Looking Back (and Ahead) on a Half-Century of TLL
Welcome to the 50th edition of The LogTech Letter, a weekly look at the impact technology is having on the world of global and domestic logistics. Last week, I stipulated that logistics is inherently a business of drudge work, and why that aligns with the success of “under-the-hood” technology. This week, I’m looking back on the initial year of TLL, to decipher which topics resonated the most and where we’ll go over the next 50 editions.
As a reminder, this is the place to turn on Fridays for quick reflection on a dynamic, software category, or specific company that’s on my mind. You’ll also find a collection of links to stories, videos and podcasts from me, my colleagues at the Journal of Commerce, and other analysis I find interesting.
For those that don’t know me, I’m Eric Johnson, senior technology editor at the Journal of Commerce and JOC.com. I can be reached at eric.johnson@ihsmarkit.com or on Twitter at @LogTechEric.
Fifty? Cannot believe I’ve been at this for a year, and I mean that in a good way. The year has flown by , and I have so many more ideas in upcoming newsletters, but I thought I would reflect on putting together 50 editions of this newsletter. What has worked, what hasn’t? What topics seemed to capture more attention than others? Where should this newsletter go in the next year?
Let me first dissect the format: whether I nailed the format for The LogTech Letter out of the gate, or I’m just too lazy to take on a radical reimagining, the look and feel of this newsletter hasn’t changed much since my initial edition. I’ve added images (SEO, y’all), streamlined the formatting, and brought in guest writers. But mostly, I’ve tinkered around the edges rather than make wholesale changes. I think consistency helps the audience. You know you’ll be getting something from me every Friday, and you know what it will look and feel like.
Over the last year, the newsletter has grown somewhere into the middle range of my expectations. I had a pretty open mind about how it would be received, and I’m currently nowhere near my most pessimistic forecast, but I’d also love for this to get distributed even more widely than it has. That’s something to work on the next 12 months.
As an aside, metrics are a funny thing, especially when they can’t be independently verified. I struggle with this mightily in covering the logistics technology industry, where I depend on companies to honestly report their size and growth metrics (customers, revenue, employee count, etc). In reality, that’s asking the wolf to guard the henhouse, no matter how honest a company is and no matter how much trust I have in the person conveying those metrics to me.
Content success metrics are equally unreliable if they’re provided by the producer of that content and can’t be independently verified, and publicly available tracking sites are only so effective. So take any chest-beating with the appropriate grain of salt.
In terms of topics that seemed to resonate…well, people clearly enjoy predictions. My end of 2020 newsletter was easily my most read one to date. A bit more surprising to me was that the next best performing newsletters were ones that focused on what I consider to be overlooked niches within the world of supply chain: namely trade finance and trade compliance. Readers tended to gravitate toward any exploration of market segmentation as well. But overall, it’s hard for me to delineate the success of a particular newsletter versus growth in the audience over the past year. In other words, would my exploration of the $10 trillion logistics market myth, penned 11 months ago, have performed better if I wrote it today, with five times the audience (don’t forget to take that growth metric with a grain of salt since I provided it!).
Where do we go from here? Well, first let’s go back to my goal for this newsletter in the first place: to help people in logistics understand the technology landscape better, to help technology providers understand the nuances of logistics technology buyers better, and to help investors understand how those two things fit together more efficiently. With that in mind, I definitely have a goal of being more specific and less abstract in forthcoming newsletters. It’s easy to fall into a trap of writing expressively, but not meaningfully, about a topic. My least favorite writing style is “tastes great, less filling.” This newsletter should be easy to read, but nourishing at the same time.
I definitely plan to have more guest posts, and definitely plan to continue to tinker with aesthetics and formats to make it even more consumable than it is now. In terms of topics, I keep an ongoing list of things I want to explore, and there is currently zero shortage of interesting things going on. But I’d love to hear ideas you may have for things I should write about. So don’t be shy. My contact information is above.
Let me just finish by saying thank you. Your support is greatly appreciated, and I truly do this because of the great feedback I receive on a regular basis. The most gratifying thing anyone has said to me all year about TLL was “I don’t always agree with what you write, but I always make sure to read your newsletter every Friday.”
To the next 50 TLLs!
🚨LogTech Map update – Version 2.0 is in the wild
We’ve got a big update on our 2021 LogTech Map, releasing version 2.0 earlier today. This is an open, iterative process, and we never set out to create a perfect map, because that doesn’t exist. We wanted to create the most accurate, most useful map out there, and we’re progressing toward that goal. We know where this can be improved in future iterations and that the makeup of this map will change weekly based on funding rounds, M&A and new entrants on the scene (not to mention more representation from companies in emerging markets). A huge thanks to Radu Palamariu, Brian Laung Aoaeh, Nick Chubb, and Ben Gordon for the countless meetings, phone calls, and Airtable work putting this together. Thanks to Radu’s team at Alcott Global for making this look pretty too.
🚨TPMTech is coming to Long Beach Feb. 24-25!
Registration for both TPMTech and TPM22 will open Aug. 2, and we’ll have a sneak peek next week at early themes and sessions at TPMTech. I am brimming with ideas about how to make this the most impactful global logistics technology conference ever, but again, would love your feedback on session ideas, speakers you’d like to see, and formats that you think might be cool. Can’t promise we can wedge it all into two days, but I’ll do my best.
Here’s a roundup of pieces on JOC.com the past week from my colleagues and myself (note: there is a paywall):
Only one story from me as I was on vacation for most of the week, but it’s a pretty cool one. Sedna Systems, which is trying to rethink how large, distributed organizations (hello logistics!) communicate with one another, landed a $34 million round this week. I explored what that means with founder Bill Dobie, lead investor Rebecca Liu-Doyle, and an early customer.
And here are some recent discussions, reports, and analysis I found interesting:
This was a really fascinating dissection of ocean carrier ETA data. That’s pretty important, given how much grief (from all angles) carriers get about the quality of the data they collectively provide.
An ongoing survey about what freight forwarders actually want.
Sobering piece about the inequity developing nations are facing from steep freight rate increases.
Some upcoming events I’ll be involved in:
My new monthly show on the Let’s Talk Supply Chain network premieres 10 am EST Aug. 6. It’s called LogTech Live and our first guest is Rachel Premack, intrepid reporter at Business Insider. Each episode, I’ll be discussing tech topics of the day, which buzzwords are meaningful or not, and of course a healthy sprinkling of dadjokes. Count on it being fun and informative. This week, I’ll be talking to Rachel about what initially attracted her to logistics, why it’s important for the masses to understand the world of supply chain, and her experience covering technology in the space. Mark your calendars!
I’m moderating a JOC webcast at 2 pm Aug. 12 (this was pushed back from the original July 29 date) on how technology can play a role in improving freight invoice accuracy. In a year of, as one tech provider put it, “duplicate freight invoices, previously negotiated surcharges re-emerging without cause, new surcharges on international ports that weren’t properly disclosed, and heightened detention and demurrage charges,” this hardly seems more relevant. Register for the free webcast here.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is in no way affiliated with The Journal of Commerce or IHS Markit, and any opinions are mine only.