238: Scaling Smart: Warehouse Automation and Calculated Growth at Startups with Adi Dalvi, VP of Sales at OSARO

How does a startup scale? It all starts with a great product that solves a real problem. And sometimes that means taking the slow and steady road to startup success.

Recorded at Trillium Brewing in Boston, we sit down with Adi Dalvi, the VP of Sales at OSARO, a company that specializes in robot piece-picking and machine learning solutions to automate warehouse tasks. With minimal marketing in the early days, OSARO managed to grow and scale operations to deliver holistic systems to solve real warehouse challenges. 

The secret? Rather than rushing technology and products to market and hoping someone bites, OSARO spent years perfecting products before deploying. We hear about how its founders, with backgrounds in industry, achieved calculated growth and targeted the right customers from the beginning.

Adi shares his view on the four types of people you need on your startup team, how OSARO set 3-step criteria for finding the right customers, and Adi’s approach to getting great case studies from customers.

In this episode, find out:

• Adi gives a breakdown of what OSARO does – developing vision software and machine learning to integrate with articulating arm robots in the warehouse
• What “calculated growth” means at OSARO and the importance of taking the time to develop products before deploying
• Why Adi wouldn’t describe OSARO as a startup anymore and instead a company in early-stage growth
• Why companies shouldn’t rush to get products out when they’re still in the research project stage
• The benefits of having founders come from industry
• The three-step criteria OSARO used to pick the right customers in the beginning
• How startups can extend their runway and keep investors updated with the progress
• Adi’s method for getting customer case studies in the early negotiation stages with customers
• What four types of founder backgrounds bring to a startup and why you benefit from having them all
• How OSARO managed to achieve growth without marketing in the early days by focusing on perfecting the product
• Adi’s advice for startups just trying to get early customers so they can grow and scale successfully
• The best part about running this podcast and how things have changed since going down the entrepreneur route

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Tweetable Quotes:

• "Really testing your product, making sure it's robust with actual products that you're going to pick is very important as you move from very early company to somebody that can scale."
• "They wanted to have a deployable product before they actually deployed to a customer site... You don't want to deploy a research project into your customers’ warehouses where they're actually fulfilling orders for their customers."
• "What [someone with a VC background] brings is they’ve seen a lot of competing technologies and understand what those technologies are doing well and what they're not doing well."

Links & mentions:

• OSARO, manufacturer of robot piece-picking and machine learning solutions to automate warehouse tasks
• Adi’s Pittsburgh brewery crawl, including Grist House, Dancing Gnome, Pittsburgh Brewing Co., and Cinderlands
• Row 34, seafood restaurant found in Boston’s historic Fort Point neighborhood in the renovated Boston Wharf Company’s old warehouse
• Trillium Brewing, brewing company operating across multiple locations around New England
• Joe Fenti, Boston-based standup comedian

Make sure to visit http://manufacturinghappyhour.com for detailed show notes and a full list of resources mentioned in this episode. Stay Innovative, Stay Thirsty.