, and now you can email your trucks and our agent will send back freight, likely synced over directly from a TMS.
Matt Silver retweeted
Hierarchy of investors
Level 1: Actively sabotage portfolio companies
Level 2: Push bad ideas that lead founders down wrong paths
Level 3: Distract companies with random obligations, ideas, etc that have to be fended off
Level 4: Hands off, neutral, and generally supportive
Level 5: Contribute in big ways in small number of key moments
Level 6: Have sufficient context and experience to be an ongoing valuable member of the CEO’s team
You can get way more than this effort from a broker for way less Zyn.
Lance Oppenheim says he bribed Robert Pattinson into starring in ‘PRIMETIME’ by sending him 200 canisters of Zyn with a letter saying “Dear Chris Han-Zyn”.
“Rob, at the time, was grappling with a Zyn addiction.”
(Source: vulture.com/article/lance-op…)
AI should enable people to build or manage relationships and solve problems / put out fires.
Now, if someone’s job is just copying data from one system and putting it in another system, that gets replaced by APIs or agents.
AI is not taking over customer service in freight brokerage.
Think about when you're at a restaurant and the manager comes over to the table. How was your meal? Are you getting everything you need? That's customer service. They're checking in on the people paying them.
Our customers are paying for a service. They pay us to get loads picked up on time, delivered on time, and communicated. So ask them how it's going. Ask what you can do better. Ask what they'd like to see change. That's truly lacking in freight brokerage right now.
Everything is AI this, AI that. Automation is supposed to buy you more time for customer service. If you're not using that saved time to talk to your customers, you're wasting it.
You've got hunters chasing new business and farmers growing the business you already have. There's automation on both sides now. Either way, whoever owns that account should be talking to those customers every day.
Some customers don't want to hear from you at all. I've got customers I could call a hundred times in a day and they wouldn't pick up once. But the goal is more customers you can serve well, communicate with, and build a real relationship with.
AI doesn't make a customer sticky. It takes the work and the minutiae off your plate so you can spend more time with them. You are the glue. Everything else is the service.
We've reached a point where using Claude feels like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie".
You start digging into a problem and realize Claude can build something to make that problem go away.
Then you realize that someone was doing something tangentially related to that problem and they were doing it repeatedly -- maybe it was something kinda automated with Claude or Cowork but they were still running it on their laptop. So you realize that belongs in a new Claude Code tab and away you go.
You start thinking about this problem and how the other side of your marketplace could have a similar issue and you spin up another tab to take a stab at that problem too.
And on you go until you've had all the cookies and milk and read all the books and done whatever else you can possibly think of that you can build Claude Code.
Matt Silver retweeted
Cross-border + Mexico freight represents a major growth opportunity for freight brokers, but fear of the unknown often keeps them from pursuing.
Join Descartes @Tai_Software & Cargado for an educational conversation that separates outdated assumptions from legitimate risks.
What I'd do this month:
1. Lots of trucks? Price at the market mid. Don't start at the low.
2. Out of Mexico City and Guadalajara, post the day the load is tendered and price near the high.
3. Put the crossing, trailer, weight and pickup window on every posting.
Read the September update, and sign up on the page to get each edition by email, in English or Spanish:
cargado.com/market-update/se…
What would make this worth opening every month?
You can literally build whatever you want with Claude, the only thing that stops you is your own imagination.
I have zero engineering or web design experience but have been revamping the @Cargado_ website the last few weeks.
First fun addition: you can actually click around in the product and check it out right on our homepage.
Go check it out - cargado.com
We get a lot of requests to use our data for benchmarking. Here's a sample.
Northbound Mexico dry van rates since last October, by where the freight starts:
Monterrey +31%
Querétaro +23%
Central Mexico +19%
Guadalajara +16%
What's behind it below.
Rates held roughly flat from October through February, then jumped in March and April. Diesel spiked, and capacity tightened at the same time with English-proficiency enforcement, non-domiciled CDL revocations and B1 visa enforcement at the border.
Destination mattered. Lanes into the U.S. interior rose 21% to 37%, led by Saltillo to Detroit at 37%. The two runs into Laredo rose 6% and 1%.
Monterrey ran 14% below Guadalajara last October. In September, the gap was 3%.
If your rates were set in a bid last fall, the market has moved. DM me your lanes and we'll run the same read on them.
There is zero excuse not to produce high quality content every time you need to produce a deck or video or marketing email.
Opus 5.5 unlocks it all.
Matt Silver retweeted
Everyone runs into three potential problems moving Mexico freight:
1. They don't think they have the freight. (Ask your customers)
2. They don't know how to quote it. (Use Cargado to quote it)
3. They don't know what carriers to call. (Use Cargado to cover it)
I had a lot of fun blending my film school background and Mexico obsession into this @Cargado_ video.
