How the founder of FreightWaves is like Batman

If you prefer video, check out my YouTube video on FreightWaves:

The Origin Story

Craig Fuller is the Batman of the freight industry. Okay, so his parents didn’t die when he was a child (I hope). And he doesn’t have an immortal rivalry with a psychotic clown. But hear me out. I swear I’m only stretching this analogy a little bit.

Craig’s father (we’ll call him Mr. F), was the founder of US Xpress. It’s the largest privately held trucking company in the US. From a young age, Craig observed his dad’s business from the sidelines and learned everything he could. Over time, Craig started becoming more involved in Mr. F’s business.

He began spending his summers away from college deep in the weeds of US Xpress. He kinda speed ran his way through the entire company. He went from the help desk, to managing drivers, to planning loads (ayo).

Anyways…

After college he continued moving up in the company. He took a few different divisions from doing okay to doing fucking awesome.

• Grew the DFW and Austin freight markets to the third-largest freight markets in the company (from #12)

• Founded the on-demand division of US Xpress → $144M in revenue in less than 2 years

• Took over Xpress Global Subsidiary and went from losing $2M/mo to a profit of $1M

The guy was a natural. He soon went on to take over TransCard, a subsidiary that helped reduce fraud in the logistics industry. Unsurprisingly, it did well under Craig. Surprisingly, Craig got fired.

See, Craig wanted to run TransCard like a software business - focus on growth and neglect profits in the short term. Mr. F on the other hand came from a very different world of business and didn’t like this approach. So, the dispute led to Craig’s firing.

Some cut throat shit.

He went on his own and began trading commodities in his free time while consulting for the freight industry. Craig started learning everything he could about commodity trading. Eventually, he heard about this thing called the Baltic Exchange.

If that was Craig’s time in a Bhutanese prison (I looked it up and this is where Bruce was in prison in Batman Begins), then this next part is his time with Ra’s al Ghul. That is if Bruce Wayne met Ra’s through cold call.

Craig reached out to the COO of the Baltic Exchange. This led to a friendship and an invitation to shadow the exchange and learn about freight futures.

Here, maritime futures traders taught Craig the ins and outs of the market. Craig noticed that there were several similarities with the maritime freight markets and the road freight markets. He had an idea.

Return to Gotham

Craig was coming back to the states armed with a new business idea. This would be the culmination of everything he learned from US Xpress, his entrepreneurial excursions, and the Baltic Exchange. It was time for Craig to start a freight futures market in the United States.

First order of business: Talk to as many people in the freight futures market as possible.

He pinged anyone he could. After talking and partnering with key players in the industry (a great lesson in talking to your customers before building a product btw), the newly formed coalition realized something: To build a futures market, they were going to need a lot of liquidity and a lot of players in the market. Those participants would need to be educated on all the recent news and trends in the freight industry.

So, they decided to in-house a media company to educate readers on the freight market. That media company was FreightWaves. Batman frickin put on the suit.

FreightWaves quickly became a top provider of news in the freight industry.

Let’s get into some of the business as it is today.

The Business

So FreightWaves now has two parts to the business: The media arm and their SaaS product.

The SaaS product is called SONAR (isn’t that the thing Morgan Freeman created in the Dark Knight that could see through walls??). It delivers high frequency supply chain and freight market data to supply chain managers. Since its launch, it has passed the media arm in terms of revenue. Basically they have truckloads (pun intended) of high quality data and companies are willing to pay a shit ton for it.

And what drives all this revenue? Well, it’s the media arm, which publishes freight news and hosts events. See, FreightWaves is driven by the principle of negative CAC (customer acquisition cost). This means instead of paying to acquire your users, they are paying you. Their media and events business is profitable and serves as distribution for SONAR. Pretty sweet deal.

Just to get a scale of this thing, here are some quick and dirty numbers:

• 1.17M site visitors per month

• 2.5M web + social views per month

• 258k followers

All this is topped off with FreightWaves hosting some dope ass events. Don’t believe me that a freight convention can be interesting?

If that doesn’t make you want to run through a wall I don’t know what will.

Haven’t had enough yet? Check this out.

Listen I’ve been to TwitchCon and I gotta tell you… I think I would rather Freight Festival.

Bonnaroo and FreightWaves have more in common than both being in Tennessee.

It’s events like these that really show the impact of a business like this. I don’t know if this whole Batman analogy really held up, but I’ll tell you what. If the freight industry is Gotham, Craig has done enough for the city to be called Batman.

Btw… Craig has done some really interesting things with his businesses lately and is expanding, so let me know if you want to hear about that at some point 👀