Baris Karadogan, from computer enthusiast to venture investor to entrepreneur

Kerim: Hi, everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran, with SolarAcademy. Today, I have a very special guest here with me, Baris Karadogan, one of my oldest friends, someone that I grew up in Turkey together with. We attended the same middle school and high school, so someone that I have crossed paths, or maybe I should say, followed very parallel paths growing up in Turkey, coming to the US for education, and then working in the tech sector, becoming entrepreneurs, and being an investor and entrepreneur at the same time. 

And Baris is leading a new startup called Jingle, which is not squarely in the solar or renewable energy space, but it is definitely in a tangential space because it has unique climate effects or unique advantages to help the climate change problems we’re facing. And he will talk about why that is and how that is. 

But Jingle is a very unique distribution concept, and I will let Baris tell us about that. But before we get in, Baris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background, how you ended up leading Jingle, but maybe share us a little bit of your career background, and then we can go from there. 

Baris: Well, it’s first of all such a pleasure talking to you, Kerim. They say the best things in life are shared, and I’m very grateful that our entire America journey we’ve shared together, and we are each other’s historians in that sense. So it’s a true pleasure and honor to be here.

So how did I end up in the US? What’s my background? I grew up in Istanbul like Kerim said. And as they say, I saw a computer, and I fell in love with it. It was, I think, the first Sinclair ZX Spectrum, had 48k of memory. I wrote up my first computer game. It was a Space Invaders game. I just learned basic programming on my own, and I wrote a game. I think I was 10, 11, 12 years old. It was a very simple game, and I’ve been hooked with computers ever since.

We heard about Silicon Valley from National Geographic Magazine in school, and I was mesmerized by the concept. So I’ve always wanted to be there. It seems like where everything was happening, and fate has it, I got a scholarship to come to the US. 

Then I found my way to Stanford and study engineering, and that’s how it all started. I’ve been in America a little over 30 years now, and it roughly is, my first 10 years, I was an engineer at USRobotics and 3Com. My expertise was computer communication. My patents are all on broadband communication. That was my first 10 years as an engineer. 

My second 10 years was as a VC. I went to Stanford Business School. I found out about Venture capital. At that time, I was saying, “Hey, I’m a kid from Turkey. I don’t have any network in America. What’s a good way to build a network?” And I heard about this thing called Venture capital, where you walk around with somebody else’s billion dollars, and people come to you and tell you their hopes and dreams for the future. 

I said, “Okay, that’s a good way to get to know people. So I was a VC for 10 years, mostly at US Venture Partners. And then seeing all these amazing CEOs, the bug got on me. 

I mean, including seeing your journey, Kerim. I said to myself, “You know, I want to be the guy who closes the deal, closes the customer.” So I’ve felt like my personality was better for running companies.

And then, my last 10 years there’s a little more, actually. Now it’s been running companies. Jingle is my third startup. And yeah, I’ve been in the tech world pretty much all my life, but as an engineer, VC, and a manager now.

Kerim: Great! Well, thanks for sharing that. 

What inspired the vision for Jingle? + Push vs Pull Model in supply and demand

So tell us a little bit about how did the idea for Jingle start? Or how did you form the vision for Jingle? What was your inspiration moment? And how did it evolve since? 

Baris: Yeah, for a brief period of time, I worked at a company called Reef Technology, that was doing last-mile delivery logistics and all that kind of stuff. And that’s when quick commerce was booming, DoorDash, Uber Eats. This is right after the pandemic. The pandemic really boosted it.

I don’t know if it was my daughter, 14 years old, was accidentally ordering $70 for 2 burritos from Chipotle or somewhere on the road. I realized that the last-mile delivery had some issues.

And it became very clear that people, consumers have to wait 45-50 minutes for their food. It gets soggy and it’s got its difficulties. They pay a ton of money for it. A $20 burrito magically becomes a $40 burrito on delivery platforms.

Vendors don’t like it because they have to give a big chunk of their revenue to it, consumers are frustrated, the delivery service comes, and drivers are frustrated because, you know, they get only paid when there’s stuff in their car. 

So I looked at the industry, and I said, “There’s a little problem here.” And that’s when the epiphany moment came. Your last-mile delivery is an issue. But as you know, Kerim, when we were growing up in Turkey, going to the grocery store was a pain in the late 80s, early 90s. You have to go in Istanbul traffic. My mother would drag me, park, carry the bags. It’s a big ordeal. This is before the Internet and E-commerce.

But there was a solution. There used to be these trucks that drive around neighborhoods with a loudspeaker and a guy going, “Tomatoes, peppers, onions.” 

Or back then in Turkey, apartments didn’t have natural gas, so everything was done on propane tanks. You’d have to hear the jingle of the propane tank truck, and my mom would send me to the window. I’d go, “Apartment 10, 1 propane tank.” And the full tank would come and the empty tank would go. Or same with the tomatoes. I’d go yell out saying, “Two kilos of tomatoes, one kilo of onions”, and a guy would bring it.

Kerim: Yeah. 

Baris: I said, “Hey, look. That’s last-mile delivery.” And I asked, some of my friends say, “Last-mile, that’s been around for 40 years. There’s clearly a business model around it.”

Actually, a friend of mine told me, he said, “What 40 years? That’s the business model for the last 400 years.” It used to be that the sales guys would wander around. There was this traveling salesman.

That’s when I said, “Hey, why don’t we replace that loudspeaker with an app?” What if foods and services when they’re near you, they notified you? And said, “Hey, Kerim. Your favorite ice cream is around the corner. If you order now, it’ll come in 10 minutes”, because it’s around the corner. And because it’s going to come in less than 10 minutes, you pay only $2. 99 fee instead of 17.99 fee. 

And all of a sudden, everybody’s happy. Delivery is quicker, the consumer gets things. But the trade-off is, of course, that van may not be near you. But what if there’s this density of enough people around you, if not that one van, maybe this is a better way to do last-mile delivery. And that’s how Jingle started.

And I validated this with a lot of artisanal vendors, and they said the same thing, saying, they’re very frustrated with the high fees. They want to preserve their brand. And this was one of their challenges. So we call this the push model versus the pull model. When you order from a restaurant, you’re actually pulling the food. You order it, somebody goes there and gets it for you. In a restaurant, a waiter does it. In DoorDash, a driver does it. It’s the same thing. 

Kerim: Yeah. 

Baris: The push model is where the food comes and the services. Someone says, “Do you want me?” And there’s a nice analogy for that. This is your sushi boat restaurant. This is your dimsum restaurant, where a cart comes and you pick from the cart.

Kerim: Or a Turkish fish restaurant by the coast, where the tray with the meze has come to your table. 

Baris: Exactly, that’s the concept. And we all know how much more you eat at a dimsum restaurant, how quickly the food comes, and that’s how it works. It’s funny. I told our model’s – 

Kerim: What technical term do you use to describe this in your space? Is there a – 

Baris: I call it push versus pull. To this day, the world is the pull model. Demand goes to supply. You go, and you order. The push model is where supply comes to demand, and says, “Here I am.” And you know, the world has been shifting. Like I told you, it used to be the traveling salesman and supply was mobile. Demand was fixed. But then, now, we have cars and malls. So demand became fast and supply became fixed. 

But now, of course, with drones and electric cars, who knows? Now supply could come to demand and service much faster. And maybe, this whole delivery is the first step of a much bigger trend, where now, supply is able to come to demand. And we think that trend is real.

And this is how Jingle works, is to bring the stuff closer to you and ask what you want. I mean, I have an engineer friend of mine, and I told him about this push versus pull model. And I told him the sushi boat restaurant. He kind of got it. I told him the dimsum and I said, “Look, you should think about it as we’re cache memory for food.” And he said, “Aha. Okay, bring the memory.” That’s exactly what we do. That’s really the push model.

Jingle’s unique value proposition to the consumer

Kerim: Yeah. So I guess one way to say it is like you’re bringing the push model to the last-mile delivery problem, initially for food. Or like, what is Jingle’s value proposition then to the consumer? Can you tell us a little bit about like the categories you serve? And how does a consumer benefit from this versus an Uber Eats or versus something else? 

Baris: Yeah, I’ll give you some real examples of what our users are feeling and telling us exactly why they like to do it. But, like you said, it’s not just for food. It’s services also. 

I need my dog washed. Is there a dog washer nearby? I need a knife sharpener. Is there a knife sharpener? I have this microwave or refrigerator I need to throw. Is there a junk removal around? All of these are possible on Jingle. 

And you look at, and you can look at the ratings. Some people call us the Airbnb for mobile stores. You can say, “Oh, there’s this junk removal guy around the corner. Hey? Can you come over and get this stuff?” Boom, it’s gone.

So it’s not just food. The value proposition for the consumer, the most important value proposition is because now they can get foods, they can get artisanal stuff that you normally don’t see on other service providers. Because, let’s say, a bakery in San Francisco. We have a few on board actually. They’re very popular. Their vans are loaded up and they come down to the San Jose area, and in 4 hours they sell out.

There is no way that consumer can get that food on a daily service, because you can’t have a driver go one hour away and come back to get that one order. But if all the food comes at once, and there are quick orders like a hub and spoke model, all of a sudden, from the consumer’s point of view, they have access to stuff they can’t see anywhere, and they love it. 

They say, “Oh, I can’t believe…” We hear it all the time. “We can’t believe this bakery is now available in San Jose. Thank you.” 

Kerim: So I’m assuming you’re talking, maybe upper scale bakeries that are in the Palo Alto or the San Francisco proper city. 

Baris: We’re talking about Neighbor Bakehouse, Craftsman and Wolves, Rise Up Bakery, Wholesome Bakery. These are all very well-known names in the San Francisco area, and you could only get it in San Francisco. So that’s number one, having access to foods. 

Kerim: And your vans are traveling to further out suburbs and basically creating that quick delivery. 

Baris: Exactly. I will dwell into it more when I talk about the vendor value proposition. But also we hear all the time that people are fed up with the fees. They don’t want to pay $20 for food delivery. 

Now, in Jingle, it’s $2.99 because we can make it profitable. Well, because the whole secret is, you can only order on Jingle when it is easy and affordable to make the delivery. So $2.99 works actually for that. 

So they love the speed, they love the affordability, but most importantly, they have access to stuff that they can’t get elsewhere. Those are the three big value propositions for the consumer.

Jingle’s key benefits for the vendor

Kerim: Got it. And then let’s talk a little bit about the vendor side. So if you’re from the vendor side, what are the key benefits? 

Baris: Well, we actually already hit on it. We said, a vendor in San Francisco could sell in San Jose. Now we have some vendors who’ve told us, “Yeah, we’ll work with you, Jingle, but we’re also opening a brick and mortar store.” 

Let’s compare the Jingle model to the brick and mortar model. For a bakery in San Francisco to open in San Jose, they’re going to sign real estate leases. They’re going to have to do tenant improvements. They’re going to have to go through a hellish permitting process. 

So we’ve had some vendors that had spent one year and close to a million dollars to open their brick and mortar store to serve that area. So you wait a year, pay a million dollars, go 40 miles from San Francisco to San Jose, and the day you open the store for the 41st mile, you’re going to give 35% of your revenue to a service provider. 

Why? How about with Jingle? You load up your van. No permits needed. The van is not doing any sales. The van is a delivery vehicle. It’s not soliciting business. It’s no different than a pizza delivery truck.

The van goes to San Jose, collects the orders. You can be on Jingle the next day, as opposed to waiting a year. So a million-dollar CapEx becomes just hundreds of dollars of OpEx a month. 

A van is $500 lease, a thousand dollars to lease a freezer van. So the cost of opening your new location for a vendor becomes significantly cheaper with this model.

And then there’s a – 

Kerim: Who pays for driver in that model? 

Baris: There’s a bunch of ways to do it. One, some of our vendors, they have their van, they have their driver, that’s their thing. For those who don’t have anything, we have a couple of Jingle vans, the proof of concept, and we would take their product in consignment, or try to sell it for them. Or, of course, a third model is the gig worker model, where a vendor can say, “Hey, I want somebody to open my Sunday store for the weekend for 6 hours. Sign up. Come here. I’m going to give you the stuff, and you just go there and turn it on. A third party can do it. Either way works. 

We call that third party model micro franchising because when somebody is selling that store’s product, they’re not a dumb driver taking things from A to B. They are an entrepreneur. They are a store owner for those 6 hours. They will get the stuff wholesale, sell it for retail, make money, and try to find ways to sell it. 

And this is where Jingle software comes in. We tell drivers where the requests are, where people have demanded the product, where we think there’s a high user base. So the software guides supply to demand in this model.

Kerim: So then the driver gets a dashboard in the app and so does the store owner, the brand owner and so on and so forth. 

Baris: Well, we took a lot of our product features from dimsum restaurants. What happens in a dimsum restaurant when a cart comes to you, and you say, “Hmm, I wanted the walnut shrimp, and it’s not on that cart.” The cart owner would say something in the radio, telling the person with the walnut shrimp cart, saying, “Hey, table 5 wants you.” 

We added that exact feature. We call that a request. When you open our app, and let’s say your favorite ice cream is not nearby, you press request. That basically tells the store, “Hey, I’m interested in your product. Let me know when you’re nearby.”

So imagine the driver of the store when they open up, when the mobile store owner, now powered by Jingle, turns on their store. They come to San Jose. They turn on their store that says, “Hey, in this area there are 5 people that requested you. In this area, in Sunnyvale, there are 4 people that requested you. There’s 4 people in Milpitas.” And imagine AI guiding the supply saying, “Go here, go based on probability of likelihood of ordering.”

So imagine this. Basically, the traveling salesman becomes quite smart. He turns on the app, and the app says, “Go on this route, and here’s…”  and then all of a sudden, in 3 hours, you’ll break even. You’ve sold most of your stuff because we’ve aggregated this demand, and we’ve told you exactly how to hit them.

Kerim: And this is exactly how the climate benefits supply, I think, based on our previous conversation. Because you’re actually, instead of doing a lot of hub and spoke individual trips, you’re actually doing an optimization of a route, where, on one trip, you’re doing 8 deliveries as opposed to 1 one delivery and then going back to the central warehouse. 

Baris: The carbon footprint should be a lot less with this method. Yes. That’s a probability that that’s a known thing. Yeah.

The relationship between Jingle and property managers who need amenities for their tenants

Kerim: And we briefly also talked about this in the context of multi dwelling unit buildings and like, their customer story. Can you tell us about that case? 

Baris: Sure. Yeah, we found great partners in high rises. So as a startup, our goal is to get users signing up. Property managers want to have amenities. People who live in high rises want services. They’re the top users of delivery services. 

So imagine a case where we can tell a property owner, “Hey, If you tell your tenants to sign up on Jingle, we will make sure, Saturday morning, knife sharpening will be in your vicinity, or maybe even near a parking lot. The following Saturday we’ll have dog grooming. The following Saturday we’ll have mani-pedi. The following Saturday we’ll have a masseuse. Even also saying, “Look. Thursdays is ice cream night. We will make sure a Jingle ice cream van is within 5 miles, so within quick delivery of your tenants.” So this is a very wonderful partnership.

The property manager gets free amenities. The consumer gets services brought to their doors. And most importantly, the vendors love it. Because if you’re a dog washer or a dog groomer, and you can get 3 orders, one after another, in one place, as opposed to driving an hour per customer, you save on gas, you save on sun. So with this model, we think we’ve discovered a latent demand in buildings that we can satisfy with this push model.

The anatomy of Jingle’s economics

Kerim: We talked about the benefits for the consumer. The consumer can make requests, and whenever the vans are in the neighborhood, the Jingle app lets them know that they’re here. Their delivery gets done for a much cheaper fee, a fraction of the cost of a traditional Uber-Eats like delivery mechanism.

And for the vendor, they get a van instead of a brick and mortar million store. They expand their –  

Baris: Yeah. They just scale them. They just open a new location. They open the new location, yup. 

Kerim: And they get dynamic delivery ranges. So what does that economics look like for the van? And what does that economics look like for Jingle, for a potential, you’re still in the early phases of your company? You’re still looking for quality investors to understand and invest in your concept. Can we talk a little bit more about the economics? 

Baris: Absolutely. So we charge a fee to the vendors, but that fee is a fraction of what these other delivery services charge, and namely, because now they’re doing their own deliveries. That’s one thing that they have their driver and all that. So it’s a fraction of that. 

And then we charge the consumers a fixed fee. But all we charge vendors is no different than Airbnb. It’s free for you to host your room, and Airbnb only charges if somebody books it. It’s the same thing. It’s free for a vendor to be listed on Jingle. We will create a store for them for free. So they get their mobile stores on Jingle for free. And if they sell something, Jingle would get a small cut which is a good investment.

Kerim: So you guys get a slight commission on the sale as well a small delivery fee. 

Baris: Yes, we get a commission on the sales. There is no monthly fee, there is no fixed fee. If they don’t sell, they don’t pay us. It’s completely success-based. 

Kerim: Got it. And so they risk a little bit of inventory to put it in a van, maybe some driver time that they’re paying. Or maybe they can put it alongside other products in a Jingle van that carries multiple brands of products. 

Baris: And it’s very feasible that three vendors can get together, hire one driver and one van, and that person would do pastries in the morning, healthy lunches in the afternoon, and ice cream at night, do that. And it could be three different vendors share the cost of the entire infrastructure. We are completely free, that we are completely vehicle-agnostic.

We’re basically saying, “Hey, if you’re moving around, we’ll get you orders. We will tell you where people are, and we’ll get people to buy your stuff.”

Early results and traction of Jingle

Kerim: Got it. Can we also talk a little bit about the early results and traction? Yeah, like how many brands are you working with? 

Baris: So we have now 50 plus vendors on Jingle. We have a very, very vibrant user base, our cohort analysis. Our users tend to stick. Anybody who buys on Jingle, 30% of a chance, they’ll do their second, third, fourth orders.

So we have some people who have done hundreds of orders in Jingle, and they’re just perfectly happy customers. Yeah, we have some people like clockwork. Their Saturday morning pastries, their desserts. Jingle is their part of life now, and they get it. They’ll wait for the Jingle to be around. They put their requests in, and in the morning, when the Jingle is passing by, they drive around. They get their orders. 

So yes, we’re active in the Bay Area. We have a little bit of a presence in Miami and LA, but most of our users are in the Bay Area. It covers San Francisco, Oakland, and the Peninsula. 

Yeah, we have a very healthy, growing user base, 50 plus vendors like I said. And yeah, that’s it. And we’ve gotten some angel investment. Bessemer Venture Partners invested in our company, a very well-known venture firm.

We have a lot of very good angel investors, so the company is funded, growing, soon to be raising a Series A. And what we believe is, we have – Oh, most importantly, we have product market fit because we have some vendors who are turning profitable on their vans.

And I think that’s the most important message for our attraction that the cost of the driver, advertise cost of the van, gasoline, all that, add those all up on a daily basis, they make significantly more in gross margin than their costs. So we are now showing that this model of “Hey, bakery in San Francisco, sales in the Peninsula is working.” Now we have to have it scaled.

Kerim: One other detail, I remember from a previous conversation is that your abandonment rates of your carts were significantly-  

Baris: Oh, yeah. That’s right, that’s right. I think the industry average is 70%. We’re around 30% because it’s a different way of doing things. This is actually the push versus pull model concept. 

People come to our sites with intention, in that sense. They could say, “Hey, I’m nearby.” So the minute, by the time you’re interested, by the time you’ve clicked on a request, it shows that you have a desire at that moment. So we catch people when they want things, when the request is there. We kind of nudge them, basically. And that’s why that nudge is perhaps the difference why our abandonment rates are less than half of the industry. Yeah.

Kerim: And is the nudge the Jingle app? Or do you make a jingle sound when the truck is nearby? Because that can be annoying, too. How do you manage that?

Baris: Sure. So that’s a good question. I mean, obviously, if they have 50 vendors around, we’re not going to send somebody 50 notifications. We’re going to send a digest of notifications. Or we’re adding a feature that says, “Hey, here are the stores that pass by you. Request the ones you like.”

And we have some machine learning here that has smart notifications. We learn your preferences, and we don’t try to give you too much of one kind or too little. So it’s a balancing act, obviously. 

There are some people who love the notifications. Some people turn it down. We’re going to give layers of ability to say, “Look, just let me know when these guys are around.”

So this is the same old Netflix recommendation engine model. Do we recommend the popular ones? Or do we open some new ones that could be popular? We do our algorithms for that. Yeah.

Concluding thoughts + ways for vendors to get in touch with Jingle

Kerim: So as we conclude, any concluding thoughts? And how does a vendor get in touch with you? Where can the consumers download the app? Whatever else you would like to say. 

Baris: Sure. For the app, you can go to jingle-app.com, and download it. Or search Jingle quick services on the app store to download it. On our website, there’s a sign up form for vendors. They can just sign up there, and we’ll reach out to them. What I want to say is, what makes us very unique here and that’s interesting for vendors is that look, this is the first time where supply goes and finds demand.

It’s a different way of thinking of things. All our lives, demand goes to supply. We’re creating software for supply to find demand. And we think this is a bigger trend. We think there’s going to be more of this. As cars and drones become automatic, supply is going to be able to now find demand, instead of having demand come to them. 

And the consumer behavior is changing. More and more things are being delivered. Now we’re used to, press a button and a cab comes to you. Press a button and food comes to you. So we’re getting used to that. 

So I think the big trend here is that supply is going to have to be mobile, as opposed to demand being mobile. And we believe our technology is one of the first ones to be out there in this new era of retail, so to speak.

Kerim: Great. Well, Baris, thanks for this insight into Jingle and the detailed explanations and information you shared.

And hopefully, we will do another one of these conversations in the near future, when you make some more progress, new features, functions, offerings. 

Baris: We can’t wait. We have a lot of crazy ideas. Well then, thank you for your time, Kerim. It’s a total pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you very much.

Kerim: Great. Thank you. Talk soon.