Right About Now with Ryan Alford - HopinTech: Creating Sustainable Solutions to Real Commuting Problems

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with two of the founders from HopinTech, Erich Ko and Boyd Reid.What is Hop In? Why did it start? What problems is this company solving? All these questions and more are answered in today's episode on The Radcast. In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with two of the founders from Hop In Technologies, Erich Ko and Boyd Reid.Hop In is a Toronto-based, sustainably focused, commuting application company. Their mission is the following: "Hop In is building an ecosystem focused on improving the worker lifestyle by providing a marketplace of innovative solutions to the daily issues impacting the workforce." Visit their website here to stay on board with everything they're navigating through this software!If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love what we discuss, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @ryanalford  If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

you're listening to the radcast if it's radical we cover it here's your host ryan alford hey guys what's up welcome to the latest edition of the radcast it is the beginning of march as we blow through the beginning of 2021 it's been a great year we've had some amazing guests it has been world class as we bring to you the best in marketing and business podcasting and i'm excited today to be joined by eric ko and boyd reed who are the co-founders of hoppin tech what's up guys welcome to the Hey, thanks for having us. Glad to be here. Hey, man. Appreciate you guys coming on. I know you're both in Canada and staying a little locked down as you guys are separated. And everyone watching the video will see that

more clearly as we have the split screen. But how's everything going for you guys in general? It's going pretty well um you know business is picking up again i think everyone's thinking about return to work now and uh everyone's healthy right that's what matters yes that's good everybody uh stay safe and sound and i guess it's been interesting i do want to start let's just start a little bit um obviously being in canada uh with a lot of our audience in the U.S., we are worldwide, as we mentioned to you at the beginning of the session. But a lot of our audience in the U.S. and may not know all of your background, you know, being in Canada and all that. Let's just start right there. And, you know, you guys, Eric or Boyd, either one of you guys could go first with your background and what led to starting Hopin.

Yeah, for sure. Eric and I are actually, we've been friends since high school. We got really close over the years, and we've always been talking about starting our own business ever since we've known each other. Originally started out looking at starting a bar, to be honest. Any young 20-year-olds looking to start a business. Hey, Hopin could have worked for either one i mean you know right exactly the name is transferable along a lot of if this doesn't work out i i'm gonna be all in for uh for the uh the hops bar sorry i digress. No, that was great.

And that's something we were always talking about over the years once we started getting into the professional life. We went in our separate careers. Something that we were continuously complaining about was our commute. How do we make that better? And Toronto is quite a mess sometimes when it comes to the commute whether you're taking public transit or driving in it's quite complicated sometimes the closer you get to the city so we sat

down and we also invited one of our other co-founders Erwin who focuses more on the tech side to have a conversation about how we go about solving this problem and what we realized over time was, there's tons of transportation options that are available to people, but it's just not being mobilized for the purpose of the commute. They're all separate, each municipalities

work independently of each other. And what we really need is a connector. And what we focus in with Hop Intact is focusing on the logistics aspect of it is about creating routes that are based around the needs of companies and their employees and looking at the transportation options available, whether it's a rideshare like Uber or it's a charter bus company that have a lot of idle fleets at this time. We use those and mobilize those fleets to kind of fill the gaps that are left by public transit. And that's how our solution has come about. It's one of those classic like solve your own problems type of initiatives. those fleets to kind of fill the gaps that are left by public transit. And that's how our solution has come about to kind of,

it's one of those classic, like solve your own problems type of initiatives. Great, great. So how did you all, the three of you come together? It's at three of you, I'm assuming I heard a third name there, but how did all of that kind of transpire together? It sounds like you guys got different faceted specializations is where my brain goes naturally, but I'd love to hear how that kind of all came together. Yeah, I'll take this one. Like Boyd said, he and I have been friends since high school. I've actually known Erwin, our CTO, since I was like 10 years old.

He was actually my little brother's friend growing up in elementary school. Oh, wow. And yeah, we all just kind of came together at the right time here, I think. And we were all talking about something, right? It was the bar first, then it kind of moved to something else. And it kept moving. And one day, it was like four in the morning, I woke up and had this idea. So I called them. I was like, guys, we need to do this. We need to talk about this right now. And Boyd's like, okay, let me call you back in about three hours. And I wake up. We'll have a talk about this.

And it's just been kind of going ever since then. Great. So where are we in the evolution of the company? I mean, how long has this process been and kind of where are we at? I imagine there's been some slowdown with COVID, unfortunately, I would imagine, with transit and things like that. I don't know. You guys could fill

me in but talk to me about kind of the evolution of the company and how far along we're into it you know like you'd think that yeah a transportation company would probably go down during COVID but um we found some really interesting pivots and the one thing we realized is that not everybody can work from home right you have all the food processing plants, manufacturing, Amazon, I know is making a killing right now and opening a ton of new fulfillment centers. They still need to get to work, right? And if you look at the surveys, the majority of the people around the world are not comfortable taking public transit anymore. It's brought to light a lot of issues, not just with health, but also with general safety and security riding. is not just with health, but also with general safety and security riding.

So we started offering up these transit systems or these shuttle systems to help the company stay in business and to give like a bit of a safer and healthier commute. So we actually partnered with a bunch of health tech companies. We offer symptom tracking on our apps before you even board the bus. It sends like aggregate data to the company so they understand the health of the workforce on a daily basis. And then we actually also do rapid test kits that are brought to your home so you don't have to leave home to get tested that makes a lot of sense that's smart uh i didn't even think about the uh the extensions of that you guys have been smart with pivoting is so talk to me about the nuts and bolts of you

know it's funny when i think of bus riding and i don't know how it is in canada but like here in greenville south carolina and i'm sure someone local is gonna like dm me as soon as this goes live and you can't be talking about green like that but the local bus is just not the most popular ride like you know it's like what i my whole life has just been like you know you're trying to avoid the bus at all costs like is it the same i assume it's similar everywhere right i mean is that is that part of the challenge even in canada yeah and uh i think that's the only convention it is a problem kind of everywhere um you know public transit if you have the luxury of owning your own personal vehicle like that's what you would go with um just being able to get going whatever you want wherever you want to go without

any restrictions I think that's where the goal is but when we look at some of the you know bigger cities in terms of the metropolitan cores the ownership of vehicles goes down not necessarily because of them not needing or wanting a car but they just don't need it because there's access to so much more public transit when you look at toronto you have the the subways the street cars the buses um like you know in quite a huge volume you mentioned you were from manhattan same kind of concept the more you're into the city you have a lot more public transit options so to have a car um in those situations this may not be a need per se but when when you come into more suburbian, more rural areas, having a car is a lot more needed

because the buses are not as accessible and you're not able to get around as often. So same kind of concept, I think you see, quite uniformly across the globe. So that's why we tend to work a lot into these suburbs and rural areas where there's not access to those really strong public transit infrastructures and that's where we come in with our solutions kind of again

make sure to fill those gaps with those those transportation options because it's really to get someone to work uh sometimes very very difficult by public transit and when you talk about like what eric mentioned the people who are servicing those essential workers, they're normally the minimum wage to low income earners. So they tend to not maybe have, you know, one or multiple vehicles for the family. So a solution like ours fits in perfectly to meet that need. There's a lot of boxes that get checked with your solution. You talk about green, you talk about like conserving energy and different things. So there's a lot of positive going on is i don't need

to tell you but they kind of come to my head because when i was in new york like it was right when like the bike rent the bikes and rent the scooters and all that stuff this was like 2013 2014 and it just not only just congested things but left literally bikes were left everywhere like made no sense and if you go to like santa mon to Santa Monica or some of these other big cities, it seems like a good solution, but it's just more stuff around the cities and are dangerous on the streets. There's people, there's idiots riding these scooters

that think they know how to ride a scooter. It's like, you don't know what you're doing. They're like this 45-year-old, not that there's anything wrong with 45-year-olds, but they're bunny hopping over curves and it's like, what are you doing? You know, but, uh, in all seriousness, the, uh, but, uh, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Talk to me about the nuts and bolts for, you know, how, how businesses find you like it, you know, it's a Canadian company. I want to talk about expansion here shortly, but being outside of Toronto, in the

Toronto area, how do businesses go about finding you and utilizing your services? What are the nuts and bolts for that sales process? I think the first thing to understand is that we had to figure out what the root cause of a bad commute was. It's not just because there are tons of cars on the road, but it's why are there tons of cars on the road. And so we found it in economic development and urban planning actually. Because the way that we design cities, the way that we bring in corporate citizens and residential citizens eventually all of that contributes towards congestion and traffic flow right. So we work directly with them, we work directly with municipalities municipalities with regions even with provincial or state governments as well and and we kind of understand the problem a little bit more so we understand how they're

building cities right now or the rural areas are developing where they're looking to put manufacturing facilities or office parks and how we can start to construct more efficient lines of transit or shuttles there because the other problem is that with transit and city development, it's kind of like a chicken and the egg story, right? Transit's always waiting for the demand because they don't want to waste taxpayer money building bus lines or whatever it is, right? But the economic developers, they need transit to come in to be able to get their corporate

citizens to come and plant themselves there. So we come in and act as a bit of a catalyst for that. So we work between all of these different bodies. We work with like the boards of trade chambers of commerce, the commercial developers and real estate firms. We're actually working on a partnership with a property management firm right now. And, you know, we look at what their needs are, right. What their needs, the needs of their tenants are. And we, we kind of work around that and get clients that way, I guess. So every contract's very unique. I imagine, uh, it's kind of building it out into what that proposal and our contract ends up

looking like the terms, et cetera. Uh, the length of time and all that and the number of people, I mean, how many operating buses or what do you call your transporters? Do they have a special branded name or are they just vans? So we work with a variety of different types of, like you mentioned, the ride share and charter. So for some of the smaller solutions, we look at using kind of a ride share kind of model because, you know, they only need maybe a few people at at a time but when we're looking at some of the bigger companies when we look at some of our bigger companies like for example maple lodge farms that we have out here

in brampton up here in uh in canada uh they need to move you know multiple people like hundreds and thousands of employees they have so in terms of moving them we need to use charter bus companies and they're the charter bus companies that you would take to a trip to Niagara Falls or a trip to a wedding party or something like that. With them, they focus mostly on events and stuff like that. So we're able to provide them more consistent businesses with working with these businesses because they need to get to work Monday to Friday. So what we do is we provide opportunity for those charter bus companies to be able to provide those travel services. And when it comes to the actual needs of the individual businesses, what we do is we call a needs assessment. And that needs assessment allows us, but also the company

as well, to understand the community challenges that their employees are facing. And they can kind of see where we go in terms of plotting routes and how we can optimize the commute to make it a lot easier to get into work. Great. So, you know, I guess I'm slow to the game here. I don't know if it's just my Tuesday cobwebs or what. But so how much infrastructure do you guys, like, you guys are aggregating existing infrastructure, be it vans, buses, cars, whatever, that might be going unused, which I love even more, even smarter. Damn it, I knew you guys were smart.

So do you guys actually own any of your own infrastructure as it goes to the ride sharing, or is it all using up existing infrastructure that's there, but you guys kind of aggregate it, bring the deals together, bring the technology together? Am I hearing that right? Yeah, we don't own any of the infrastructure there. We only own the software.

We put things together, and there are two reasons why we did that. Number one, it helps us expand really quickly. If we're just expanding software, we fund the local shuttles. We can give back to the local economies by contributing to these businesses as well. And like, it's helping us right now. We're selling in North Dakota right now as well. And that wouldn't be possible this quickly if we had to bring buses over and get licenses and everything. Right. The second thing is, is exactly that, what you said, we're using the existing infrastructure and we're just redirecting it. And for us, it's more of a clean tech thing. We want to take single occupancy vehicles off the

road. We want to reduce traffic congestion. We want to reduce carbon emissions as a whole on your daily commute. And we actually have some cool initiatives coming as well through that. We're going to be donating trees and planting trees with some of our partner clients and companies to kind of offset the carbon emissions that we have right now. Wow, that's awesome. I love that. Let's come back to that one. But so talk to me about expansion. So we started in the Toronto area and surrounding suburbs. I imagine not knowing or pretending to know every suburb. I guess that's inconsequential. Now I know Ajax, but that's not just under my kitchen sink. But in all seriousness, where are we expanding to from here? Or what are both the maybe near-term

and long-term kind of aspirations with all this, because obviously this now understanding, and I apologize for not kind of getting that quicker, but the implications for this are, are worldwide. So, you know, I, I, I like to dream big. I know you guys are. I'll go big to small that, I mean, yeah, long term we want to be everywhere because commuting is a global problem. We are talking to a few bodies in Asia and a few of the countries there, a little bit in Europe, although they actually have a bit of a better transit system. Like Paris

has an insanely efficient transit system. But mainly North America and getting into Latin America a bit more right now. I mentioned, so Toronto is great. It's its own body, but all across our province, Ontario, I think it's like three times the size of Texas. So we're working right now from Toronto all the way to the border of Quebec, the other province beside us. We're also expanding out to Vancouver, to British Columbia, a little bit to alberta which kind of leads us down to the midwest u.s right so we're going through north dakota looking at a lot of those industrial and like manufacturing zones um i think one of our advisors put it really well he said you know unsexy areas is where we're going for um the places that you wouldn't normally think a tech company would be right yep hey the riches are in the niches the uh you guys can have that one the uh

we'll send you one t-shirt if you make turn if you make merchandise then, you know. In all seriousness, what is it like as far as the technology that's involved in this? Like, talk to me, you know, in layman's terms. We're not talking about zeros and ones here. But, like, what kind of infrastructure and technology are we talking about? And I'm not asking for trade secrets as much as the softwares, because it seems very complex to me. Just knowing the little bit that I know about government and how behind some of their stuff is,

combined with just tapping into all of these available infrastructures, it seems complex. Can you walk me through some of the tech side of all of that? You know what i think again in the long term yeah it gets really complicated right and like the large-scale change that we're trying to evoke here we'll get there but for now it's pretty simple um companies need to get their employees to work. There's a connection, obviously, from transit hubs that are already there.

And we can just run shuttles back and forth like that. Right. The data that we collect on the rides themselves, that's what's kind of feeding back into our software that we're building and kind of optimizing everything on that end. And that's where we start to scale it out a bit more, work more closely with existing infrastructure

and the transit companies themselves and the cities. And we're starting to do that a little bit. You can see on the rural areas, like I mentioned, from Toronto to the Quebec border, it's basically all like rural areas out there. So we're starting to develop it there, develop the technology and deploy it. It's obviously easier in smaller towns than it would be in Toronto or New York or something like that. And then the products, it's funny because we actually didn't build any tech until this year.

We started building in like January. We didn't need it. We ran the company, understood the operational process and kind of how it would work. And then we built the tech around that and kind of what our clients really wanted. So we do have four products coming out this year two mobile apps one for the riders one for the drivers and then um like a corporate dashboard on the internet for um for our clients to to go and check out all the data and things that we're tracking for them um kind of showing them how their workforce is is being more efficient after using hop in. And then kind of our backend internal server. And all of this is, I mean, I'm talking about it,

but I can't take any of the credit for it. Like Boyd and Erwin architected this entire thing. They've set up like the stages in which we're gonna go and build bus lines. And then eventually they're gonna say, Eric, okay, go and tap into our municipal contacts and things and start to do this longer process. That's cool. So I do wanna bring back up the green initiative with the planting of the trees.

So can you talk, you know, expand a little bit more about how that happens and, you know, where and who you might be partnering with to kind of bring all of that to life? Yeah. Uh, that's the part I'm like most excited about these days. You can ask anybody in our team. On our Monday meeting yesterday, that's all I was talking about. I don't know if you know the company Tentree. Sounds familiar. Actually, they're in San Francisco. So basically what we'll do is like we have a calculator that we created that shows like how many trees you're able to save by using our bus service as a company. Right. And I think we're up to what, 30, 35 trees now, Boyd? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So we're actually going to go and plant about 35 trees to start with them in Madagascar, like the mangroves, they have different sites that they use as well. And then basically every quarter, we're going to partner with the companies,

kind of donate on their behalf because they're the ones that are paying for the rides and contributing and again, help to offset the carbon emissions. Because at the end of the day, I think that's, it's, you know, it's a small step per tree that you plant, but everything kind of counts, right? And it's a small step per tree that you plant, but everything kind of counts, right? And it's just one step towards being clean. Love it. I love it. You know, it sounds like there's a lot. I mean, there's ancillary things that happen just naturally by the way you're bringing the, you know, using the existing infrastructure.

There's a lot of green happening there. It's a big story there, which I i always appreciate love to kind of expand on so uh as people go along like how are you guys kind of documenting all this or how can people kind of keep up with you know this story and everything that's happening with you guys you guys have some some channels and different things that we could pub uh you know for for you guys for how people can learn more and stay up to date with everything with HopinTech? Yeah, for sure. I mean, our social media platforms are very active.

Like Eric mentioned before the call, our social media person, Cass, is on top of all these things. So she's posting a lot of updates on not just what we're doing as a company, but what we're doing in terms of impact as well. On our website, we have um impact calculations so you can see in terms of the amount we're servicing like you mentioned you know how much um you know we're reducing in terms of reducing the single occupancy vehicles and what that means in terms of impact on the environment as well um and we're also posting about that on our social so you know our like instagram is at hopintech.com. Our website is www.com.

Sorry, www.hopintech.com as well. And if you search Hopin Tech as well on LinkedIn, we're very active on there too. And Twitter. So all the social media platforms, if you look for Hopin Tech, you'll be able to find us. We keep very regular updates in terms of what's happening with the company, whether it's a new client, whether it is our social impact. We also are very much active on the COVID initiative that we started for COVID. Like Eric mentioned, when the situation first happened in March, when we had our first initial lockdown here in Canada, we decided instead of waiting around, we wanted to make some sort of impact. So we delivered over 100 meals to frontline health care workers we did about 250 kilometers of free rides to help

them get to work as well and we did donated over 25,000 masks as well during that time so all those kind of updates and little things we share on our social media so people can be aware we also share all of our partners because it's not just us as a company. We like, just like our business model, we like to bring other people in as well and provide that leadership and provide a platform for people to create impact too. So anything you research HopinTech on any social platform or our website as well,

you'll be able to follow along on the story. I love that. So are we looking for investment? I mean, where are we wanting to take the business? Is it just the three amigos kind of going at it? Are we looking for investment down the road? Like anything that anybody should hear or know about? Yeah. I mean, we've actually been talking to a few firms in the U.S. already. yeah i mean we've actually been talking to a few firms in the u.s already um we're uh we're actually in the middle of a round so we're looking for uh yeah we're looking for about 100 grand more

um we have a group of investors that are already interested but you know we're really big on on the the the the proper backing for our investors, right? Like we've turned down quite a bit of money from some bigger firms and private equity firms. And we went with social impact investors. Like our lead investor in the syndicate, they're B Corp certified. And all the investors are aligned. They see what we're trying to do,

not just for profit, but also to change the world and kind of impact it. So we're looking for investors that are really big on social impact. Yeah, that's great. It's smart to stay aligned with your core values. A lot of people, a lot of startups, you know, get lured by the money because they want to see it be successful, but then you get into some real, some unfortunate situations

when you're not aligned kind of where you want to go directionally and from a brand and everything else. That smart so be patient with that that's a little counsel not that you asked for it yes but hey guys Eric Boyd really really appreciate you guys coming on and I really encourage everyone to follow along with everything with Hopin Tech you heard heard where they are. You will see all of the links on our profiles and the social media content to come. And we really appreciate these guys coming on. You know where to find us. We're at theradcast.com, at the.rad.cast. And I'm always at Ryan Alford on all the social networks. And we'll see you next time. Yo guys, what's up? Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it.

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