So what's up with the van?

A few of you know that Jared Adams and I, in addition to tackling other fun professional pursuits, have found our way into the RV products and services business. And that I also help run a venture fund out of a van (The Founder Support Vehicle) with Jared and Aman Brar .?As I reflected on how this all happened, I made note of some fun learnings and lessons that seemed worth sharing. It’s a bit of a road trip. Apologies in advance.?

Doing normal things produces normal results

In 2014, I worked for a scrappy startup called Pure Storage that was taking on the dreadnought class “bigs” in a tired and sleepy data center storage space that hadn’t evolved in decades.?

Early on we lacked the feature set to be anything but very specific about our ICP and use cases. But we solved a very painful problem and earned the opportunity to grab more share as our product matured. We knew where we were going, and painted a vision that was about “simplicity” in both the user experience and the consumption model.?

We were encouraged and emboldened to do things differently by our co-founder John Hayes , who once remarked that “most of our competitors were in a competition to be more serious than the next competitor and as a company we weren’t going to out serious 30- or 40-year-old companies.” To that end, we did what my venture fund partner Aman Brar likes to refer to as “non-normal things in the interest of non-normal results”. And boy did we have a lot of fun in the process.?

?We’d love to meet with you…in the NANDrover

In 2014, about 2 weeks before our President David Hatfield flew out to run around the Midwest on some sales calls, I impulsively bought a 170 wheelbase Mercedes Sprinter van. I had Corky Huston and Huston Signs plaster it with Pure Storage logos. We had the word “disruptor” placed on the driver and passenger doors with arrows pointing up to the driver and co-pilot. My amazing teammate John S. and I wore captain hats when we drove it. We called it the NANDRover as Pure was displacing legacy hard drives in the data center with software paired with consumer grade NAND flash memory.?

It wasn’t fancy at all. We outfitted the back as a spartan conference room with a couch and a white board wall. We also had a bulletin board for all of our parking tickets. It had form and function. We were super productive curbside on Zoom calls in between the towns were hitting in pursuit of customers and partners throughout the Midwest.?

For long journeys, we’d contract side hustling Uber drivers to help. We’d give them access to our Twitter account and we’d pay them when they hit milestones along the way.?I remember getting a text one weekend from a friend asking me what I was doing in Utah. At the time I was sitting on a dock in northern Indiana.?

?

The NANDdrover had its share of bumps and bruises. We covered them up with our best reseller partners logos. Over its lifespan, that van saw dozens of tailgates, transported hundreds of customers AND La Victoria burritos, was stuck in a Napa vineyard, was struck by falling timber, and was nearly booted by the San Francisco labor union for poaching prime real estate in front of the Moscone Center during VMworld.? ?

We blasted 70,000 miles on the NANDrover in a matter of just a few years. Beyond being a super productive space for covering a large territory, it became a veritable mascot for the company and our customers.?Mike Speiser and Scott Dietzen cited the NANDrover as an example of building culture at the Disrupt SF conference in 2014.

Not all company sales cultures are the same

I had a wonderful run at Pure. We solved lots of problems for lots of awesome customers. Their enthusiasm for our brand and our team was special. I moved on from Pure to Snowflake. Recently, I heard the CRO of Atlassian talk about having to learn that not all sales cultures are the same. That was very much the case in the early years of Snowflake in Central where I worked for several legacy Oracle, SAP and Bladelogic folks who are no longer there. It seemed that they were trying to “out serious” their previous employers. Sadly, the NANDrover couldn’t become the “Snowmobile”. So, I sold the NANDrover. My family as well as my former Pure teammate and co-pilot John Stine questioned my decision. Then the pandemic hit, and everyone got a van. And then I questioned my decision.??

Vandemic and “jumping off”

It’s good to build the right thing the first time. But we’re not always so fortunate. Getting started is the hardest thing. “Jumping off” is a bit easier with conviction based on an intimate understanding the customer problem. Maybe you experienced the problem. Maybe you talked to hundreds of customers before you started building. But at some point, you jump off and start learning and adapting in the arena as you go. And hopefully you jump off with the right people.?

After a September 2020 father-son pandemic-appropriate cycling trip in the Black Hills with my father (he had his van and I had a tent), I called my wife and told her I was buying another van. I spent that fall and winter wrenching on that van and nights and weekends. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I figured it out along the way. In January I took my nephew and my son on road trip to see and ski the west. We covered lots of ground. We woke up early for Zoom school that was on a three hour PST:EST offset. We skied a lot of afternoons and weekends. Coming of age experiences were abundant. It’s a trip that will likely be most remembered for austerity and problem solving but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.?

After returning from that trip, I told my wife I was going to sell the van and buy another one and apply my learnings from the first build. It’s worth noting that I’m married to a super supportive and tolerant human. I listed the van on Vanlifetrader. I had 20 inbound inquiries in no time. This was the peak of COVID, and everyone was buying vans. I sold the van to an awesome person (Dr. Bob) who still texts referrals from his kite surfing trips up and down the eastern seaboard.?

Jared Adams had recently sold his SaaS company and was aware of the van experiments I was running. He was in the process of starting a home remodeling business. He set up a meeting with one of his employees, Luke Powers, who was keen on vans and an insanely skilled carpenter. We decided to bootstrap a van company shortly thereafter. We named the company GoCode . As a team we went back and converted many of those initial inbound inquiries from the Vanlifetrader listing into LOI contracts. We were super transparent about the fact that we didn’t have a workshop (yet). We sold the team and our combined experiences. And we built our first van in the elements or wherever we could find a garage. To this day, we are grateful for customers like Andrew (Diff) Diffenderfer who took a chance on us. “Diff” is a SaaS founder and company builder in his own right. He appreciated us for who we were and how we were going about our business. Stage relevant customer types are super important. We were intentional about finding innovator and early adopter types in the early days.?

We got started not with the end in mind, but because we had customers willing to pay us to build things and we knew that in the process of doing so that the world would reveal things to us. We got started in a driveway. We got started in hopes of encountering painful problems along the way that we could solve. We knew that the solutions to those problems in the form of products that would be much easier to scale.?

One word: plastics?

17 months later we find ourselves in the ABS plastics business. How? We found painful problems building fans. Then we built products to solve our own problems as van builders. Then we went and talked to every van builder that would meet with us to understand if they shared the same pains until it was blatantly obvious that they would pay us for our painkillers. And how they would quantify the value of our solution in terms of time and money (saved and made). And in those discovery calls we also found additional product opportunities.?

I won’t bore you with the details, but we make plastic trim pieces for the camper van industry that help van builders take days out of their van builds (reducing cost and risk) and create new top line revenue opportunities by bringing additional functionality like van audio to the fold. We know our value to our customers. We have defensible value because of the intentional discovery work we did early.

New games, old tricks

Bill Gurly talks about being a student of history in order to be great at venture investing or starting anything for that matter. ?The RV parts space is new to us but we’re pulling out all our tricks and listening closely to others who came before us.?

Team:? Team is everything, and the one we’ve built at GoCode is world class.? I am blessed with an incredible founding partner and talent in Jared. And we’ve enjoyed the fortunate circumstance of attracting a group of exceptionally talented individuals. This initial stroke of luck in assembling a capable team provides a strong foundation. However, beyond mere serendipity, the company has been purposeful in nurturing and enhancing the skills and potential of each team member.

Do stuff that matters and do it with others: Jared and I have been fortunate to help start several companies whose missions mattered to us and our customers. Starting things is not easy. It’s nearly impossible. Having the right partner and being focused on something personal to you is critical.????

?Customer closeness: We’re still building vans just so we understand the evolving pains and needs of our customers. We’re manically curious about what slows them down and eager to find ways to help them move faster. We put on the investigative reporter hat for our interactions. Customer closeness is everything and allows us to innovate with conviction.?

Attach to the largest pains, sell the vision: We’re solving the most painful “right now” problems that save our customers (lots of) time and money. But we're also projecting our vision every chance we get. Our goal is to be the agile forming partner for custom builders and an API between the specific needs of those custom builders and the production capacity of Indiana’s RV industry. We’re intentional about projecting this vision.??

Partner love and networking: We’re relentless about showing up and staying in front of our partners. Quoting my fund partner Aman again: “We just want to be Robin to their Batman.”

Do unscalable things: In the beginning, we knew we needed to deeply understand our customers' needs and that we would find ways to iterate on the product based on experience and feedback. We often remind ourselves that when “time intensive feels” show up that it must mean we are innovating again.?

Fun and culture: We’re having more fun. The high-end adventure van space is more serious than you’d think. And we try hard to bring fun and bring levity to that space. Spend a day at our place and you won’t want to leave.?

Be Lean and capital efficient: We bootstrapped the company and we run lean. We spend very little on marketing. We constantly revisit and optimize burn. Our hardware margins rival best in class SaaS.?

Systems and frameworks: We run the business with good, mature systems and tools from collaboration to CRM to payroll. Our GTM lead, Vaughn Taylor , would be happy to share how we’ve owned digital in our space by way of a pillar-based marketing strategy. He’s launching a vanlife-focused SEO agency this fall. He’d also love to tell you about top-down enterprise sales frameworks. We’re 100% confident that GoCode is the only company in the RV space applying the same Force Sales Methodologies employed by the world class sales teams at Snowflake, Mongo, Data Dog, etc.?

End in mind and goal setting: The whole team knows where we want to go and what it will mean to us all when we get there.?

Jumping off into the RV products and services industry has been a fun journey filled with unexpected turns and valuable insights.?Like our days in tech sales and services, I’m reminded that solving painful problems for a specific ICP while projecting a bigger vision is the key to progress. Vans for us are more than just a means of transportation; they symbolized our dedication to practical solutions and our knack for infusing fun and creativity into the most serious of industries. Our journey from building our first van in a driveway to venturing into the world of ABS parts forming underscores our commitment to learning and growing, even in uncharted territories. Through close customer relationships, identifying critical pain points, and projecting a compelling vision, we've found a path to genuine solutions and meaningful revenue.

?

?

?