Issue #42: A Car-gobble gobble thank you!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who reads my newsletter and those in the Cargado community!

We hope you’re spending the day with friends, family, and delicious food. We are incredibly grateful for each and every one of you for following along for the journey over the past year. It’s wild to think that on Thanksgiving last year we were a team of 6 people with Figma designs. Fast forward to this year and we have 130+ customers, are live in every city at the southern border, and have onboarded nearly 400 carriers. We absolutely could not have done this without our incredible customers who have helped shape the product and continue to do so every day. They are the reason I am building Cargado into what I know it can become. As a former broker, I am motivated to give everyone the cross-border experience I craved when I was doing the job.

And I feel like we’re just getting started — 2025 is going to be a big year for Cargado.

We’re going to become more than just a cross-border load board and help logistics companies and trucking companies collaborate well beyond the initial matching interaction.

We’re catching onto powerful network effects in the year since we’ve launched. We’ve noticed that the more freight that gets posted in Cargado, the more notifications carriers receive, driving them into Cargado more often to bid on freight. We recently spoke with a large carrier who told us that his team only started going into Cargado every single morning when they saw the volume of freight rise. Now, we find them bidding and matching nearly every day. We’re going to keep that going by investing heavily in the carrier network and hiring more team members at the border and in Chicago who will onboard carriers and keep them engaged. Finally, in 2025 we’ll introduce tools that make it easier for brokers and carriers to collaborate with carriers and other people on your team. I can’t share more than that right now but can say the products will be pretty powerful.

Our Thanksgiving request to you is that you refer any friends to Cargado. It could be brokers who have never moved a cross-border load before (we have Mexico experts who can coach them) to ones who have been in the business for decades. Cargado supports both use cases and we’re always thrilled to get referrals from this incredible community.

Thank you all again and stay tuned for a post-Thanksgiving update with some additional product features to round out the year.