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226: Build a 10,000 Puzzle Piece Business with Nelson Nigel

Nelson Nigel, Founder and CEO of Kidmoto Technologies, is driven by his passion for entrepreneurship and creating innovative products that improve lives.

We explore Nelson’s vision of business as a puzzle, stressing the importance of a clear vision and strong foundation. He discusses Kidmoto’s mobile app, allowing parents to pre-book rides with pre-installed child car seats, ensuring safety and convenience with professional chauffeurs. 

He also talks about expanding to serve niche markets often overlooked by larger companies, highlighting the significance of planning for growth and continuously adding pieces to the business puzzle to achieve long-term success.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Build a 10,000 Puzzle Piece Business with Nelson Nigel

Good day, dear listeners, it’s Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast and my guest today is Nelson Nigel, the founder and CEO of Kidmoto Technologies, the Uber of kid car seat rides. Hey, Nelson, welcome to the show. I don’t know if I gave you the right kind of introduction, but this is how I surmise your business.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Thanks for having me on, Steve. I’m so excited to be here, just to be on your show.

Yeah, it’s good to have you, Nelson. So, tell me a little bit about how did you become an entrepreneur and what is your personal Why, your personal mission that drives you to jump out of bed every morning?

Steve, I feel like I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. It’s something that’s part of me. And I’m just so excited about doing something on my own, about creating new products, doing something good. And I think I’ve had one real job in my life, like working for a company. I think that was like right out of college, but after that, it was like, oh, forget about it. And me, personally, I just don’t want to be myself. I just want to live my life, be myself on my own terms.

Okay, well, you definitely looked the part. You are a very unique personality, and I appreciate that. We get sometimes some very conventional boomers on this podcast, if I may say. You know, they all look gray-haired and dodgy and middle-aged and like myself. And it’s great to have a refreshing face, someone who looks at the world differently and looks different. So, tell me about this Kidmoto business idea, because it looks very interesting in the sense that who would think of car seats being a business and there’s enough of a market for this and how did it come about and why did you think it would work?

This was a long shot and I saw a need in the market. I knew it was scalable. I saw that everyone in the industry refrained from providing child car seats. And I thought to myself, well, hey, let’s only do this. So, this is like saying, hey, you’re doing something that’s like, let’s go to the moon. Right? Something that’s like seemingly impossible because no one thought about it. And now, we’re in 52 cities, we are raising capital, we are expanding our product. It’s like, whoa.

So how does it work? So, Nelson, tell me, how do people use this service? So, they just call, is there a special app where they can call their car with their child seat or they order the child seat that gets delivered? How does that service even work?

It’s a mobile app. And parents traveling with children will have downloaded at some point and they can request a ride to and from the airport, to and from the cruise line with pre-installed child car seats. So, now the basic idea is, hey, we are professionals, our drivers pre-harness the car seats, meaning they put the belts accordingly to the child’s size and pre-install the car seats, meaning they install the car seat inside of the vehicle and therefore the parent doesn’t have to do that when the parent is traveling. Normally, parents are traveling with the child car seat and when they get to the airport they have to lug it around with them and when they get to their destination, they either rent the car or a ride service and they have to install the car seat themselves and it’s like, I installed a car seat is like rocket science sometimes so we solve that problem and yeah, so we say ditch the car seats when you’re flying off a baby

Makes life so much easier. So, are these uber drivers and Lyft drivers who offer this as a special add-on? How do you connect with the drivers?

Okay, so they’re not Uber drivers and Lyft drivers because our drivers are commercial drivers, they’re professional chauffeurs and they provide executive type of vehicles, more of the black cars and this is what they do for a living. So, they’re like commercially insured and commercially registered and we do due diligence on them, background searches and all the training, etc. So, they are professionals at what they do and this is what they do on a daily basis.

And is it difficult to hitch a ride like that with a car seat? Because when I go to the airport, I can call an Uber in 5 to 10 minutes, I’ll have an Uber. Is it comparable or do you have to pre-book them before you travel? How does it work?

This is all pre-booked. And generally, when you’re flying with a baby, you don’t want any unforeseen circumstances or you don’t want to really do it on the fly. You’re pre-booking it weeks in advance. Same way you’re booking a vacation. So, you’re booking your ride to and from the airport. And you want to have that assurance that, hey, there’s a car coming with a child car seat. And now you can get rid of that hassle of lugging a car seat around with you everywhere around the airport.

Yeah, okay, that’s great, that’s great. So, let’s talk about how you put this business together because it sounds like, really, it does sound like a long shot, although most revolutionary businesses are a long shot and eventually, they turn out to be great. And you actually have a concept that you shared with me, which I found fascinating, which is the business is a puzzle. And you talked about 100 puzzle businesses and 20,000 puzzle businesses.

Yes, yes.

So, tell me about how does Kidmoto became a puzzle and how did you solve it? And are you solving it with fewer puzzles and more puzzles? And how does your concept work with the example of the business?

Okay, I’m glad you brought this up, Steve. And here’s how to look at it. It’s all in your vision. The way I see a business and putting a business together is like putting a puzzle together, a jigsaw puzzle. Share on X And you want to have a bird eye view of that jigsaw puzzle. So, you need to look from the top down. You can’t be looking from the bottom up because if you’re a one piece out of 10 pieces in a 10 piece puzzle and you’re looking up, how would you ever know what other nine pieces are unless you’re like working doing that for 10-20 years. But if you have a bird-eye view of what that puzzle looks like, like say you’re looking at the box of the puzzle. I’m buying for my child a 10-piece puzzle or a hundred piece puzzle .You know exactly what it looks like. You have a great idea of like where the corner pieces go, where all the pieces go. So, that’s the vision. So, when you have this bird eye view, Steve, now you can envision putting this puzzle together. And the better you get at putting puzzles together, the more pieces you see. So, you start off at 10, you do a 50, you do a 100, before you know it, you’re so good, you do a 20,000 piece puzzle, and you can see where everything goes. And that’s building a business. Building a business, building a puzzle, that’s how I see it. And the better you get at it, forget about it. It’s like putting together Legos. Now, if you do the small ones, then before you know it, you’re doing 20,000 pieces.

Yeah. I love this metaphor because basically what that tells me is that, let’s say I’m a technician, as Michael Gerber calls them, maybe I’m a consultant, and I’m just providing my services one-on-one to clients, that maybe that’s a 10-piece puzzle. I just have my service, I have my process of calling the clients and working with them and billing them, that maybe that’s 10 pieces, maybe 50 pieces. And then when I hire people, then there’s more complexity coming into the business. Then I have a team, we divide and conquer, we share responsibilities. Maybe it becomes a hundred-piece puzzle. And then when we have layers of management, maybe it becomes a thousand pieces and then maybe you have different locations and then you have franchisees, then it becomes 5,000, 10,000 and you go and then it becomes 20,000 how you look at it.

That’s exactly how you need to look at it because it gets super complex. Right? You got to think about everything. Employee succession plans, employee onboarding, software for onboarding, this, that, training videos. That’s just HR or risk management. You’re thinking about all sorts of different types of insurances and all sorts of different types of, you know, safety nets and et cetera, et cetera. So yes, you’re a hundred percent right.

Okay. So, this understanding to me as a business owner, it tells me that, okay, maybe I have a 200-piece business. So, if I want to grow this business to the next level, then maybe I will have to add some puzzle pieces to it. I will have to add some maybe systems and processes could be puzzle pieces.

Yes.

Maybe another product or maybe I’m productizing a service and that will create or require a lot more puzzle pieces for me. So how do you use this analogy to help yourself building the business? How do you use it?

Okay, so let’s go back to the puzzle, Steve, right? You’re saying you need to add pieces. Now let’s go back to what I said earlier, your vision. You have to visualize what you want to create. Now you can’t build a 10-piece puzzle in a small room, you have to have it to be in the living room, bigger room. So, you have to have the infrastructure built out ready. You have to visualize, hey, it’s going to be 10 by 10. So, you need to be in a space that will allow you for 10 by 10. You can make a 10-piece puzzle in a small closet, yes, but you can’t make 1000-piece puzzle in a small closet. You just can’t do it. So, I always say the corner bodega can’t be a Whole Foods. That’s just the reality. The corner bodega is just a small store in the corner. It can never become a Whole Foods, which will just go in and buy out the entire block, and then they build out. That initial vision of building a 10-piece puzzle starts with your foundation, you must plan for it because what if you start off in a closet, then you realize that, hey, I’ve outgrown my business, but I have nowhere to go because I just built this puzzle in the closet. I can’t move it to the living room because I’m going to ruin the puzzle.

So essentially, when you want to take your business to the next level, then you have to develop a vision. What does this business look like? So, let’s say I have a consulting business, a one-on-one. Okay, I envisage that I want the business where there are 20 people and we have different product type services and we provide it through different channels. And then I have to visualize this. Okay. What does it take? What is going to be the function, the organization of that business in order to be able to achieve that vision? And then who are my strategic partners going to be and what my products are going to look like and what is it going to take to put all the puzzle pieces together so that this business really works? How are we going to generate the sales, marketing, back office, all that stuff?

Starts with the vision and how you build your infrastructure. Share on X So, it’s easier to build in the living room where you have a lot of space, but it’s just harder, right? But it’s just harder to foresee that. So, if you start off with the initial vision of, hey, let’s build this puzzle in the living room, let’s start there, okay, it will be a lot easier in the long run because now you have a lot of space to build out this puzzle. But if you don’t foresee that and you start off in the closet, you get stuck. So, let’s take this analogy and let me transition into something that you can visualize. So, let’s talk about building buildings. You need to build that infrastructure. You need to dig down deep in order to go high. That’s the reality of modern engineering, right? Architecture. If you dig down 10 feet, you might build a two-story house because the foundation is only dug 10 feet. It could be 10 feet by 30 feet. So now you can build a two-story house. Forget about it. That’s it. If you try to put another story on it, that foundation is weak. It can’t sustain that third floor. So, once you get to the second floor, that’s it. Forget about it. You’re done. But if you dig down 30 feet now, of course you can put up a two-story house. Matter of fact, you could probably put up a five-story building, but that foundation was dug deep enough so in the long run, you can go high. But say you get on the fifth floor now and you say, wait, I want to go up higher. Let’s go to the tenths and let’s go up to five more stories. Well, guess what? That foundation wasn’t dug that deep to sustain a 10-story building. And you really can’t go back down.

So, I would have to bring the whole house down and start from scratch.

Again, kind of like moving that puzzle from the closet to the living room, you have to bring it down. So, if you start with that initial concept, the vision, think about being like an architect. The architect draws those plans out. So, architect says, listen, if you want to build Burj Dubai, you have to go down 225 feet, which is what happened. If you want to build a 50-story building, you have to go down 75 feet. The architect sees that, right? But when you're building your business, you are your own architect. There is no architect but you. Share on X So, you have to visualize and see that building, that business or building before you build it. So, if you’re saying, I’m Steve, I’m a consultant, I want to build a consulting firm with 100 consultants. Okay, fabulous. I need to build my foundation. I need to have enough space to put my puzzle together. I need to dig 50 feet down because the business I want to build is going to be 50 stories high.

Got it. So, Nelson, how do you envision the future of Kidmoto? What is your vision? What are the puzzles that you are putting together to achieve it?

Right now, we’re owned by Moto Nation, which is the parent company and we’re building out subsets of Kidmoto built on the Kidmoto platform and we have a national platform. So, we have the infrastructure. So now we’re building out a company called Busmoto, which is providing transportation for airline personnel, cruise line personnel and last mile cargo and we’re building out Babymoto, which is also in the child space, which is picking up infants of hospitals. So, think about being a new parent and you have no idea how to get home from the hospital.

I remember that.

And it’s traumatic, it’s an experience that, hey, you could give that to Babymoto, they will pick us up with a pre-installed newborn infant seat and we don’t have to worry. And that’s the kind of solution that we will provide with Babymoto for new parents because having a newborn is stressful for both parents, it’s traumatic and it’s never been done. So, we’re here and we’re going to be national.

That’s amazing.

Yeah. And of course, another company we’re working on is Medimoto, which is more on the medical logistics.

That’s really cool. So, you’re going from child seats and you’re going into different services, you’re servicing the airport staff or the stewardesses, I guess, and stewards.

Yes.

And then you’re also expanding into medical and it’s all about booking the right kind of vehicles and the right kind of equipment, so that these people can do what they need to do.

And we’re serving underserved segments of the population, niche segments, because these segments have not, well, companies have not really provided for these segments specifically. So, we’re very niche. We’re provided for niche services. And this is how we can compete in a space dominated by Uber or Lyft, et cetera.

And you said that you are raising financing for the next phase of your business?

Yes.

What is the financing for? What is it going to fund?

We’re raising on Republic zone and we’ll be raising to hire more employees to add more pieces to the puzzle.

Sounds awesome. So, Nelson, if people would like to learn more about Kidmoto, Babymoto, Medimoto, all these motos of the Moto Nation, where can they find more information? Where can they connect with you personally?

Yes, so everyone can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Nelson Nigel, and you can find me on Twitter. And the URL is motonation.us and also kidmoto.taxi.

I love the taxi. I mean, now Uber is taking over kind of as a synonym of taxi, but for my generation, it’s still a taxi that you’re hitching when you want to get somewhere. Love it. Love it. kidmoto.taxi. So, Nelson, thank you for coming to the show and sharing your framework with the 10,000 Puzzle business.

Yes.

It’s really a good way to think about it. You know, begin with the end of mind, start with your vision and make sure you’re not building your business in a closet.

Yes.

Take it to the living room or take it to maybe outside.

Outside the door.

The big office in New York.

Yes.

And then figure out what those puzzle pieces are, how you’re going to put them together. I love it. And those of you listening, please stay tuned. Make sure you follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn, Steve Preda Business Growth. We are posting video shorts of all our episodes. We are posting articles of our episodes on our website, Steve Preda Business Growth website. So, make sure you just check us out there as well. So, thanks Nelson for coming and thanks for listening.

Thank you, Steve, for having me and I appreciate you. Thank you very much.

 

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