#96: Lukas Minkov & Logan Schouman (afters.io // IDRA)

It helps all kinds of businesses closer to the consumer side logistics retailers and
wholesalers to estimate and predict a lot of things associated with general product
demand and individual product demand eventually then reducing costs for businesses
across the board so now after the delivery service has become our learning
environment and an in -house learning environment for that model that's non -static
inventory and operations management model, which is really cool because it's a
different approach. Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are
telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them.
Welcome to the Land Podcast, where we are exploring the people are building in
Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, And today, I had the pleasure of speaking
with Lukas Minkoff and Logan Schumann. Born and raised in Vienna, Austria,
in a former member of the Austrian Armed Forces, Lukas is the son of first
-generation immigrants. Launching his first startup at the age of 17, he has seriously
created companies spanning e -commerce marketing businesses to most recently in 2020,
an organization providing masks to analyze communities and selling into the German Red
Cross during the pandemic. Logan, who was born in Buffalo, New York, has a passion
for entrepreneurship and background in sales and connected with Lucas as students at
Kent State, where together they founded AFTERS .IO and are building out IDRA, an
acronym standing for Intelligent Demand and Revenue Augmentation. As they can attest
to first -hand consumers and particularly college students today expect instant
gratification when it comes to e -commerce delivery. Existing options like Instacart
may offer same -day delivery on groceries but cannot accommodate 10 -15 -minute
deliveries during late hours when college students need it most. Their focus has been
to build out a hyper -speed delivery service that delivers everyday convenience store
items like drink mixers, cleaning products and snacks, in 10 minutes or less, and
through their bootstrap trial at Kent State, they have validated this hypothesis,
yielding a seven -minute average delivery time on more than 2 ,500 fulfilled orders
and over $30 ,000 in revenue. As part of their experimentation, they discovered value
they could actually unlock beyond a local delivery service, where they are focused on
coupling modern logistics best practices with AI to increase delivery speed and
predict product demand with increased accuracy. I enjoyed learning about Logan and
Lucas's experience so far, and I'm excited to see where they take afters and I try
next. Please enjoy my conversation with Lucas Minkoff and Logan Shuman.
With two of you on, I found it's always kind of helpful to associate voice with
names so that people can follow along. So how about to start us off here, kick us
off with some introductions? - My name's Logan Schuman. So I'm from Buffalo, New
York. And then I went to school at Kent State University where I studied
entrepreneurship. And that's kind of when I got, you know, started to get involved
thinking that way and trying to do certain things, you know, to live that
entrepreneur lifestyle. and then I met Lucas through some mutual friends and I
brought the idea up to him and we just kind of rolled with it. Yeah, my name is
Lucas. I'm originally from Austria, so you might hear some grammar mistakes along the
way, but I try my best. As Logan mentioned, we went to school together. We
graduated last year and we started this together, I think, September in 2020. Were
you two kind of always interested in this entrepreneurship kind of endeavor, how did
your interest in trying to build something come to be? - Yeah, so for me
specifically, it was kind of funny. So I was majoring in criminal justice and then
I had a minor in entrepreneurship. And as sophomore year starts to hit,
I start to get into these major classes. I realized that I really didn't care about
and all justice classes, but then all the entrepreneurial classes, I was super
interested in. And I never wanted to directly trade my time for money. I know with
entrepreneurship, you end up working 20 -hour days instead of 8 -hour days, but you're
working on something that you own and that is truly a part of you. So I wouldn't
simply, I would say, just not trading that time for money, it was super important
to me. So that's when I kind of started to get aspirations, you know, to build
something up. So then I started a clothing company at first. I realized I didn't
really care about the clothing industry. And then that way, when I was taking these
classes, I kind of segued and then started afters. And for me, actually, it started
quite young. I was the first thing that I remembered. It ended entrepreneurial wise.
And I got in trouble by my school teacher for that was doing origami and selling
it to my classmates. But over time, I kind of realized that it's less about,
I mean, obviously money is great and it's needed, but I always loved building stuff.
That's why I always started different things. A lot of things have failed, a lot of
things. Some things have actually worked out. My first endeavor was locally sourced,
designed sparkling wine in Austria, drinking they're legal from earlier ages. And I
started it at 17, which was really funny. Here, everybody just confused when you
mentioned that to them. But I love for design and building things. And then a few
companies along the way. And now we're here. Right on. So, so tell us a little bit
about afters, right? So how does this idea come to be? What are you guys, what are
the questions you're throwing around? Did you have kind of a vision? Did it stem
from a problem you guys were experiencing? Where did the idea come from? Yeah, so
it definitely stemmed from a problem that we had. So throughout the entrepreneurship
program at Kent State, they kind of hold your hand through the whole process, right?
So, you know, it starts as the idea, and then we write the business plan. And when
we were in the idea phase, I was like, oh, wow, like I really don't know what to
do because I don't want to stick with this clothing thing and it was it was at
night you know after we were out and a couple people you know wanted some faves a
couple people just wanted to drink and one of our friends wanted a pizza and nobody
wanted to drive and there was a very limited amount of stores that were open and
available to consumers late at night and so we were like what if we could just you
know, get something delivered here with all these variety of different products, all
from one service, and have it be here very quickly, 'cause that's another thing in
college. You know, 20 minutes from now, you might not be at the same location you
just were. So incorporating that instantaneous delivery to satisfy the need for
instantaneous gratification was also super important to us. So originally, I had the
worst name for it. It was called warehouse delivery. And then from the clothing
company, I realized, you know what, I really need a business partner, they'll hold
you accountable. So then me and Lucas were just kind of bouncing it back and forth.
And then we became partners on it. And then the first thing he was like, dude, we
have to change the name. We changed it from warehouse delivery to what it is now
after is because the idea was created at like an after party. - Yeah, and mind you,
that time where we started with it was actually early 2020, conceptualizing it when
instant services or groceries on demand and these things, which we can talk about
later, have not even existed yet. It was only one, two businesses internationally
that did that. I know in 2020, a lot of companies spawned that are now quite big,
but we'll cover later that we're actually not quite in their industry. But yeah,
it was actually at the time that this started becoming a thing, and obviously the
pandemic was also a contributing factor to not having things available late at night.
So you guys have this this problem that arises from your own experience,
recognized that there's an opportunity there potentially. How do you go from this
idea to trying to build something, to kind of validate what afters maybe has become
at this point? I feel like a lot of that has to do with, one, Lucas's
entrepreneurial background, like he said, he started at a very young age. So having
that different sort of mindset per se when thinking out logistically and looking at
analytics for how or why we should approach something. He had a lot of good input
there. And then as well in the entrepreneurial department, like I said, you know,
they're kind of holding your hand through this process, like the idea and then
building up the business plan. And my teachers were great resources for us, you
know, giving us the outline for the business plan, questioning us on certain things.
Like, are you really sure this is gonna work if this happens? And just really
making you think outside the box and taking everything into account. They did a
really good job for it. And then from there, you know, once we did have the
business plan up and running, we just kind of looked at each other and we were
like, "Hey, why wait? Let's just do it now, get our feet wet and hit the ground
running and see where it goes." And so that's exactly what we did. - So if you
think about like the vision of what AFTERS is, it kind of is logistically
complicated. It's gonna touch not just the software component, but it's playing very
much in the real world and there's a physical component and people, delivery, all
this is, it's a big coordination problem. So how did you guys think about trying to
work towards what you might think of as like an MVP for this kind of thing that
you were trying to build? - Actually, Logan did a lot of surveying
current the current environment which in which we're at which is a very very college
-centered demographic We we noticed that all the surveying and all this planning is
great But like he mentioned before and which is some which is why I'm very happy
that we work together We we just had to start after enough serving and understanding
our environment in which we live We just took the practical approach and started
doing it. We definitely planned planned out driver times, delivery schedules, things
like the optimal radius in which we can deliver originally was 15 minutes now. It's
10 minutes, a button with an average of seven. And we have barely ever went over
that average of seven minute delivery in the last, I mean year. And that's still
serving all the people within our environment. And I think almost the entirety of
Kent, it's around three miles. So there was some calculations on routes and times,
and considering if two people order at an inconvenient time, that's more on the
strategic side. But with implementation and with working on it and optimizing it as
a beta, which we did, we did trial runs before we officially kind of mentioned that
we're rolling it out as a strict company, so to speak.
But We did have a lot of support from friends and everyone that helped us to
really understand what our environment needs, what we're capable of, and eventually it
turned into a different business because we saw things along the way, which has also
helped us pivot our mission, pivot what we're doing and what we're actually building
over time. So that's been almost two years now. And what with those learnings would
you say is the focus now? So, we've noticed that a lot of these other businesses,
they're not very profitable. Look at DoorDash, for example, which, again, is a
different business model, but they have very slim margins. They add costs on top,
on top, on top, because they don't profit in most cases from being a little further
away from the consumer and the supply chain. But we also noticed that we can make
this way more efficient, not Not only in the delivery sphere, but look at
supermarkets, look at general retail, look at e -commerce. We noticed that we had a
profitable month within our first trial run, which is kind of unheard of especially
in this space. And then we thought about over time, okay, what are the reasons?
What are the costs associated? How can we reduce those? And eventually we started
working with the entrepreneurship department here as well. A good mentor of ours,
professor Roland actually leads that department. We've worked with him to also figure
out a strategy and a plan and an economic model that eventually leads to what we're
currently building. We lovingly call it IDRA. It's called Intelligent Demand and
Revenue Augmentation. And I can talk about that a little bit later. But what it
basically means, it helps all kinds of businesses closer to the consumer side,
logistics, retailers and wholesalers to estimate and predict a lot of things
associated with general product demand and individual product demand, eventually then
reducing costs for businesses across the board. So now after the delivery service has
become our learning environment and an in -house learning environment for that model,
that non -static inventory and operations management model, which is really cool
because it's a different approach. So the plan would be to, instead of building
these massive warehouses or even micro or nano storage facilities, create pop -ups in
different communities to gather data in versatile communities, different demographics,
gather that data that we can then use with our framework and our AI to really
optimize that and create a tool for other businesses. So basically we're becoming a
SaaS SaaS company. Got it. So, I think it would be helpful just to take us back
to that initial bootstrap trial run that you had where you were able to collect
some of those statistics, write seven -minute delivery time, a few thousand orders
fulfilled, maybe just walk us through what that actually looked like. You mentioned a
few concepts there, the micro warehouses. How did this actually work? How did people
place an order, how did orders get fulfilled? What did this trial actually look
like? Originally, we were using Shopify and based on Shopify,
they did all our internal record keeping when it comes to inventory. If consumers
were paying, if we still need to collect the payment, and it was super beneficial
and made everything easy because there wasn't as many kinks as we have now with
creating our own app outside of Shopify. But so essentially how we bootstrapped it
originally is we were doing direct marketing, right? So we created these door flyers.
Imagine like, you know, at a hotel, they have like the do not disturb signs. We
would make those and they would be branded towards afters and we would keep it
super simple, a couple couple pictures and put our main message like hyperspeed
online convenience store free delivery 10 minute delivery and like that was
essentially it. And then we would go around to all like the major apartment
complexes. So we get hit a bunch of different doors and a very quick time span.
And we saw a lot of traction based off of that. And another thing that also helped
us ironically is a bunch of people from Kent State where we are in Fort Lauderdale
for spring break, and everyone was like, "Wow, I wish we had afters here," and just
the word -of -mouth promotion from everyone saying, "Oh, we wish we had it, we wish
we had it." Once we got back from spring break, I feel like that's when it really
took off, and we were like, "Okay, we have something here." Yeah, and Fort
Lauderdale did have other services. It was It's not the same, I guess, for the
consumers. And how does that last mile piece look at that point? How are people
actually getting the things that they ordered from AFTERs? Yeah, so the order will
come in and then we can go ahead and accept the order and we'll mark it once it's
quote unquote picked up. So once it's quote unquote picked up, what that essentially
means is that we have all the products in the bag we're about to leave and ready
to go and then through the app we can see their address right so then we just
click on the address and we'll have our drivers take it from one of our nano
facilities to the driver and then when the order does get there we can click that
it's been delivered and they'll get sent a notification on their phone that the
order has been delivered but then their phone number is also there so then we can
shoot them you know a a call or a quick text and let them know we're there. And
a lot of consumers would also pay via Venmo. That was another thing we wanted our
consumers to have a very easy time throughout the entire process. And nowadays, a
lot of college kids, it's easier just to send a quick Venmo than pull out your
card and enter your card information. So with that being said, once the drivers got
there, we would just pull out the Venmo and they could Venmo us. But it got to
the point where, you know, we had a lot of returning customers, so they already
knew our Venmo. So a lot of the time before we even got there, the Venmo was
already sent, which was kind of neat. Yeah, and the order would be picked up from
our facility here, where we also try to offer the drivers who are often college
students an opportunity to study in here, kind of create a nice working environment
for them that's kind of giving them the work, life, and study balance that they
need because obviously they won't have to do orders for eight hours straight. They
would have time in between. They could watch TV. They can do homework and all these
things. So everything is located here, the drivers and the products. So I want to
touch on something, Lucas, that I think you mentioned, but really you guys are, from
my perception, in like a thunderdome of competition in a highly competitive market
where a lot of people have failed before, and a lot are pretty deep in the arena.
You have Gopuff, Instacart, DoorDash, and a lot of these companies have had the real
proliferation of all of us being somewhat remote over the pandemic and becoming just
more accustomed to this logon, to your words, like instant gratification,
very very quick consumer -oriented stuff. As a consumer, when I want ice cream at 10
p .m. and I want it in under 30 minutes, am I going to have options? I'm curious
how have y 'all thought about what you are building that other new entrance have in?
How do you think about differentiation in this space? I think initially the biggest
thing was we wanted to be free Because everybody hates fees we hate fees especially
college students who don't have the necessary spare change hate fees secondly Even 30
minutes and even what you currently get. I know gopuff takes longer actually But
doordash sometimes does a pretty good job with their decentralized driver system, but
it's still not really Faster than going from your place to the gas station and
getting it right there. We are, which was another very big beneficial factor of why
people preferred us for certain products and certain things. But this differentiation
is great. And in, from a consumer perspective, it's not a 10x differentiating factor,
right? It is, it is preferable and maybe the lower fees help. But at the end of
the day, The core thing that I mean, also when going to fundraising and those
things it's hard to kind of tell an investor or someone else that okay Yeah, we're
way faster and we'll have all kinds of products But that doesn't quite work out the
world is not as beautiful and simple especially in our entrepreneurship spaces We
would love to think and hence we dialed in on what we actually do best is and I
believe that is really Understanding our consumers which is a very very general term,
especially in marketing and stuff but when I say this I actually mean it on a
Technical level we understood exactly which products over time which we did everything
manual to understand it exactly which products will Give us great margins which
products will not even individual brands and perfect substitutes of let's say water
or whatever it is we understood whether it matters to overstock stock and lose
inventory space where we can differentiate with other products and at the end of the
day, this is where we started pivoting into becoming more of a SaaS company and
instead of trying to compete with these businesses, we will eventually, hopefully very
soon offer them a tool that will save them costs and actually automatically
I don't know if I mentioned the name, it's called IDRA. I think I did. The word
intelligent obviously comes from the I aspect because manually doing those things is
virtually impossible. Demand revenue augmentation is for a multitude of factors, but
yeah, I can go into that also a little later if that's interesting. - Yes, no, I
definitely wanna cover the work you're doing with IDRA and really what you've learned
from AFTERS. But I'm curious, just on the AFTERS thread, kind of closing out the
pilot, if the cost is not passed and fees, you know, how is it that you guys were
saving that money and providing a cheaper, more affordable experience for folks
placing orders? Yeah. So that's a really good question. And it kind of coincides
with what Lucas was talking about when we're looking in Tory levels and things like
that. So even though we don't have the luxury of getting that extra $2 .99 or $5
.99 from the delivery fee, by being able to save money in other categories like
warehouse space or dead stock from the shelf life expiring,
being able to save money there definitely helps us. But then ultimately, what we
It's almost like the stock market, you know, buy the products low and sell them
higher. So instead of having, you know, that upfront delivery fee that just comes
out of nowhere at the end, essentially, you know, you might pay an extra 50 cents
for a bag of chips here and there. And also, you can kind of imagine it like the
generals just for simplification. A supermarket makes money from what? I'm buying and
bulk and selling in retail prices. Basically the same model minus the cashier cost,
the cost for us, a little inset storage space, minus all of that stuff. Instead of
really changing the entire system, we're just reducing costs because we optimize and
streamline things. Got it. That makes sense. It's just interesting to think about
because it's specifically an industry that I think is notoriously blighted And the
whole kind of narrative of a lot of these companies as they've gone public and you
kind of get an inside look of what their financials look like, they're all, as you
mentioned, struggling to actually make money at scale. But they also overspend on
customer acquisition costs, especially competing in bigger cities where people overlook
a broad mass of people that don't live in cities. Obviously the majority does, but
places like Kent, once you reach a critical amount of customers, you are profitable.
Once, if you go to other college towns where these services are not quite as
efficient as in the big cities, when you look at New York, Gorillaz, Joker, Gopuff,
all of them are competing for obviously a lot of people. There are also a lot of
competition, which we have obviously managed to avoid and then pivot it into
something else, whichever we believe we can be more successful and instead of
overspending on customer acquisition. - Yeah, so maybe let's talk a little bit about
Aydra. So the model is a little different. The customer is different.
It's, as I'm understanding it, a tool to empower these kinds of instant gratification
platforms to do their jobs even better than they're currently doing it? Not only. So
we can help a lot of parts of the supply chain, starting with retail to wholesale
to even manufacturers, because instead of taking, and there's, I think, one company
that does something similar, but not quite how we do it, but instead of taking a
top -down approach, using aggregate data, past sales and sales forecasts, and using
these outdated static models that we learn about in school or anywhere else that
say, okay, this is your lead time, this is your safety stock, etc. These are models
that get optimized with small things, but they're mostly static, right? So your
predictions, even with seasonality included, your predictions are not really accurate,
never actually. And we're trying to get as close as possible to accurate demand
prediction with including a lot of hyperlocal factors that are also closer to the
consumer. Once we understand the individual consumer within his environment, we can
make assumptions about how the entire demand of that area or even the country in
the future will be shaped. So instead of, we try to see the forest for the trees
is kind of a metaphor that we like to use when it comes to really understanding
what's going on. - So can you kind of walk us through like an example of what this
looks like in practice? Are you guys, when you think, and there's a few threads we
can pull on here, but like geographically, are you focused on college environments,
right? Just these kind of hyper -local spaces, mostly young people, or how are you
thinking about different markets and just kind of maybe from like soup to nuts just
take us through what this looks like. - So essentially, yes, like we are definitely
focused on college kids and there's a couple of reasons. One, being fresh out of
college, we truly understand the lifestyles and the behavior and the consumer buying
habits when it comes to college kids. And since we do know, you know, the
lifestyles, they're busy with work, they have class that they have to be at in 20
minutes. We can align ourselves more properly with these lifestyles since we truly
understand them. And another thing too is since we are built on this kind of like
nano structure per se, we can really understand the consumer in certain cities.
So let's say like, you know, St. Louis, for example, you know, they might buy
Sprite, but they eight, seven up. And these big companies kind of miss the boat,
since they're just kind of lump something them all in together. Since we do have
that nano approach, we truly understand, you know, what they prefer to buy, when and
how. The focus on college campuses right now, as Logan mentioned,
because of understanding, but it also helps us build out the model. So environmental
factors that we understand while we're here are going to play part in our global
model and the type of data and the data sources that we feed into our AI in the
future. We try to see if there's any omitted variables within our formulation of
everything and basically other than feeding data of demographics and hyperlocality,
census data in general, sentiment analysis and these things, we include things that
people have not really thought about just as a stupid example whether whether it's a
good predictive indicator sometimes when you want to say okay is the demand for
certain products or overall going to increase when it's sunny or when it's raining
that's very simple but I'm just trying to surface level explain that these factors
are never really used on these aggregate models where with us we can when eventually
we will have data from all different kinds of demographics across different cities.
It's not only gonna be here, it's gonna be everywhere through pop -up facilities, but
also using data from partners in the future. - A lot of questions I have. So
there's always kind of inherently this geographic tension between doing something at
scale and doing something local. And as And as I'm understanding it,
the kind of nature of the approaches, you have to kind of own and really grasp a
local market, which will have its own nuance and unique characteristics compared to
another market, like Kent State versus some university, somewhere else in the country
with completely different demographic makeup of people and different demands and and
all that. What's the strategy or tactic for understanding local markets to work
towards getting something at scale? I think the best approach here, and that's what
we're working towards, is eventually building a tool that is good enough and saves a
decent -sized already existing company in some similar sphere, enough money, where we
can offer our tool in exchange for a reduced price or savings or however we
structure that, but also collaborate on the data exchange. So basically that would be
a strategic partnership which we would like to utilize to kind of reduce the need
for us to go into all these hyper -local markets, start competing, waste money on
marketing. We would just let's say this for example and that's obviously far,
far in the future, but even let's say Walmart and their delivery service or Walmart
and their analytics within the entire US. So we say, okay, we can offer you this
tool to optimize your entire business and maybe only save you 1 % in cost,
which is still amazing for a company like Walmart. And in exchange, we want to
utilize that data to make that tool better, to benefit you, and benefit us when we
sell or license that tool out to others. Instead of having to do all these physical
locations, this very high cash intensive field, which there's no rational reason to
do that just ourselves. I think one of the really fascinating things hearing all the
founder stories is that the business that a company succeeds with is rarely the
business that a company you started with. It's just part of navigating that IDMAs to
pivot along the way and to follow the signal that you're getting from the market.
Is there a future for AFTERs? How are you weighing the two different endeavors,
IDRA and AFTERs? How are you guys thinking about the future and what comes next for
the company overall? IDRA is part of AFTERS, technically. It's just AI that we call
IDRA. AFTERS itself will probably keep us pop up locations and grow those because we
think it's gonna be a standalone business, especially in communities like this. But
on a way smaller scale than maybe all these multinational companies are. But AFTERS,
data and AFTERS SaaS side of things that I think We'll be our kind of main thing
within the industry within our within our work that we're doing. Yeah I think the
AI technology as well will kind of give us like a snowball effect per se by
Utilizing and implementing the AI it'll help us expand further and At a stronger
pace per se, you know So instead of just gradually being able to you know move out
to one city here, one city there, I think I'll really just streamline the process
for us to be able to just hit the ground running and just expand. One of the
things that is just running through my head is, is there a fear or a worry?
I think in a lot of markets, there generally is, right? There's the capability for
the big player to just perhaps do what you're doing. I think Amazon is Amazon is
the canonical example why I started a company in the space if Amazon is even
adjacent, they'll just do it themselves. Is there a reason you think that the large
companies who have maybe access to that data already are not building the tools for
themselves and eating their own dog food, if you will? That's a gray area because I
actually talked to someone, a supplier, that does medical products for Amazon,
that they supply medical products directly to Amazon. And Amazon's forecasting system
is still so bad that the people who sell products to them have to adjust their
insane quantities that they sometimes send out automatically. There's entire departments
actually, that still work on working over these results. And it looks like an often
the company, I mean, Amazon, these top companies have enough money to develop a lot
of things, but that's a beauty of AI because technically there's nothing that you
need to pay then it's just how you work it, what data you feed it. It's same as
an economic model. If you put unnecessary data inside or not the right things,
or you miss out on the right things, which for us, it's a proprietary model. We're
not going to just share basically our formula of what data we fit in.
And then I don't think they can just do that as fast, because we have already have
that also first mover advantage since we've worked on this for such a time. But
with AI, it takes time, and it takes data. So they wouldn't waste that if maybe
they purchased a company that does it, but there's not a lot of those companies
either So I personally am not really worried and maybe Logan can add to this Yeah,
I mean and then looking at like in the delivery specific space, you know, when
we're looking at go puff We're looking at door - one of the big structural
differences between the two of us are the fact that you know we are based on this
nano -sized philosophy and by really understanding and I mean like truly understanding
our target audience I feel like that gives us a great advantage over these large
companies because they're missing the boat on a lot of things like yeah 30 -minute
delivery sounds great but when you're in a college lifestyle you have almost no idea
where you'll be in 30 It's like you you could be you know across town by then so
or even like when you're going home from work Like you want to be able to order
something at the end of your shift and have it be there by the time you get home
So you know even 30 minutes it sounds quick But realistically that's still a
significant amount of time for where a lot of different things can happen And then
with that nano ideology per se Like I said earlier, we really understand their
buying habits as well. Making sure that we have the right products, making sure we
have enough of them or purposefully only keeping a couple products. So I really
think that Nano and understanding our audience is what sets us apart.
So what comes next for AFTERS? Where are you guys right now? What are you working
towards at the moment. We have some cool things planned, some things that we are
still not finalizing, so we wouldn't want to say too much about those. Other than
that, we're talking to some funds and venture capital firms to potentially start a
fund raise for financing our larger scale R &D, for getting partners within the
ecosystem to obtain more data. We're very confident with the current economic model
that we've developed and the sources of data that we want to use will get a good
model ready within four months of financing that we then will integrate within our
entire operations for another four to six months to really test it. And as I said,
after the delivery aspect is like our in -house learning environment as well. And
then after that, we think within around a year of getting that financing ready,
we would probably start to license it out, look for our customers, maybe start with
the bigger enterprises because it's kind of easier to sell one high -ticket item than
a thousand low -ticket items. So maybe we'll focus on those,
but that's not exactly clear. It depends on the amount of benefited offers of the
business. We'd have to get more precise numbers on cost reduction, revenue,
and demand augmentation, and all those things to really pitch it properly. What does
the kind of world look like where Afters has realized the vision? What does success
look like? What is the impact that you guys want to have looking back in
retrospect? Yeah. I mean, our biggest goal is, truthfully, We created this to ease
the lives of consumers right there's a lot of different factors that go in and You
know the important things like spending time with your family and doing what you
like and little nuances like going to the grocery Store things like that can really
take away from other moments than that you truly do Cherish so I believe you know
just by Making consumers' lives easier and another big mission of ours was to
eliminate, I guess you can't eliminate it, but to decrease the amount of drunk
driving. That was a really big thing for us. We don't like to see people drinking
and driving. And by having this late night option, I believe that we can really
have a big impact to help decrease the amount of drunk driving and the accidents.
Yeah. And I think for maybe from a business side of things and that economic
impact, I guess we want to help businesses become more profitable at every level,
which would be great, be integrated in as many businesses as we can, starting from
maybe even eventually local mom and pop shops to big corporations, but from the
triple bottom line approach, if you want to say so, I don't like using two standard
terms for these things, but There's a lot of benefits here when you'd say, be it
for afters as the delivery pop -up or as the AI solution,
we can reduce waste by a lot, be it for perishable products, be it for waste of
space, which is eventually going to become a problem in the world. And by kind of
empowering other businesses that do delivery, we can start avoiding the need for
brick and mortar more and more, And we can also reduce pollution and other levels.
I actually kind of started off as more of a social entrepreneur in my early
beginnings, which is for me and I know, so for Logan, something very important, we
can reduce a lot of bad influences on our surroundings, environment, and make an
overall a better place. Again, a very standard thing to say, but I think this can
really power some change here. Obviously, we'll never be able to avoid the need for
transportation in total, but just imagine going to the store and bag just for your
groceries. It's usually a trip of an average of 45 to 45 minutes to one hour and
a half, and that trip burns gas there and back. Whereas we can do multiple
deliveries in a row, or let's say door dash at once, which already reduces the
emissions and so on and so forth. Just a waste reduction in It would be really,
really fantastic to see some impact there. On the transportation front,
I think there was a lot of hype in just reading technology blogs and things like
that about the prospects of the coming robot and drone delivery mechanisms for
instant delivery. What's your guy's perspective on the reality of that and where that
is? - I think there's actually a possibility and a solution for that. Currently,
there's a lot of legislation problems, but the most reasonable solution currently
would be using a tool like AFTERS to know what to store and when, and then using
small facilities that are located and automated around the city. So the drone flying
distance and the associated risk would actually be lower at the end of the day.
Obviously, there's restrictions about flying how high and where and so on and so
forth, but let's take a city for Miami, like Miami, for example. If you do storage
facilities around the coast, not within the city, and you reduce the distance that a
drone is flying around above people and buildings, that's actually quite feasible
within the next three to five years depending on how legislations work and how
people decide to work with this, but it's actually possible and it would reduce a
lot of pollution. It would kind of pollute the airspace though, which is kind of a
thing that people have to wait for themselves. Yeah, then going off of that, I
think the drones could be a very great thing for the future,
but then looking at automated driving, I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of a hater
when we talk about the automation and driving, and the reason why I feel like this
is because even if the automated vehicle that is driving itself is 100 % accurate,
there is no errors, there's still gonna be the human error behind the traditional
cars. So I feel like unless we can get everything automated very quickly within,
you know, maybe five years. I know that's probably very aggressive, but unless it
happens really quick, I think the slow pace of normal human drivers and then the
AI, I feel like that's just gonna cause a lot of issues. - So one thing I wanted
to get your guys perspective on also is just the kind of insight that you have as
students, or recent students rather. I think there's, you know, this whole like
unlock and there's been, you know, funds that have just come out of kind of
academic and undergrad experience. And I just would love to get your perspective on,
you know, what are the things that the unearthed secrets, if you will, that you
guys have access to that, you know, the rest of the adult world lacks from just,
you know, being part of that environment still. Yeah, I think one of the big things
with our generation, when you look at, you know, maybe our parents' generations or
our grandparents, is I feel like in general, our generation tends to question a lot.
And whereas if you look at our grandparents' generation, you know, whatever their
parents said, like, "This is the correct way to do it. Don't question me. Just go
ahead and do it. And that's what they did. Whereas our generation, I feel like, you
know, someone might say something and it's like, okay, well, why? Or it's like,
well, I think this is a better way to do it. So I'm going to go ahead and do it
like that. So I think just having that mindset of like, always question everything,
making sure, you know, this is the route you want to go. I think that's a really
big benefit? When it comes to being students, I guess a lot of the benefits that
we have are free resources on being within that environment. The free resources we
have are getting increasingly better with every year, actually. I can see now that
the entrepreneurship department here at Kent State alone is growing. They're
rebuilding. They're doing a lot of things, which is actually amazing to see because
especially in Ohio, it's a bit more difficult to go into a more modern tech
business with the old industry that exists here that's prevalent from the steel of
steel and production industries in the past around these areas. And also young
founders get a lot of benefits when it comes to certain custom funds that are just
tailored at young entrepreneurs and also incubators that are associated with the
school or the connections that you get from professors within entrepreneurship and
economics, those are very, very, very helpful. They really accelerate this whole
building process, this making connections aspect of being a young entrepreneur.
And these are a lot of the big resources that I think we have and all their
founders, I guess, don't really get access to, especially if they didn't have the
possibility to go to college or if they didn't want to go to college. So I think,
yeah, those are the major differences plus a very supportive community and framework
around your in colleges such as Kent or anywhere in the US actually. - Yeah,
and going off of what Lucas just said, I feel like there's something with young
entrepreneurs where it comes to obtaining resources and obtaining help.
I feel like more people are more willing to help us out since we are younger and
we are now just starting to enter this adulthood, whereas once you are older and
you are an adult, I feel like people tend to give you the cold shoulder a little
bit more. Either A, they don't trust you, B, they're like, "Oh, you should already
know what you're doing. And I feel like just having that young aspect to us, people
are more willing to help. I think it always helps to have the beginner's mindset to
the degree you can. So before we kind of hit our closing question here, I want to
just kind of leave it a little bit open for you guys if there are, you know,
components of what it is that you're working on it afters or things that we haven't
really talked about yet that you think are important that you want to share? I
mean, with the risk of sounding repetitive a bit, but I actually didn't quite, it
was kind of superficial on the tool side that we're building, but eventually,
just to put an example and maybe for anybody listening or to understand,
the things that we'll be able to predict will have a ripple down effect and affect
the entire supply chain and understanding what to do, but also will give businesses
the opportunity to store different products than they already do, eliminate products
that they don't need, and find perfect substitutes that are with higher margins. But
yeah, that's all on the technical side. It might not be as interesting, but there's
a lot of possibilities that using this framework can bring into all other industries
as well, not just in the delivery space, not even only for supply chain. It has a
retail consumer benefit as well at the end of the day. And then one thing that we
didn't really talk about is Lucas and I's relationship and our partnership. So I
think, you know, what we have going on above all else, above our competitive
advantage above, you know, I draw is how well Lucas and I can work together.
And that's the biggest thing that comes down to our success. Like Lucas has, you
has that very analytical and technical thought process, whereas I might look at it
more from like a social and operations mindset. And let's say Lucas and I disagree
on something. It's not trying to convince each other to join our side is more so
let's have an open table discussion. I wanna know why you think that way. And once
we both understand where we're coming from, we can communicate together and come to
a mutual agreement. One of the other big things too is we hold each other
accountable and that's really important. We can be hard on each other and know that
it's just business. Being a business partner with one of your friends can definitely
sometimes be difficult, but we know if we're being hard on each other, we know it's
because we hold each other to a certain accountability and we expect each other to
perform at that level. So the relationship that we've built and that we've had
definitely plays a big impact on our success and our success, that's going to be
going forward. So our traditional closing question is to ask folks what their
favorite hidden gems are in Cleveland. But I feel like there's a good opportunity
here to kind of expand folks horizons to Kent State and what you guys have in the
surrounding area. So I'll just pose that to you guys. Let us know what the hidden
gems are. - Oh my gosh, I am so happy you just asked me this question. The best
hidden gem in all of Kent, Ohio is the pub. If you guys have not been to the
pub, please go to the pub. The bartenders are the best. Tasha, if you're listening
to this, I love you. But they're perfect. Super cheap drinks. Food's good.
And I'm a big pool player. They have a pool table. So if you stick me in a 10
foot radius of a pool table, I'm happy and you'll probably find me playing it. So
that's the biggest hidden gem I can say. I knew he was going to say that, by the
way. I started laughing in advance. Actually in Kent, maybe there's nothing really
hidden actually. Everybody knows about a lot of things and even I spend most of my
times when I sometimes go up and DJ in the flats or somewhere, but I guess I love
steakies here in Kent. It's a Philadelphia cheese steak place. Yeah,
definitely check out the campus sites. That's something that I used to do when I
was in school, hang out in the library or Rosy's. Rosy's at Kent State,
that's the best thing. 4 a .m. The mozzarella sticks.
Right on. Well, if folks said anything that they wanted to follow up with you guys
about AFTERS or otherwise, what would be the best way for them to do so? Office
@afters .io. Even direct messaging us on Instagram,
you know, that would be a good way as well. - Yeah, we haven't really utilized
growing our social media actually, just work within the community. So we were very
happy about that. Yeah, definitely all the social media through the apps or LinkedIn,
if you're on a more professional way. - Well, Logan, Lukas, really appreciative of
your guys' time and coming on to share more about the work that you're doing and
afters. I think it's a really cool it's exciting to hear about, you know,
all the things that you're working through. Hey, thank you for having us. We really
appreciate your time. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I definitely appreciate us
being able to come on and speak to you and as well as portray everything to your
customer base. So thank you. Not customer base, listener, sorry. Our dozens of
dedicated listeners. No, I really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Yeah,
thank you.