He Ran One of Australia's Biggest Athleisure Brands - Then Built Software to Fix Its Biggest Flaw

imagine this your ECOM store is drowning in late orders

what if there was a tool that plugged into all your systems

your Shopify

ERP warehouses and fixes issues before customers even notice

help us manage complaints

q u stops them

Javon co founder of Q felt the operational pain while running Surf

Stitch and PE Nation

there was 1,000 customers that had bought something

they weren't gonna get what they ordered

I could have stopped the problem from snowballing

we kinda don't have a product today

it turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers

it wasn't a painkiller

because it wasn't really solving the crux of the problem

um took my partner and son out for lunch and I said OK

you remember what that was like

it was chaotic right

living on the edge of um

being technically insolvent

so it's gonna be like that again

hi I'm Jevon Le Roux

a co founder of Q and this is founders in motion

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okay let's get back to the video

everyone else is trying to manage complaints faster

q saying what if there were no complaints at all

what are you building at Q

we're building an AI

powered platform for proactive post purchase ecom ops

and what that is

in simple terms is when shoppers hit buy on the button online

there is that bit of angst

that what they've ordered is not gonna arrive on time

as promised

the brand doesn't know something's gone wrong until the customer says

where is my order and so

what we're doing is we're fixing that ops issue proactively

before the customer even says

where is my order I love that

most people know you from leading huge retail brands like PE Nation

or Surf Stitch but your story actually starts on a surfboard

so how did that early world kind of performance pressure

flow shape the way that you build now

you know I dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer

and compete on the Walter

and I did that for five years

and amazing that from like the age of 17 18

19 20

21 22

like into my mid twenties

you know I spent nine months of the year traveling the world competing

and competitive surfing is exactly that

it's super competitive right

like it's all about I would figure it's all about winning

it's all about winning and

and I was highly competitive

like ultra competitive in fact

I was yeah

exactly and I was

and I was well known for being the guy that would paddle over the

over the guys in my head uh

and paddle around

them and kick water in their face to distract them and so aggressive

yeah aggressive

competitive and um

but it taught me the art of marketing because I had to market myself

it taught me the art of um

living on a thread because I didn't make a lot of money doing it

but I love doing it

but there was a point on that journey where I said

I wanna do something more and I wanna build a brand

and um

that's when I sort of threw in the towel on competitive surfing

and went down the path of um

of becoming a sales agent for my sponsor Billabong

and so I did that for a bunch of years

and I was out of my comfort zone at a early age having to build that

but then that got a little boring

you know just been just selling clothes and I'm like no

I wanna build a brand I love it

and in the mid 2

I built the Nike surfwear brand Hurley in South Africa ground up

so that was kind of my first

I wouldn't call it a startup

because I wasn't building something from nothing

but I had to build a business ground up with my own working capital

so it certainly has given me that competitive drive

like that foundation gave me a competitive drive

as I've gone through my career to like

wanna win yeah

and win it and and win not at any cost

but win in a very competitive way

OK so through your experiences in retail

you've seen the operations from the inside

um what was the

the first moment where you were like

this system is broken yeah

that's a that's a really interesting experience

in fact it was um

at the start of Covid I think in 2020

um and everything shifted online

yeah no one could shop in retail cause stores were closed

and so what happened was the

the business that I was at

Tracy my co founder was there also

we sort of met each other at this business

and that brand ran a big online warehouse sale

and the volumes just went through the roof

and the Shopify store or actually the big commerce storefront

stopped syncing orders with the warehouse

and so customers were buying things that was

that was sold out and oversold

but they could keep placing the order and uh

we were running around the

the offices going you know

this is awesome we're crushing it

look at this revenue and it's like high fives and yeah

and um

the problem is we're selling things that were sold out

and when the dust settled two or three days later

there was 1,000 customers that had bought something that uh

and given us money but they weren't gonna get what they ordered

oh really

and so Tracy had to hire a bunch of people

like she had to double the size of her team

and she had to get on the phone

and she had to call all these customers and say

really sorry

um you've

you've bought something

but we can't actually give it to you because it's sold out yeah

and had to process refunds

and so it was incredibly manual

incredibly time consuming

very frustrating for for for the brand

but also very very

you know

terrible for the customer because if you don't get what you want

you you're gonna go shop somewhere else and um

you know Tracy said something really

really interesting she said

if I could have spotted that issue in real time

I could have stopped the problem from snowballing

we got and that's at the heart of what we do at Q is that we

we're the only

solution that tracks an order from the moment it's placed

paid for processed picked packed

shipped delivered and returned in real time

uh

tracking like

countless metrics

to see whether it isn't going to reach the customer on time

as promised and then take proactive action in real time

and so that situation never would have occurred

because the second it triggered

um uh

we would have had an an agent analyst

there was no AI at the time yeah

but Tracy was like hey

if I could have spotted it

I would have um been able to put a fix in place

that was a really painful

painful painful experience

cause like can't imagine yeah

as the brand you're like

I we totally crushed it on revenue

you know and that was a thousand

customers that had spent 200 and something dollars each

so a lot of revenue went out and one

two

a lot of frustrated customers that didn't get what they want on time

yeah so you've scaled established brands before

yeah um

and you're used to working at kind of bigger brands

so how did it feel to start again from scratch with like no logos

no product um

you know I sort of honed my skills as

in sales and marketing in my early twenties

uh and then I actually built Hurley

the Nike surfwear brand ground up from like nothing um

uh absolutely nothing

and I knew didn't know how to do it um

I didn't know how to run a warehouse

I didn't even know how to cost a product or a margin

and had to learn that through trial and error systems and failures

so I've had experience building brands ground up yeah

but established brands but that weren't available in that market um

and men spent you know

obviously time running larger businesses

I think that's not really that fun running bigger businesses

you know they're not messy

they're not crazy and stepping into this

I really had a clear understanding and I remember

um when I'd reach the conclusion

well Tracy Taylor and I'd reach the conclusion we wanna

we wanna cofound Q I um

took my partner and son out for lunch and I said okay

at a really nice restaurant

I'm gonna hey guys

we got a big life decision we gotta make

you remember what it was like 10

15 years ago you remember what that was like

it was chaotic right

living on the edge of um

being technically insolvent because the business was growing so fast

we didn't have the working capital to keep funding the growth

for seven years like it

it was it was chaos yeah

I said it's gonna be like that again

and I just want everyone at this table for lunch to know what we

signing up for

with a startup that's got a tangible product that you're selling

you're generating revenue from from day one

and it sort of just can keep

you know keep going so this one's gonna be harder

are we all all up for this

and I got the yeah let's do it Yay

I love that um

taking them to a nice restaurant helps

you know yeah

everyone's in a good mood before you break the news okay

so everyone preaches the idea of building alongside your customers

yeah um

did you actually do that 100%

and we had a we sort of had a raw MVP

um so to speak

we had some kind of raw MVP that we had built that hadn't yet

but I remember to get the first couple customers

um

what I did was I went in at the user level inside of the organization

said hey

would you we're working on something

I'd really like you employed

I'd like you to complete the survey

and share with us the frustration that you're experiencing

and so I got user level feedback

and then came back up at management and said

hey management

I've had a chat with your team

they're really struggling with this problem

of reactive customer service

putting out fires it's time consuming for them

it's manual

we're building we're launching Q and it's a startup and um

we kinda don't have a product today

but would you be our first pilot customer

and we got three pilot customers that way

um a budgie smuggler

E H P Labs and um Helly Hanson

we then said

we're gonna launch just the absolute bare minimum of what we

our MVP but like a version 1 of our MVP

we were clear that we're gonna just put something messy out there

didn't have beautiful UX U I

it was all focused on functionality like

is it gonna be able to detect the Ops issues

is it gonna be able to be used by the customer

to then prevent those ops issues

cause when we launched

we actually had no vision around AI it it wasn't a thing

it was just after chat GPT had we envisaged Q like soon after that

so what was the first iteration of the product

it was a centralized platform to detect issues

and that centralized platform brought all of the e

commerce systems that manage an order

your shopfront your payment gateway

your E r p your W m s uh

your carrier integrations your returns modules

your help desk brings all of those systems together

so there's no solution in the world that does that yeah

so it was a novel idea at the time

it turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers

it wasn't a painkiller

because it wasn't really solving the crux of the problem

which is yeah you can detect the issue

but you still have to manually fix it yeah um

round about when the the text started showing up that you know

the the agenic stuff the agenic side of things exactly

yeah and I remember us coming back to the office and we're like

and we had a conversation with a customer and that conversation was

I liked not knowing I had all these problems

because they just sort of see me sorted themselves out

well that's a really terrible thing

because that means you had frustrated customers

and you just didn't know about it

we were like hey

can we automate fixing this

and that's where the penny dropped for us

I think I think a lot of things right

like you're adapting super quickly to different

um customer feedback

as well as AI trends coming out in terms of how you could do

how you could fix the problem in a different way

maybe not in the way that you envisioned at the beginning

and I think that kind of like idea of pivoting super quickly

but being very grounded on solving problems

rather than like select solutions

yeah yeah

hundred percent and I think we talk to our customers a lot

like we're always talking to our customers

and we're not afraid

we were never afraid to release an imperfect product

we certainly didn't go down the path of saying

we're gonna build the gaudy cathedral in its entirety

it was it was releasing parts of it in in in real life

like in real play

all the time when you introduce this kind of agentic problem solving

almost yeah

all to an e commerce is Operation Stack

you're touching pretty sensitive APIs right

you're touching all the shop

the shopify the ERPs

the warehouse data

how did you think about ensuring quality in those early days

when we when we rolled out that specific workflow with a customer

we do a bunch of testing with them

and then we just do 5 5 workflows

and then they they observe it

they watch it they go yeah

we're okay with that and then we increase and expand

and so it was a bit of testing and iterating

you know um

and so the team have uh

had to 1 do our own internal dev and

and testing in our own environments before we start rolling those out

and then when we rolled them out

it was like working closely with them to gain their confidence

part of it is that we haven't fully automated it

text not 100% there where this is truly like it

it needs some guardrails so it's semi autonomous in the narrow sense

in that we've given it a clear

this is the finish line yes

the start line

these are the sort of parameters you need to work within okay

so this is quite a complex product in terms of

there's a lot of different intricacies and work flows that uh

an e commerce brand would work in the background

so how do you balance um speed of rolling out new features

new workflows versus ensuring kind of accuracy

trust within the workflows that you already have yeah

so

we're gonna know instantly from our retailers if there isn't accuracy

because it's gonna go wrong and so they'll be

and and right now

we are in a trust building phase that they can feel comfortable

so it is very user in the loop at the moment

the user is participating

they can see the workflows

they're watching things unfold

and they can intervene wherever necessary yeah

and there are prompts for them if it be necessary

etcetera so our users are involved

what we do is we're taking away all that manual

repetitive tasks of checking systems

writing emails waiting for responses updating systems

closing tickets that all gets taken away

as far as the speed of like delivering new features

we've actually just it's just ongoing all the time uh

and we've got a little thing around the office

it's called the wow of the week and every wow of the week wow wow

it's wow of the week right

and every and it could be like week on week growth yeah

week on week no

it's it's the while of the week and it's Tyler um

Tyler the co founder and CEO

he is hustling with the engineering team and what that is

is every engineer uh

joins one product call uh

and we we've

we've got four in Sydney four in Pakistan and

and they join a product call with a customer

uh once a week

they've all got to join one

one call for for 15 minutes

and they hear something

and then they go off and try figure out that while of the week

to solve like a really small

little thing that could actually turn out to be meaningful

yeah and um

yeah we're pushing out features every

every week we just constantly pushing out new features and and

and our customers respond really well to it

Yesterday

Tracy did a slack and she was on calls with customers all day

and she's like I can't believe how excited they are because Yay

all the stuff's coming out all the time

and it just keeps the customer engaged

we we spoke about this briefly

but you're building a new category

not just a feature so

how do you think about framing key use values for customers

when you're building a new category

and an e commerce is the the

the journey with e commerce is

there was never an e commerce store front right

and someone had to then figure out how to put products online

and then yeah someone had to figure out how to take secure payments

you know the Amazon thing came and then caught abandonment and

and automated email flows

there's just constantly new categories in e commerce every 2

3 years um

more recently like order editing

for example

ability to edit an order afterwards or buy now pay later or um

instant um

instant refunds or easy re

easy returns or next day delivery

so there's this sort of constant involvement on new categories

and part of the job for us is when we

reaching out to potential customers

we're like oh no

we got a help desk no help desks manage complaints

q prevents them what's that

well we fix the root cause that causes a complaint

so that they never happen

we we're very mindful that while we build our

our our brand

our product we've also got to build a category

and we've got to educate and inform

potential users and customers about this

new way of working because for decades

they've been doing customer service reactively firefighting

waiting for customers to complain

yeah and we sort of have to show them a new way and then they go ah

light bulb yeah

when they see the product working

they go oh

that's that's really smart

like why didn't someone else think of it before

you talk about preventing problems before they happen with Q

but what's one early mistake you wish you prevented

in building Qiu itself we went down the path of um

not really understanding the difference between sales

lead and product lead growth right and um

and and we'd be chatting to people out like

you gotta be product lead

sort of got some advice that you could be product lead

if you had a Shopify app

because then people could just go to the App Store and download it

so we built a light version of Q

which didn't include all of the integrations

and that was before

we actually had gone down the path of building the agents

that it was a watered down version of the vitamin

so yeah

and someone had said and we had a bunch of potential investors say oh

it's gonna just explode because the Shopify ecosystem is so big

and there's so much opportunity in it and um

but once my person said to me

you can't expect to just put an app up on a Shopify store

and then suddenly get 1 million downloads

it just doesn't work like that and they were proved to be right

you know uh

it it it didn't work

we spent 3 4 months building it

it didn't work we didn't get the downloads

uh and we now got even deeper conviction that we sales lead

uh and uh

to make the unique economics work

it's about getting our ACV right

okay so

were there anything

that you Learned the hard way about what AI can't do

at least not in the way that you hoped it would

it's certainly a lot more complex to

to build out what we're doing simply because it isn't just um

uh it isn't just a wrapper

um we're building a vertically trained

uh

um agenic environment

uh vertically trained in that we're pulling the data from many

many many systems

having to just yeah

so all the data is coming from your Shopify storefront

it's coming from your warehouse

it's coming from your ERP

it's coming from your carrier integration

from your help desk it's come

so we're pulling all this data together from a bunch of different

solutions and then applying um

uh workflows and agenic

um agenic architecture to it

and it's not like us just tapping into um

an existing LLM you know

this is an actual model that we're building to be able to drive this

and so it's far more far more complex in that

in that regard

because you're dealing with so many different points of data

to be able to run it and then so many uh

so many variables uh

every business is different

well you're

so the decision making engine between like

what to do if this situation happen

this happens you're building that like based on the niche model itself

like not on any of the open source are we using to write the emails

for example we are using um

a model but the actual engine that's driving the

the process is is our own

yeah yeah

I think that's super interesting

and it speaks to like a broader trend that I've been seeing

a lot of people have been moving away from the bigger models

just because like

it's closed source

so it's very hard to determine decision making rational

what's been the most valuable lesson that you've Learned as a founder

maybe something you wish you knew earlier

most valuable assets don't take rejection too hard

you're going to get um uh

no

99 times more than

you gotta get really comfortable with being rejected

you gotta get really comfortable being told it can't be done

you gonna gotta get really comfortable with uh

uh naysayers and have absolute conviction in what you're doing uh

and stick by that and

and you know that

that to me is the key thing is

in fact I was chatting with a founder earlier today

he's he's out raising

he's just come through an accelerator

he's out raising

it's not getting a lot of yeses

he goes what should I do

and I'm like just don't stop yeah

I mean if you think about it

startup founders are crazy right

absolutely crazy the odds are crazy

like think about making an investment

knowing that like 90% of the time or 95% of the time

you're gonna fail hundred percent

that's like crazy thinking

but it's really about North Star right like yeah

what do you wanna achieve in your life

and I think it's like this

idea of purpose of vision

um that's so intoxicating

yeah and you

and the winds are winds are incredible

like yesterday

um I pitched to a customer at like lunchtime and uh

they came into our it was our first organic inbound huh congrats

yeah which is a real big deal when you start up yeah

when you get like an inbound as a result of LinkedIn

and they booked through our website

like I was like oh awesome

the booking link on our website actually works

the LinkedIn campaign is working yes

that was 7 days ago and I pitched them yesterday and I

I didn't think it went like great

so and sent them the pitch deck afterwards that the

I did a customized sorry

discovery call with them a week ago

then did a custom demo yesterday

sent them the the deck afterwards and um

they uh

responded like an hour later

yep we're happy to move forward

and it wasn't even like that

I suck and I just jumped out of my chair

it's like yes

sign another customer

so those wins you gotta celebrate the small wins

you know that wasn't a small one

it was a it's a

it's a customer's a big win

you know what I

I so that that's what really makes it good

you know you leave work with just a Pep in your step

and the thing is um

in the last three weeks we've signed five customers

but I had like 3 4 weeks before that where I didn't

and I started questioning like

am I doing things right and I'm not

and you know

you get into a down mood yeah

so you gotta deal with like the roller coaster of emotions of like

getting it right and not getting it right

and sometimes you are getting it right

but the but the winds are not showing

so you've done this a few times

build a business from scratch

what is easier the second time around knowing how hard it is

coming in eyes wide open

eyes wide open I will say though that um

there were moments over the last 18 months of building Q that that um

we we

I think we're almost on 24 months from when we first got going

but 18 months that we've had a product in users hands

there's certainly been moments where we're like

this is really really

really hard and can't see the light at the end of the tunnel

but we

and there were times when we were like our backs up against the wall

like we had a runway like what's gonna happen

like how we gonna keep moving forward

and we said to ourselves as a founding team

this this problem we're solving is real

like it everyone

how can an entire category exist

which is complaint um

complaint triaging

complaint management if there isn't a problem to solve

yeah and we like

we just stayed super focused on the fact that our users of Q

the eight or 10 customers we had at the time

they relied on the product

like it was really really meaningful

and um

we saw that when we did some case studies the other day

video case studies mm hmm

and um

the one customer was asked

what would you do if you didn't have Q

she said I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow

she's like I would not come to work tomorrow and um

OK but like she's

that was her immediate raw answer

I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow

cause like I could not do my job without it too much

and then like the follow up conversation to that

with that same person was

she said to me um

you know a company called poacher to go work for them

and she's they said

she said look

I'm not really interested in leaving

they said well

what would it take for you to leave

I would only come if you got key okay

so I wanna do like a little founder gut check with you

yeah

so I'm gonna give you two scenarios and you tell me which you prefer

you can give me a rational or not okay

hire fast or hire right hire fast

fire fast what about hiring right

you just not gonna get it right all the time

the startups cause we move too fast

and so you know

bigger companies are designed to hire people

hire slow fire ask

which they don't do okay

product first or distribution first

distribution first is the approach we've taken

built in stealth or built in public depends on how deep your moat is

yeah um

you've got a bunch of startups that are building in stealth

because they're they don't have a moat

and so they have to

because they need to get that jump to get the traction

to get the customers do you still DJ and where do you DJ

hahaha I

I still DJ and I uh

you know being on a founder salary

I do need to substitute uh

some of my my income with like side hustles

so I DJ every weekend thank you so much shivon for coming to the show

thanks a lot for having me here

really appreciate it

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