Why I Started LUCIUS…
“You look lost.”
It’s February 2019.
I just started working at a stealth startup codenamed Interstellar.
It was a joint venture between BCG Digital Ventures and Airbus - We were building a one-stop shop for geospatial data.
I was the first salesperson hired to the team, and the head of business development that had hired me ended up staying at his previous company.
…so we didn’t really have any real domain knowledge on my team.
That was perfect, because I really knew nothing about satellite imagery and remote sensing at the time 😂
In my first week, I was in a meeting to decide which datasets should be integrated onto our marketplace first.
I had no idea what anyone was talking about and it showed.
Afterwards, the Head of Data Science pulls me aside and said:
“You look lost.”
I laugh and respond:
“I am."
Still, I get to work trying to understand the different datasets we plan to offer, the use cases we could support, and the major players in the industry.
I reach out to potential customers to try and understand their current pains, talk through our value proposition, and get their feedback.
Our product launches in September 2019, and the sales grind begins.
The original product strategy was focused on leveraging third party algorithms on top of existing archive imagery to derive insights quickly.
That turned out flawed - will go into this in more detail in a future post.
But…
It became evident very quickly that if I wanted to make any sales at all, I’d have to focus on purely selling data.
And, if I wanted to get close to my quota.
Tasking would be the golden ticket.
Tasking vs. Archive - what’s the difference?
Satellite Tasking is telling a supplier to take an image over a specific area within a specific timeframe. It’s like telling a photographer to come to a specific location and take photos for you at a specific time.
Archive Imagery is imagery that has already been captured from the past. It’s like buying photos from a catalog / portfolio that the photographer already has.
What you get at the end is the same - a satellite image. The difference is the timing, and your ability to customize the parameters of the image being taken.
Tasking picks up for us in 2020. 2 early stage customers of ours start building out their solutions based on satellite tasking.
While their demands start coming in, I start trying to figure out the tasking ordering process for each of the providers we work with and develop our internal processes around managing these orders from order intake through to delivery.
This was REALLY grunge-y at the beginning.
I’m talking: Orders taken via email and delivered via Google Drive share links.
YIKES!
It was really down and dirty, but it was also a huge learning experience for me.
As the demand for tasking increased, we hired more team members and developed more structured processes around order intake and delivery to keep up.
I started by passing over responsibility on the order delivery piece.
Then, I passed over responsibility on the order intake.
But, I NEVER passed over responsibility on making sure the customer orders were well managed and delivered.
“Delays happen...ALL THE TIME”
As we scaled, the problems that come with satellite tasking were exacerbated.
Imagery orders got delayed all the time.
At one point, during a summer season for tasking, over 50% of the orders that a single customer placed were delayed.
It was a cluster****. Their customers weren’t happy. They weren’t happy. We weren’t happy and our suppliers weren’t happy.
We tried really hard to figure out why delays happened so we could come up with solutions to mitigate them.
Here were the 3 main reasons we discovered:
Over-optimistic Feasibility Studies: Providers either miscalculate how quickly they can actually get the imagery captured OR they purposefully tell you a shorter timeframe because they want to close the deal.
Unexpected Weather Conditions: Optical Imagery is significantly affected by clouds and cloud cover requirements. If the capture period turns out cloudier than expected, than there are fewer possible attempts to capture your area.
Competition: Suppliers won’t tell this to you, but they don’t work in a first come first serve basis. If a customer with higher priority (usually defense orgs) who pay significantly more than you do requests tasking in a nearby region, they will prioritize their order capture over yours EVEN IF you put in the request earlier AND it jeopardizes their ability to capture your area in the timeframe of the original feasibility study.
So…delays happen…
ALL THE TIME.
My control freak tendencies naturally made me think…
How can we better mitigate risks of delays?
A good start would be having visibility into all of our active orders, how much time is remaining on each, and how much area has been captured.
A nice to have would be upcoming weather conditions and potential attempts over the remaining area.
A step further would be to understand the likelihood of a delay over the remaining area and suggested alternative sensors that could supplement the capture to ensure on time delivery.
Wrap that all up in a single system to report and manage everything as well as automatically notify us of potential delays WELL before the end date…then we’re cooking.
When I left in April of this year and thought of the company I wanted to build.
I started thinking about this idea…and how other resellers could leverage a tool like this for their tasking order tracking.
Then I thought about how my former customers could have used a tool like this to track their own orders from all of the different suppliers they ordered from.
Then I thought about all of the existing suppliers and new imagery providers that are building out their own internal tasking management solutions that needed to deal with order tracking and management.
It’s the same problem - tracking and managing tasking orders sucks and needs an upgrade.
LUCIUS is here for it.
