Every scaling founder eventually hears a version of the same sentence from someone whose judgment they respect: this can't be fixed. The sentence rarely comes from a competitor or a critic. It comes from someone with standing — an investor, an advisor, a person who has already built and sold a company in the same space. That's what makes it dangerous. It isn't noise. It's informed skepticism, and informed skepticism is the hardest kind to dismiss and the hardest kind to weigh correctly.
Jevon Le Roux, CEO and co-founder of Keeyu, faced that sentence during an early fundraise. A well-known e-commerce founder in Australia — someone who had sold his own company for $600 million and was widely regarded as a category authority — told Le Roux and his co-founders that the problem they wanted to solve was impossible. Their response set the direction for the next two years of the company: "That's not a reason not to fix it. That's actually the reason to fix it. Because if it's that broken that it can't be fixed, it has to be fixed."
That line reads as conviction. What makes it useful to other CEOs isn't the confidence behind it — it's the discipline that came after it. Le Roux didn't treat the investor's skepticism as something to prove wrong through stubbornness. He treated it as a signal about the size of the problem, then spent the following eighteen months testing whether his solution to that problem was actually right. It wasn't, at first. The distinction between those two things — belief in a problem versus belief in a solution — is the decision logic worth extracting from this episode.
Le Roux's conviction about the "where is my order" problem, known in e-commerce as WISMO, didn't originate in market research. It originated in a crisis at a previous company, where a thousand shoppers placed orders for stock that didn't exist. The team had to credit and refund every one of them, calling and emailing customers to apologize. "We lived that kind of pain," Le Roux said.
That history shapes how the rest of the decision plays out. A founder who has only observed a problem from the outside has less standing to override expert skepticism — they're weighing a hypothesis against someone else's experience. A founder who has personally absorbed the cost of the problem is weighing lived operating reality against someone else's outside opinion. Le Roux's team built their first version of Keeyu on the strength of that lived experience, and it worked well enough that they believed they'd solved it. Then the investor conversation happened, and it forced the question of whether "solved it" was actually true.
Here is where the story avoids the trap that stubbornness narratives usually fall into. Persisting past the investor's skepticism didn't vindicate the original product — it bought the team more time in the market, and more time surfaced a different, more specific failure.
Users weren't rejecting the problem. They were rejecting the shape of the solution. "We thought it was a painkiller. But then we get feedback like, no, this is a vitamin. It's easy, I could do this myself," Le Roux said. The team had built something customers found useful but not necessary — the kind of product that gets used lightly and churns quietly, because it never becomes the thing a business can't operate without. That feedback sent them back to the drawing board multiple times in six months.
This is the moment scaling CEOs should sit with longest. The instinct after surviving one skeptic is to treat the survival itself as proof of rightness. Le Roux didn't take that shortcut. The team kept the belief that the WISMO problem was real and worth solving, while discarding the belief that their first product had solved it. Those are two separate commitments, and collapsing them into one is how founders either quit on real problems too early or defend broken solutions too long. Le Roux's own framing makes the separation explicit: believing a problem is real matters more than believing your first solution is right.
The insight that eventually replaced the "vitamin" product came from rethinking what customer service could actually do. Most WISMO tools on the market were reactive — they helped a support team respond faster once a customer had already been let down. Le Roux's team concluded that reactive service was structurally incapable of solving the underlying problem: "A help desk cannot prevent a ticket the same way a hospital ER cannot prevent a heart attack. It can only triage it after something's gone wrong."
That reframe pointed toward a harder, more technically demanding product: one that identified failures upstream — in inventory sync, payment processing, warehouse fulfillment — before they ever reached the customer, and automated the fix before a ticket was created. It also meant the team could no longer rely on off-the-shelf frameworks; they rebuilt their technology to be deterministic rather than assembled from generic tools that had already failed them. This is a materially different company than the one the investor had dismissed, and a materially different company than the "vitamin" version customers had politely tolerated. The pivot wasn't away from the problem. It was toward the only version of the solution that actually addressed it.
Conviction about a problem doesn't pay payroll. Rebuilding the product around prevention rather than reaction took time and capital the company had already spent once. By the time the team was clear on the automation direction, they had raised nearly a million dollars, burned through it, and had roughly five thousand dollars left in the bank — with no choice but to raise again, on an unproven pivot, with no fresh MVP to show for it.
The response was not optimism. It was rationing. "We didn't pay ourselves for three months while we were raising. We turned off all our cards, like the cards to pay things, so that all subscriptions would bounce," Le Roux said. When a server payment had to go through, a co-founder would turn a card on for exactly one minute, process the charge, and turn it off again before any other subscription could take money out of the account.
This is the part of the story that separates genuine conviction from retrospective narrative-building. It would be easy, looking back from a company that survived, to describe the near-failure as a necessary trial. Le Roux doesn't frame it that way — he calls fundraising "the hardest job in the whole world" and describes the period soberly, not triumphantly. The lesson for other CEOs isn't that running out of money is a rite of passage. It's that running low on money is a real test of whether belief in the problem survives contact with the balance sheet — and the test doesn't care how sound the underlying insight is.
The other tradeoff embedded in this decision is one that founders creating new categories underestimate going in: the market has no shorthand for what they're selling. Le Roux's advice to first-time founders — "don't build a solution and then find a problem, find a problem and believe in that problem and then build the solution" — is easy to agree with in principle. It's harder to execute when the eventual solution doesn't map cleanly onto an existing buyer category, which is exactly what happened once Keeyu moved from reactive support tooling to preventive automation. Selling that shift meant educating buyers on a new mental model for customer experience, not pitching a better version of a familiar tool. Le Roux frames the scale of the underlying problem in e-commerce terms — citing a figure of $213 billion in silently lost revenue, a number he cites rather than one independently verified here — as part of how the team justified the category-creation effort internally and to investors.
The useful thing about Le Roux's decision isn't the moment he refused to be talked out of a problem. It's the discipline he applied afterward — persisting on the problem while staying genuinely open to being wrong about the solution, and treating a near-empty bank account as information rather than failure. Skepticism from an experienced voice is not, by itself, a signal to stop. But it's also not permission to stop listening to the market. The investor who called the problem impossible turned out to be right that it was hard and wrong that it couldn't be done — and the team only earned the right to make that distinction by testing their own assumptions as hard as they'd resisted his.
"You've really got to believe in it and you've got to stay the cause," Le Roux said near the end of the conversation. The word doing the real work in that sentence isn't "believe." It's "stay" — the willingness to keep revising the solution without abandoning the problem, for as long as the problem remains true.
Jevon Le Roux is CEO and co-founder of Keeyu, a platform that prevents e-commerce order failures before they reach the customer. He previously built and exited a company and ran e-commerce operations at scale, including at PE Nation, where he lived the WISMO crisis firsthand before founding Keeyu to solve it.
Website: https://www.keeyu.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jevonleroux/
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Jeff Holman is a CEO advisor, legal strategist, and founder of Intellectual Strategies. With years of experience guiding leaders through complex business and legal challenges, Jeff equips CEOs to scale with confidence by blending legal expertise with strategic foresight. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Intellectual Strategies provides innovative legal solutions for CEOs and founders through its fractional legal team model. By offering proactive, integrated legal support at predictable costs, the firm helps leaders protect their businesses, manage risk, and focus on growth with confidence.
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The Breakout CEO podcast brings you inside the pivotal moments of scaling leaders. Each week, host Jeff Holman spotlights breakout stories of scaling CEOs—showing how resilience, insight, and strategy create pivotal inflection points and lasting growth.
Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
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Want to be a guest—or know a scaling CEO with a breakout story to share? Apply directly at go.intellectualstrategies.com.
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY:
00:00 The $213B e-commerce problem
00:14 Meet Jevon Le Roux of KEEYU
03:02 Why late orders silently lose customers
05:34 Solving an “impossible” problem
08:36 The customer crisis that sparked KEEYU
12:35 From internal tool to startup
15:47 Early product lessons and pivots
18:11 Turning detection into automation
23:15 Reinventing customer support
31:23 Building through failure and near-zero cash
36:07 Fundraising, traction, and resilience
45:07 Advice for founders and CEOs
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Jevon Le Roux (00:00)
Well that's not a reason not to fix it, that's actually the reason to fix it. We turned off all our cards. A help desk cannot prevent a ticket the same way a hospital ER cannot prevent a heart attack. That's a two hundred and thirteen billion dollar problem. You've really gotta believe in it.
Jeff Holman (00:14)
Back to the Breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman, with Intellectual Strategies, and I get the pleasure of talking with some really smart people, CEOs who are building businesses, and talking about a few of the things in their what I like to call their breakout journey or their breakout arc, right? What were they building? What broke it, what broke or got disrupted disrupted their momentum? what was the breakout moment where they kind of worked through that disruption?
And then what's the breakthrough where where the business headed, maybe even where they personally kind of reoriented themselves or or headed in a new direction. So that's the breakout arc. And today we've got Jevan LaRue joining us with he's with Kiyu. Jevan, thanks for coming on the show.
Jevon Le Roux (00:57)
thanks Jeff. And there's like three lots of tough words over there, Jevon, Luru and Kiyu, all not easy to pronounce in Ukraine. Well done.
Jeff Holman (01:05)
If I say it r rhythmically I might get it to sound like a rhyme even.
Jevon Le Roux (01:10)
Yeah, it does feel that way.
Jeff Holman (01:12)
Jevan LaRue, CEO of KiU or something like that, right?
Jevon Le Roux (01:17)
How doesn't it?
Jeff Holman (01:18)
So hey, well it's good to have you on the show. I'm really excited about this because as I think about what you're building with Kiyu and the little bit we've talked up until this point, like I think there's a real problem here that you're that you're addressing and you're trying to address it not by not by not by resolving it when it happens, but resolving it before it even happens. And that's and that's in the e commerce space.
with with Wismo or where is my order? right, where like customers saying, I I'm not getting like I thought I was gonna get this or it's not not on its way yet or it didn't arrive or whatever it is, right? This this is the problem that you're that you're addressing. I'm gonna give a a little analogy here and I don't know why this pops into my mind, but the thing that comes to mind for me is that that Disney is it Disney? No Pixar, Pixar movie The Incredibles.
And the scene that that comes to mind is when, boy, is it Frozo Frozo? I don't remember the guy. And he's like, Honey, where is my super suit? You know, because he's he's he sees chaos happening outside his window and he's like, I gotta go grab my suit and go help the and and he goes to grab his suit behind I think his bed flips around or something like that. And there's no suit there. He's like, Where is my suit where is my super suit? And I just that's what when I l read about your business, I'm like, I think a lot of customers
are doing that same thing, right? They're like they're like, hey, e commerce company, where is my product? Where where is it? Why isn't it here yet? And why haven't I not heard anything? If it if it's not gonna come on time, like like I I I need some information. Can you help me? That's did I get the pro did I get the problem right? Even though I maybe twisted the analogy a little bit.
Jevon Le Roux (03:02)
Yeah, well there's probably two parts to that problem. One, there's a customer that says, Where is my order? And then there's a customer that doesn't say where is my order, but they didn't get their order on time as promised. And so both of those are dangerous. So if you think about it, like last year, one in five online shoppers in the US didn't get what they ordered on time as promised. And it's huge. Yeah. That's a two hundred and thirteen billion dollar problem for e commerce businesses, revenue that left silently. And so there's two parts. Those that actually call in and become a help desk ticket.
And they're asking where is my order? Uhhuh. And then there are those that don't say anything, but they're upset and they just leave. That's the silent that's the silent problem.
Jeff Holman (03:40)
What's the split between those?
Jevon Le Roux (03:41)
I d I I I just know that the data around carriers saying that one in five online shoppers didn't get their order, that means those parcels didn't meet the delivery SLAs. And so a lot of the big misconception about this problem is it's a carrier problem. Well it's not. It's actually everything that happens happens upstream before a customer gets an order. So it's like your Shopify, is it syncing correctly? Is your inventory allocated correct? Are your styles
loaded correctly? Is the payment system working fine? is the warehouse shipping it out of out of the wet out of the warehouse okay on time? there's just all of these sort of system issues and process issues and people issues that are greater than just a carrier getting a parcel lost or a carrier getting a a parcel delayed. And so all those minute failures that happen between order placement, delivery and return, help desks don't know they they exist.
And a help desk is like a hospital ER. It cannot prevent a hot attack. a help desk cannot prevent a ticket the same way a hospital ER cannot prevent a hot attack. You can only triage it after something's gone wrong. So what we figured out is if we can identify that something going wrong before it becomes the prop customer's problem and automate fixing it, the ticket never exists. The comp the frustrated customer goes away. And customers will always get what they want on top.
Jeff Holman (05:08)
Yeah. That's I mean you make it sound easy, but there are there are l as you kind of hinted at there, I think, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of moving parts here. I I I feel like it seems like this is a business that you chose to get into on the complex side, right? There are some really simple businesses or or s simpler business models, but you've picked one that is is relatively complex, right?
Jevon Le Roux (05:34)
It is extremely complex and and and and I think if I remember correctly when we went out two and a half years ago and we'd my co-founders and I have been in e commerce for a while and we've run big e commerce businesses and we s we lived this problem, right? We we lived it. There was a crisis where a thousand shoppers placed orders at our at one of our companies, the stock didn't exist, we had a credit and refund a thousand customers and send them emails and phone them and say sorry. It it it it's it's terrible. And we lived that kind of
So we knew the problem existed. we didn't realise how hard it was going to be to actually solve it. We built an V P it delivered a bunch of results. We're like, yeah, cool, we've crushed it. And I remember going out a fundraise and there was this very well known e commerce founder in Australia that had sold his business to a Nasdaq listed SPAC for he sold it for six hundred million and he was seen as the guru in e commerce in Australia.
And he was doing some angel investing and we were like, Hey, do you want to invest in us? And he went, You can't fix this problem. It's impossible. It it can't be fixed. And we kinda all turned to each other and said, Well, that's not a reason not to fix it. That's actually the reason to fix it. Because if it's that broken that it can't be fixed, it has to be fixed. And foolishly we we decided to go down that path. And I often say to people, it was
It's as if we're almost building a a complex deep tech stuff. Like it's really, really hard to stitch all of these systems together that are managing order. You think about it, you've got a shopfront, a payment gateway, order management, inventory management, a warehouse management, an ERP, you've got a carrier integrator, carriers, multi-geo warehouses, ship from store, click and collect, return solutions, marketplaces, TikTok shop, Facebook, Walmart, and and you throw in a help desk.
We're stitching that all together in one platform and we often say we've got more data than Google has on its customers. As as far what for for that e commerce business, we can provide more insights into the the health of e commerce operations than Google Analytics can on shopping.
Jeff Holman (07:41)
That's amazing. And it sounds and it sounds like you've got more integrations than Amazon. You might have been you might have been better off starting a new Amazon than than integrating all these other platforms together or something.
Jevon Le Roux (07:51)
So
Jeff, right now I kind of do feel like that. I'll be very honest with you. I was reflecting on how easy it was for Amazon to start just actually yesterday when it was like how smart was Jeff Bees I was back in the late nineties when he like, I'm just gonna do books. How did you go from just doing books to sending rockets to to space? It's just amazing, right? Totally. And that's that's that's a bit of a pivot along the way, but we certainly have had a few pivots as we've been building this.
Jeff Holman (08:19)
Yeah, well we're gonna get we're gonna get into some of those. But before we do, tell me tell me about your team and you know, you guys had experience in e commerce, but but how did you really, you know, resolve that this is the problem you want to tackle? What what was that like for your team?
Jevon Le Roux (08:36)
Yeah, so I think the three of us all we all worked together at a really well known activeware brand in Australia called PE Nation. In fact it was doing really well globally. It had a collaboration with H and N just absolutely exploded during COVID. And we're all working there together. I was the CEO building building building and growing the company and my other co founder was leading customer service and e commerce operations and the other was we hired him as the CTO to build the systems to scale the business.
So we were there and there was this like moment I was talking about a bit earlier where a thousand customers bought products that were not in the warehouse. The systems didn't sync. it was a high velocity sale day and and and just wasn't caught at time. And only a week or two weeks later did we start realizing when these customers started calling in and saying, Hey, what happened? Where is where is this? Where is that? And you would Tracy was dealing with each one individually.
And eventually she unpicked a pattern and then when she pulled the thread, it's like, it's a thousand. She came to me and she said, Look, you know, I I'm gonna have to hire six extra people. I'm gonna have to get on the photos, I've got to pass all these credits, I gotta do all this stuff. But she said, if I could have seen that happening in real time, I could have stopped it. I could have turned off that item from from the storefront. And this wouldn't have happened. And that was where the concept of, wait, I can fix this reactively by throwing people at it.
after the customers complained, after they're frustrated, after they've had a bad experience, what I could have pro actively prevented it from ever happening. And that was the light bulb moment for us. It was like, wait, it's built the wrong way around. Customer service is rewarding itself for fixing problems fast versus preventing problems. Yeah. And and we're like, instead of customer satisfaction score, let's talk about complaints prevented.
And and that's where the where it landed for us, where we we could clearly see there was this that no one had seen it from the other angle. Prevent prevent a complaint from happening versus triaging a complaint after it. It's the classic eat a eat eat an apple a day, keep the doctor away, you Right, right. Treat the calls not the treat the calls, not the symptoms.
Jeff Holman (10:54)
I I mean it makes sense when you say it, but I think about companies out there, they're they're they're tackling the they're tackling the problem th you know, the complaint, the customer complaint problem. There's a company here in Utah where I'm located. I think they just raised eighty million dollars not too long ago, called Redo, and they they basically are I don't know that they're tackling complaints specifically, because I I I they're not a client, so so I don't know their business model intimately, but but they're they're tackling the
the return, the product return process, which is I think very closely tied to the customer complaint process, right? Like like we're returning the product for some reason. And if we couldn't re if we have tr trouble returning it or if we're returning it because there was a problem, like this is th they're they're in there, but they're but they're they're certainly on the the after side of it, not the before side of it, right?
Jevon Le Roux (11:48)
Yeah, yeah, hund and I mean their products providing one specific part of the the order gene.
Jeff Holman (11:54)
Well, so so as as you and your partners w did you implement this like like why not just build this where you were at? Why why start a new company around it? Just a quick note about our guests. I host the Breakout CEO podcast to share behind the scenes insights from scaling businesses. As an attorney, I see the real challenges leaders face long before success becomes public. But client stories have to stay confidential.
So we invite guest CEOs to share their own moments of struggle and success. I'm so grateful to our guests and my team at Intellectual Strategies for making this show possible. Now, let's get back to the show.
Jevon Le Roux (12:35)
Yeah, Jeff, we actually did that. We we built an what we call an MVP initially and rolled it out where we're at. And we didn't realise what we'd actually built. It wasn't like a l it was like, great, this thing started delivering results. Very rudimentary product. It is totally unrelated to what we've built today, like light years apart. We built this sort of internal system and it was more of an early warning system than it was anything else, and it was like able to
to to drive efficiencies and it was super good and we saw a reduction in workload, we saw a reduction in tickets, a an increase in customer engagement, increase in employee engagement, all these positive things. And then I left that company and I went to another one to do what I'd done there at a sleepweed brand called Papinel. And I walked in and there were a hundred and ten help desk tickets to orders. Hundred and ten percent.
Jeff Holman (13:29)
So they a hundred for every order you had you had one point one
Jevon Le Roux (13:34)
Okay. Tickets.
Jeff Holman (13:36)
wow.
Jevon Le Roux (13:37)
So ever every every order had a ticket. So every order that had ever been shipped out of that company had a ticket, meaning that it had a bad customer experience. And so
Jeff Holman (13:45)
That's that's
not the what what should the ratio be in a in a well in a healthy business?
Jevon Le Roux (13:52)
When we speak to comp companies, h healthy is below ten, but it's generally floating around about twenty percent, if not thirty percent of orders I've got to take it.
Jeff Holman (14:01)
So this was this was close to four times that.
Jevon Le Roux (14:03)
it was just crazy. It was off the charts, right? And not all of those are are are where is my order tickets? Probably half of all tickets, forty to sixty percent of all tickets are where is my order. The rest are like just basic inquiries like about the product or about service delivery or offering that can be triaged by what we call reactive AR. Okay. So reactive AI can answer questions that have got a out of a knowledge base. proactive AI, which is what we're building, can prevent problems.
versus just answer a question. So it's truly a genetic. But I went I walked into this company, had the same problem and well no not the same problem, like just a the dire situation. And I called up Tracy and said, do you want to come across and help me fix this? And called up Tahir and said, Do you want to come across and help us f help me fix this? And and then
Mm. When we looked at it and thought about building that internal system again, that's when the light bulb went off off for us. It's like if there is no solution like this off the shelf and we've got to build it again, surely there should be an opportunity to build this as a company. Yeah. And that's kind of where the light bulb went off for us. Only then, only a few years later.
Jeff Holman (15:12)
I see. I see. And then you're like, hey, let's let's try this. So so at some point you you left that company, the three of you are building this this new product. what's that journey been like from then for the last two years or so I think it's been, right?
Jevon Le Roux (15:29)
Yeah. Anything but linear, anything but straight, anything but easy, anything any no straight line, no finished line. Only only canyons, rivers, mountains, oceans and seas and polar caps, anything but straight.
Jeff Holman (15:44)
So pretty typical.
Jevon Le Roux (15:47)
Pretty typical. and I remember when we walked we we we got into this startup accelerator in Australia called Startmate. Uhhuh. and Startmate is the a YC of Australia, like highly regarded, you know, low acceptance rate, only ten ten startups a year getting it. And we're pre product, pre revenue, pre you know, we had a pitch deck, that was about it. Like nothing else. And just just vision and just
Jeff Holman (16:15)
Hopes and dreams, yeah.
Jevon Le Roux (16:17)
Yeah, hopes and dreams, craziness. And we got in and I remember and we thought our product was rock solid, that we're gonna have product market fit like this, like and we we'd we
Jeff Holman (16:27)
Because you'd been there, you'd seen it.
Jevon Le Roux (16:29)
I seen there, like we know we've got this. Like our we've we've we lived it and and and we were doing a workshop with an early stage VC around how to pitch it. She she she I never forget her saying this. She said, Today your product is shit.
You don't think so, but it is shit. And I can tell you today, in in twenty four months, your product will look nothing like it looks like today. And I was like, What is she talking about? She doesn't know our product. Our product rocks. Yeah.
man, could we have not been eating any any more wrong? Because, you know, we got it into users' hands. And you know, that was like a really a key thing. We got got the product to the users' hands and they started using it. And then
You know, as time kinda ran along, we started going, Well, they're not loving it as much as we love it. And we started engaging with well, just around functionality, like it it it started becoming I don't I don't quite know how to fa phase it up. It it it was we thought it would was crushing it. We thought it was a painkiller. But then we get so feedback like, no, this is a vitamin, it's I can do this myself. I don't it's easy, I could do that, I could do this.
And and it sent us back to the drawing board on multiple occasions. Multi
Jeff Holman (17:47)
So this was w w you're using kind of the classic like shark shark bite versus you know vitamins like the like the like you weren't solving the biggest pain that they had. Even though it was a pain you had experienced yourself, something between what you built and how the user was experiencing it didn't wasn't delivering the same level of impact that you thought it would. Is that is that right?
Jevon Le Roux (18:11)
The pain, the the problem we're solving to the had it didn't change. It was the solution we're applying to it. Wasn't it wasn't painkiller, it was a vitamin. It was it was good, but not groundbreaking, not like I can't live without this. And and and that to us was we were able to detect the reason why, but it still required people to do the work. And so this was this was our first big insight when someone said
I really like that. You're showing me all the problems, but now I've got to fix them. And before I didn't know about them and now you're actually creating more work for me because I'm having to fix these things. and and that's when we were like, sh we need automation. Yeah. We need to automate work. You know, we need to automate work. And that was the life of COVID for us.
Jeff Holman (19:02)
Okay. So it sounds like you're I mean, this is this is a role I'm very familiar with as an attorney. I I get to go into companies, I'm like, well, let me tell you all the problems that you got going on. And they're like, Don't tell me that. I don't want to know all that. Like, I was fine until you walked in the door. I had one question and now I have twelve questions. Cause you just made me wonder if I've got other problems that I should be doing that I didn't know about. I i is that a little bit like what you're explaining?
Jevon Le Roux (19:27)
Hundred percent. And so they were really happy just sweeping the sweeping these unhappy customers under the rug. Right? They didn't know they existed. The silent churn I was talking about.
Jeff Holman (19:36)
Because they weren't even calling, right? They weren't they weren't
Jevon Le Roux (19:39)
Now you're telling me about all these people that have got problems and now gotta do all this work. And I was like, Yeah, but don't you wanna protect your customer lifetime value? Don't wanna keep all your customers happy. Like you know about it, but the thing is we were creating more work through that process of detecting the issue in real time.
and we thought that would be helpful, but it was actually not. And until we then realised, well, we've got to automate that work. So detect and automate fixing it, that's when we realised that that's the painkiller is automate all this work.
Jeff Holman (20:11)
What what do you think people were doing before this? Were they were they aware of the of the kind of the silent churn that you mentioned? Or were they oblivious to it? Or were they aware and they just said, It's happening, but what are we gonna do? Like, it just happens. It's part of the part of the game.
Jevon Le Roux (20:26)
No, because I don't th I don't think they're really actually with thinking that way. They think that every time a customer's a problem, they reach out and it becomes a help desk ticket and then they measure how fast did first response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction score. And if those three metrics are good, they're like, we're crushing it. We're crushing it because we're fixing a problem no customer wanted and we're doing it really well. Yeah. And
And and that's just backwards thinking, right? Like and and and then you've got the e commerce department that is measuring their success on customer lifetime value. And customer lifetime value is I bought something, I had a great experience, I'll come back and buy again and again and again. Yeah. Now they measure customer lifetime value. how do they how does e commerce improve it? They send out more emails and more nurture emails like, we haven't seen you in a month. Would you like to come back with this offer?
And so you've got these two sides of the business, one measuring customer lifetime value through retention marketing, and the other one measuring customer happiness through fixing a problem. And they're and they're they're just just on just not on the same page. Like it's two totally different things. And I keep saying if you keep if you throw emails out at people all the time and they've had a bad shopping experience, they're just never going to come back. So just get the fundamental shopping experience right.
And we're in this we call it the age of anxiety. When you hit the buy button, you don't know if you're gonna get your order on time and it's a really uncomfortable feeling for a shopper. There is no guarantee it's gonna always arrive as promised, especially that gift, that one thing you really want to arrive on time for like Valentine's or Christmas or a birthday. There's no guarantee. And so we're hell bent in making sure that the term where is my order never exists in e commerce again. It's just gone. It doesn't exist. Everything
Will derived on Thomas promise.
Jeff Holman (22:23)
I I love it. So so y I mean, in a sense, you you weren't you weren't tackling an entirely new market, but you were attacking the the silent part of the market that existed but but didn't exist where the companies were gamifying the the actions that they took. And so it just it existed quietly in the background while they while they played with other pieces of the puzzle. but
But we're ignoring a probably a pretty l i as you said before, in the US, one out of five orders don't arrive as as intended or something like that. And and that's a large piece of the puzzle to just say, well, that's not that's not where we've gamified gamified our statistics and our teams. So we'll just we're not gonna we're not gonna t we're not gonna address that.
Jevon Le Roux (23:15)
Yeah, well they're making their problem they make their problem look good by by measuring some fixing something that that was a bad experience. It's like, we're sugarcoating it, right? Yeah. So we're what we're actually doing is just preventing that from all we're saying that that the concept of a help desk is built the wrong way around. The concept of a help desk should be proactive, it should reach out, it should fix things before the customer knows there's a problem. And so we are reinventing the way the problem needs to be fixed at the end of the day.
Customers just want to feel comfortable when they hit the buy button that they're gonna get what they ordered on time. That's it. And how that gets solved can be done from a multi multiple different angles. We just think the way it's been done with help desks is is dated. It's been like that for twenty years. And there's a new future. The new future is preventing that compliant from ever happening.
Jeff Holman (24:02)
you and you said that you said that you had to go back and rework your pitch, essentially, re rework your product so it doesn't just diagnose the problem, it also solves the problem. How did you come to that t to that conclusion? Was did your team just say I mean, was it customer interviews where you're getting the feedback and they're just saying you're giving us problems and you know, but you're not solving them. Was it that simple or or was there more to the conversation with your team?
Jevon Le Roux (24:24)
There was definitely there were two conversations. one that my co-founder had with a customer, and the other with that I had with a customer and they came from two different angles. The one that I had was it was really great that I didn't know about these problems. Now I've got to do this work. I was like, that's the most stupid thing I've ever heard in my life.
Jeff Holman (24:46)
Ignorance is bliss though.
Jevon Le Roux (24:49)
And then the other my customer, my co-founder, spoke to a customer and she said, when things get really busy, I've got to focus on fixing the tickets. Because I'm measured at my suc measure of success is against fixing tickets. and and that's when we realized we're not placing enough value on preventing tickets. And how do we do that? We've got to take the work on. We've got to take the work off people's hands. Like there is entire teams that are there
manually triaging every single ticket after the fact, going into systems, creating new orders, cancelling orders, updating orders, refunds, placing stuff in back order, chasing up there are all these people doing this manual work. And through those two sort of customer insights, we got an understanding that automating this work is the real the the the real win yeah. But doing that, highly complex. Highly complex. Like
We've been building to get to a point, it's taken us a year, year and a half to build the tech, to be able to do that. And we've gone down a bunch of different paths. We're now confident we're going down the right path with the technology and we're starting to get get momentum because to be able to automate this work, every single e-commerce business is different. They've got different tech stacks, different SOPs. How do you how do you make it easy to connect all these systems together? Then how do you make it easy for teams to build these automations?
specific to their environment. How do we get get those automations deployed and production ready and tested on live customers? Because you can't test these things on unlive data. You've got to test them on live data. So there's that part. The biggest part is like sometimes a failure will only happen once every three days or it can happen ten times in a day. So how do you test waiting for that failure to happen and
So there's been a bunch of stuff we've had to solve, but we're now starting to get traction. We're getting more and more customers adopting adopting these automations because we've made it easier for them to build, easier for them to deploy.
Jeff Holman (26:52)
Okay. I appreciate that. And there's so many, so many ways to take this conversation. the the way that the way I'd like to explore this a little bit though is going back to your MBA, your MBA program that you went through. when I did mine, one of the classes I loved was a change management class. there's also another service design class that I really loved. But as I as I listen to what you're explaining, you know, and you're talking about building AI to address these problems.
You you are really having, I think, to change how companies fundamentally think about the problem because they were staffing up customer service to to solve issues that were disclosed to them. And you're saying and you're you're almost saying, well, that's gonna exist, but we want to minimize it as much as possible. You actually need a proactive team or tool to to act if if in an ideal world,
to to never have to need a customer service team again. That's like a that's not just a a a more efficient team, right? That's a different framework that you're trying to establish. How was that received when you started presenting the problem in from that perspective? Did you get people in the customer service saying, well, you know, I don't know how to process that because it's like like I do, I have my KPIs, this is what I do.
You're you're saying you want to do something so that I'm not needed anymore? Or or how did that conversation go?
Jevon Le Roux (28:24)
Yeah, so that there's a couple of plots to that. There's the journey around convincing people that proactive is better than reactive. That was the first big part. Like, we've got the solution that can proactively prevent this from happening versus reactively fixing it after. we certainly have come into this conversation knowing that we're creating a category. Creating a category becomes about telling a story, about building a narrative around it. We certainly know that
That we're on the back foot as a result of that, because not only are you trying to sell a software as a solution product to an e-commerce business, which is hard already, you're having to sell a new category. Yeah. And getting that message across really succinctly is pretty hard. We're now saying to when we pitch to customers that we haven't yet engaged with, we're like, every order is a promise, KiU keeps it. Or we automate what and we automate work. It's like keep a promise, keep the promise, Q keeps the promise.
Because that's what it is. Every order is a promise. We keep it. but then you go down a level lower and you're like, we can automate all that e commerce operations work or we can automate all your e commerce work. And you are right, because when you sit in front of different stakeholders when you're selling in, you've obviously got the economic buyer and you've got the champion and you've got the user. The user can sit there and say, Well, hang a sec, where's my future in this? And we're like, No, no, no, we gotta augment teams.
This isn't fully automated. We want you guys to be involved in the process. We want you to manage our agents. You're just doing less less heavy lifting manual repetitive work. And that frees you up to spend more time on the phone with your customers, proactively reaching out to them, talking about great things about your brand. So we're not yet to wipe out a whole team. We're yet to say your team shouldn't be doing tickets all day. They should be having conversations, human to human conversations with your customer. Let our let our let our
Let our automations do the the heavy lifting, the manual work, and your people are used for what they do good, which is engage with your shopper, engage with your customer, talk with them. So there's a bit of a shift in the narrative, but when you go up to the economic bio, they're like, what efficiencies can I get for my business? or what sort of savings? So you've got these competing priorities when you're trying to sell the product in.
Jeff Holman (30:38)
Yeah, that that makes sense. what are some of the things that you thought would go more smoothly as you as you did this transition? but but maybe took a turn differently than you expected? Because you're already you're trying to solve the problem and then you're like, wait a second, we've had this realization that we've gotta we've gotta attack the problem more thoroughly, right? Or or whatever. We've got to come to the we gotta come we got we gotta talk about customer experience as
But it should have been in the beginning, if which is deliver the product as promised, instead of instead of resolve customer complaints when when things go wrong. So you're so you're trying to bring the perspective back and build your product to help facilitate all this. What things went right and what things what things went sideways on you?
Jevon Le Roux (31:23)
Yeah, so I'll I actually go back to when you said we're speaking about Amazon earlier and you just said something that hit me and it reminded me what Jeff Bezos said. Jeff Bezos said the best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk with you, it just works. I mean, no customer service is the best customer service, meaning you don't have to engage with the customer. It just works. No one really wants to be reaching out to a customer service department. Like when you hit that bar button, you don't say to yourself,
I would love to spend the next couple hours of my life chasing up something that I ordered that you got wrong. But where did it so we landed on that specific situation where we said, Okay, great, we've got to automate this work. So we were clear in knowing what we had to do, and that was about a year and a half ago. But a year and a half ago, it was largely generative AR, like L L answer and ask questions. The Gentech hadn't really started hitting. Yeah. hitting yet.
the LLMs weren't pushing that out. We certainly can't use LLMs or any of the agentic stuff right now to run what we're doing. We've had to build our own custom code to be able to run these agentic automations. we went down the path of using using technology that was off the shelf, like land chain, land graph, and it just failed and was and so we've had to go back to the drawing build bold and board and rebuild. We actually on our third iteration to solve this problem of the tech.
We finally believe we've nailed it now. But essentially that was the pop. We had the insight. we've got to automate this. Then it was like, okay, great. We've got to automate it. Now how do we automate it? Very easy having the insight. then trying to figure out how to do that. Already a problem that someone else had once said to us that e commerce founded six hundred million guy said it's impossible to connect all these systems together. He said, That's impossible. Okay, we did that, great. Now we've got to figure out how to read, write, automate workflows.
across all these systems and mimic them in different different environments for different companies with different SOPs and different different processes and different customers' expectations. So that that was probably the hardest journey, I think. And then I will say the toughest part was the beginning of last year we're like clear on what we wanted to do. Yeah. Like, okay, we've got to build these automations now. and we'd been building for a year and a bit.
raised a bunch of money. I think we raised just shy of a million dollars to do that. And we burnt through all of that and now we're like, we've got to do a pivot. But we've run out of money. And so we gotta go raise on this pivot. and we've got to go raise on this pivot with no money. And the day we started raising, we probably had about like five thousand dollars in our bank account. Okay. And you got three founders and four peop four devs in Pakistan. Yeah. Five thousand dollars.
No, actually I'm not I'm not telling the truth. There was fifteen. And we the three of us looked at each other as founters and we said, All right, we've got a we we've built something for a owner, but we've tested it, we don't have product market fit. We believe this next phase is automation, we believe it'll solve the problem. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna go ahead and raise again with with an VP with a new pitch? Or are we gonna give up? And the three of us looked at each other and we said, No, we're gonna go raise.
We're gonna keep going. We didn't pay ourselves for three months while we were raising. We turned off all our cards, like you know, the cards to pay things. Yeah. Yeah. So that all subscriptions would bounce. And and when we had to pay for the servers, we would turn the card on for all of one minute so my co founder could process the server payment. Yeah. turn the card off so no other like subscribers that you can't cancel would jump in and take money out of the bank account. Wow.
And we did that for three months while we're raising. And yeah, we managed to, you know, do a really good job closing out our pre-seed round on the basis of, hey, we believe this is the future. We believe that automating this work for e-commerce businesses will change its relationship with customers. And we raised two and a bit million on that. and then we set about building the automations and we just raised
Four million just shy of four million. It's a total we raised seven million now on this sort of dream around like, we c we can automate work for e-commerce businesses. So customers always get what they want on time. And it hasn't been easy. Those three months when we're f when we had nothing, t tests anyone's strength around belief in the problem they're solving.
Jeff Holman (36:07)
Yeah. Yeah, those are those are tough tough times, especially if you're raising when you need it, not before you need it, right? So you you've got a you you've got more urgency to the story and maybe less negotiation power in the in the conversation sometimes. So how was raising the second time or the last time? How was how is raising the last time different from the first time? 'Cause you 'cause you kind of, you know, like you said, you you raised a million dollars, you you went through the VP process and you're like, wait.
This is not it. going back, did you go to the same investors? Did you go to different investors? Like what w how did what did that look like for you?
Jevon Le Roux (36:46)
Yeah, so the first round of investors were angel investors. Well, first of all, there was fools families and friends. I put some money in and a few family members put some money in Fool's Families and Friends. Then we convinced, then we got into the accelerator program. and we and then at the same time we got a bunch of angels to invest. So that first round we did that was shy of a million was angel investors, accelerators, and fools families and friends. we also were able to use some government grants.
in that first year research and development grants that were very helpful. In fact, we wouldn't be in business if it wasn't for those research and development grants because they they became the lifeline for for a few months of runway each financial year, probably one or two months of runway. so, you know, we rarely multi that. So the first round was first round two in a bit years ago was just fools, family, friends, angels and accelerators. Second round was VCs. We had met with them a year before.
and so they had a measure of success. They'd met a year before when we were raising the first round. They all passed, said we want to see some more traction, want to see a bit more grit, want to see how this unravels. Or they say we don't see the problem. So a year later we went back to everyone everyone again and and that's when a bunch of people backed us last year with a two million, two million dollar round. and then just recently we closed out just shy of four million.
So that's kind of been I I feel like in the two and a half years I've been building, I've probably been raising nine months out of those two and a half years. And fundraising is the hardest job in the whole world. There is no I I don't any I've seen people post on LinkedIn, we should celebrate founders that hit annual recurring revenue numbers, not who's raised the most amount and and I'm like, they obviously do not know how hard it is raising. Like
If you think about it, someone on the street that's begging for them to get a dollar out of someone, how hard that is at times, like it's it's the same thing. You know, you're out there convincing people that have that have convinced someone else to give them hard earned money, to give you money on a very highly very high risk situation. Like there's a good chance this isn't gonna work out. and and it's exhausting. It it absolutely takes you out of the business for a long period of time.
Jeff Holman (39:09)
How did you change your story? I mean, 'cause you said you went back and people had wanted to see traction, wanted to see the grit. it sounds like, and maybe I'm misinterpreting this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like traction w was elusive because you were, you know, tr y you had to build the the solutions, not just identify the problems. And so when you went back, it was it more grit than traction at that point?
Jevon Le Roux (39:33)
when you do a pre seed round, like an an and call it a pre pre, which is accelerator round, that's just vision. It's all vision and they're just back backing pitch pitch deck and they're backing a founder. They believe we can back these founders and that pitch deck is plausible. The second round when we did the pre seed, it's like we want to see signs of of early product market fit. We wanna see signs that you've been talking to customers, we wanna see signs that you've got customers that are paying you. Are those customers sticking around? Not not
Just early signs, early signals. Have you gone through a few iterations on your product? Is is the hypothesis of what you're now building makes sense. Yeah. and we had a bit of, I think we had about 10 customers at the time. We probably had about a hundred thousand dollars of revenue. So there was some indication that there was stickiness with our product.
Jeff Holman (40:25)
Okay.
Jevon Le Roux (40:26)
some indication. And then we're like, well, we've got this part of the problem solved. We're able to stitch these together, we're able to detect.
Now we believe to get us from ten thousand dollars average contract value to twenty five thousand dollars, we layer in the automations. And so it was about setting them in on that vision that it's one part solving detecting the problem, the other part is now automating, fixing it.
Jeff Holman (40:52)
Wh where do you see this going in the future? What is what does your three year plan or your li five year plan look like for not just not just customers and revenue but but the team and the product itself?
Jevon Le Roux (41:02)
Yeah, so where we are right now is we've got a great engineering team out in Australia. I'm moving to the US in two months. So I can build out a go to market team there and and start building out a customer support team and a marketing team. where do we see ourselves in three to five years? I would say that we should go from our thirty customers we have today to three hundred customers by the end of next year to three thousand the year after. How are we gonna do that? We're simply going to
start demonstrating to these customers that we're expanding to in the US that we are able to deliver the ROI. And I would cl confidently say that there is no reason why we won't be doing a hundred million dollars of revenue in five years. It's absolutely plausible. Just simply based on the trajectory of other companies in the help desk category that got to a hundred million dollars of turnover in ten years, of ten thousand customers, we believe we can do that or five thousand customers in in in
A hundred million in in five years.
Jeff Holman (42:05)
Well, and I imagine that the AI tools out there are helping you out, right? They're because they're they're helping all the all the connectors and MCPs, they're I don't know that you can leverage those directly, but they're they're certainly the technology is there to be able to connect and solve and and I don't know, just g allow these these platforms to communicate with each other in a in a much more integrated way than than having to do it all manually. I I would I would expect you did.
A lot of that in the last couple of years getting to this point. So
Jevon Le Roux (42:38)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I and I think the key part though is what you're referring to there is the ability to connect all these systems. Sure, it's a bit easier, but it's making sense of all that data and then being able to link it back to the customer promise. And so connections are the are just one part, making sense of the data and then being able to get that data to l reliably connect back to a specific pain point and then to a specific automation. And then don't forget we're running financial transactions.
an inventory. And so you can't have you got have a zero failure rate. Like our our failure rate right now is 0.3. and we all know how how LLM models can easily hallucinate, very easily. And so we've built technology that does not hallucinate. And it's all deterministic is the technology we've built so that no failures happen because we can't have that. Like imagine if someone
should get a one dollar refund and they got a thousand dollar refund like
Jeff Holman (43:39)
Yeah.
Jevon Le Roux (43:40)
that cost. and so that's part of the problem. The bigger part of the problem isn't the connections, it's actually just making sure that we can build a platform that robustly solves these problems from a transactional perspective.
Jeff Holman (43:52)
And is and is accurate. That makes sense. Well, Jevin, we haven't even had a chance to talk about your professional surfing that you did when you were younger and those other things. But but this has been really good. I I appreciate getting personally even getting a little bit more insight into the into the where is my order, the the customer service aspect of e commerce businesses that that we work with. I will say that of all the legal things we do for for our e-commerce clients, that's that's one that kind of stays in the
sta I don't know, stays a a little further away from us until, you know, a customer complaint rises to product liability or or something of that nature. so I I really appreciate hearing more about that side of the of the business that you're working on. is there a takeaway that you would share with other CEOs who are going down a similar journey as you something that you've I don't know, we talked about confidence a little bit a while ago.
is there something that you would say, Hey, if if this is a tip I could give to somebody else on the same journey or to my to my younger self a few years ago, what would that be for those for that type of person?
Jevon Le Roux (45:00)
Or a first time founder or someone that's already building a company?
Jeff Holman (45:04)
either one. you you you can specify.
Jevon Le Roux (45:07)
Yeah, first time founder. So I'll give it I'll give some feedback for a first time founder. First time founder is don't build a solution and then find a problem. Find a problem and believe in that problem and then build the solution to solve that problem. You often find people go, I've got this great solution. And we're like, Well, is there a problem? and I think people often get caught up in the wrong way around. And then I think to that first time founder, once they figured out like what is that problem.
like we did, it's like, no, you've got to really, really believe that that problem needs to be solved because there's gonna be a million people that will tell you the problem doesn't exist. So you've really got to believe in it and you've got to stay the course. No matter who says to you, that isn't a problem or no that problem can't be solved. You just gotta stay the course. Yeah. and then I think for established CEO, I I would say that's building a company
Just never lose sight of like why it is that you want to solve this problem. Like what's that burning desire? Because it gets really lonely as you're going along on the journey and you question why you do there's many mornings I wake up, I go, I'm just tired. And then I go, Well, but I'm solving a really burning issue, a real burning problem. Yeah. And I know that if I am actually able to crack that or my co founders and are I able to crack it and that we we will change an industry.
Which will redefine everything. And so to that founder that's building and's already going down the path, don't lose sight of why you saw why you started solving this problem.
Jeff Holman (46:40)
wow. Well, is there is there something that you tell yourself on those mornings that that you wake up and you're like, super tired today. What what is what is it that keeps like what is that passion for you? Or is there a a a you know, a trigger, a keyword, a mantra? Like how do you how do you do that in your in your world?
Jevon Le Roux (46:56)
it's called get to the coffee shop as fast as possible. 'Cause it'll all get better when I've had my flat white, my triple shot flat white. It'll get better. Everything will get better the second I get to that coffee shop and I've got my flat wire, the rest of the day is okay.
Jeff Holman (47:12)
Okay, okay. There we there you have it. Solution the solution every CEO needs right there. Wha what was the what was the mix there of triple something, flat white, something?
Jevon Le Roux (47:21)
The triple shot flat white almond milk.
Jeff Holman (47:24)
Okay.
Jevon Le Roux (47:26)
Almond milk, triple shot espresso, flat white. Flat white's not that common in America, right? It's only just starting to come out.
Jeff Holman (47:33)
I don't know. I I'm not a coffee drinker myself, so so you're you're you're saying stuff that I don't know about. I I drink way too much soda probably than that that I shouldn't, but coffee's not on my list.
Jevon Le Roux (47:44)
No, no, but all in all f in all seriousness, yes, the coffee does help. But you know, when you feel like that in the morning, I just say to myself, Man, I'm d I'm solving something really cool. And within 30 minutes, you're like, this is good. Let me go crush it. Let me get out there today and make magic. And I often say to my team, when they walk in in the morning, and they come through the door, I say, What magic you gonna make today? You know, these are tech guys, right? Like they say, What magic you gonna make today? When you tie.
Like tell me what magic you're gonna make. And and that sort of that that feeling of being overwhelmed by what you're building, like dis dissipates really quick when you start thinking about like the c the magic that you're gonna be making.
Jeff Holman (48:26)
I love that. I I think that's where we end this. What magic are you gonna make today? I and and I appreciate you, Jevin, for coming onto the show and sharing some of your magic. I mean, this is this is a journey that that you've been on that other people maybe have have not seen the details of. So you you sharing that with with other CEOs who are on similar journeys, I think helps kind of attack that problem that you that you referenced where it's a lonely journey, but but you're not the only one, right? everybody else who's in your shoes is going on the same thing.
Thinking, man, this is kind of lonely. But now they've got one more tool in their tool belt. What, what magic am I going to create today? So thanks for sharing that.
Jevon Le Roux (49:05)
Yeah, awesome. And and it's a it's it's a real simple one. Like what magic am I gonna create today? Like how hard does it get? It's all magic.
Jeff Holman (49:12)
I love it. I love it. Well, thanks for coming on the show and to to our audience who joined us again for this episode. we're always glad to have you. Hope you took away some insights. if people wanted to connect with you, Jevin, if or if they needed your services, where to remind them where they go to to to purchase what you're doing or to find out more.
Jevon Le Roux (49:31)
Yeah, so it's K U dot com K double e Y U. That's K E E Y U dot com. not that hard to find. K double E Y U dot com Q or you can chase me down on LinkedIn first and last name. There's not many of me on the LinkedIn.
Jeff Holman (49:47)
Hello. Jevin, thanks so much. And to our audience, thanks for joining us again on another episode of the Breakout CEO.
Jevon Le Roux (49:53)
Awesome, thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Holman (49:56)
Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you enjoy the show, a rating or a review goes a long way. Our mission is to promote the stories of breakout CEOs in scaling SaaS, e-commerce, and tech companies to equip peer CEOs with valuable perspectives and confidence. Thanks again for joining us on this episode of the Breakout CEO. I'm Jeff Holman, and I'll see you next time.
