From the Concrete Up: Why I'm building Flow

I just wrapped up my contract with my previous employer & I’ve officially stepped out on my own to build something I think this industry desperately needs: Flow.

Anyone who has spent time terminal operations, you know the frustration. We see millions of pounds poured into infrastructure modernisation and shiny new software platforms. Yet, 76% of logistics tech integrations actually fail in one way or another. This leads to huge integration risk..

Why? Because the way we buy and build terminal software is completely backward. Operators are forced to buy blind, relying on a sample size of one vendor reference. Developers build in a vacuum, coding to the exact specs of a single launch customer.

To understand how this happens, you just have to look at the history of terminal tech and what real product-market fit actually looks like on the ground.

If you want to talk about company history in port tech, you have to talk about Navis. Back in 1988, Jon Shields and Erik Tiemroth essentially invented the modern Terminal Operating System (TOS) as we know it. Before them, ports were literally using pegboards and paper to track containers. Navis built the first graphical interface and completely revolutionised yard operations.

Over the decades, their systems became the absolute heavyweight champion of the industry. But as ships got bigger and mega-ports demanded more features, the software got heavier. Eventually, deploying a massive TOS required millions of dollars, huge on-premise servers, and years of painful IT integration. It worked for the massive hubs, but it left a massive blind spot in the rest of the market.

That blind spot perfectly illustrates the difference between getting product-market fit wrong, and getting it absolutely right.

Let's talk about what happens when you build in a vacuum. A few years ago, IBM and Maersk launched TradeLens. It was a blockchain platform meant to digitize the entire global supply chain. It had hundreds of millions in funding and the smartest engineers on earth.

In late 2022, they killed it.

The tech wasn't broken; the market fit was. TradeLens was built top-down, engineered entirely to Maersk's view of the world. When they tried to roll it out, they hit a wall. Terminal operators - who are already exhausted by app fatigue and legacy TOS headaches - were basically being asked to do even more administrative work, and share sensitive data, just to feed Maersk’s central blockchain.

It didn't solve a bleeding, immediate pain point for the guy on the concrete. It was built for a sample size of one mega-carrier, and the rest of the industry rejected it.

Now look at the exact opposite approach. While the big players were trying to sell heavy, million-dollar software to small and mid-sized terminals, a startup called Octopi noticed something real on the ground: these smaller ports were still running on Excel and whiteboards because they couldn't afford or integrate a massive system like Navis N4.

Instead of building a heavy, complex platform, Octopi - founded by Luc Castera and Guille Carlosbuilt - a lightweight, cloud-based TOS. It didn't require massive servers. It didn't need a massive IT team. It just solved the immediate, universal headache of inventory tracking and gate throughput for smaller operators.

It was such a perfect, undeniable painkiller for that segment of the market that Navis actually stepped in and bought Octopi in 2019 to fill the gap in their own portfolio.

That brings me back to why I built Flow, and why you are receiving this first update.

We have to stop buying and building technology based on slick sales decks and single-reference case studies. Flow is designed to be the exact opposite: an anonymised pipeline where we pool real-world integration data and friction logs, so we can benchmark how systems actually perform before anyone signs a contract. And in return, developers get to validate their features against real market realities before they write a line of code.

Since you're reading this, you are part of the first wave of the cohort. Thanks for stepping forward.

I’ll be heading over to Birmingham for Multimodal at the NEC next week. If you're going to be around the floor, drop a reply to this email - I’d love to grab a coffee and hear exactly what integration headaches or tech bottlenecks you're dealing with right now.

Let's steer the direction of the tech being built.

Talk soon,

Derek