How a customer tattoo of BusRight's logo demonstrates BusRight CEO Keith Corso's ability to generate customer love
Learn about BusRight's school bus technology platform and how CEO Keith Corso's passion for his customer creates unheard of levels of customer love.
Today we spotlight a founder who leverages software beyond the screen to transform the largest public transit system in the United States. As always, each Ubiquity founder has their own nerdy background (we define nerdiness as having a deep obsession) that led to founding their startup.
Meet Keith Corso, Co-founder & CEO of BusRight, a platform that increases school bus safety and efficiency.
Can you sum up what BusRight does?
BusRight increases the safety and efficiency of the largest mass transit system in the United States, which are school buses. BusRight helps school districts solve problems stemming from the crippling bus driver shortage, overwhelming parent demands, and increasing route complexity.
Tell us more about the BusRight platform.
The BusRight platform brings together parents, school bus drivers, and school transportation teams using a suite of web and mobile apps:
A driver app on a tablet on the school bus
A bus tracking app for parents
A web app for transportation teams and school administrators
BusRight’s driver app provides turn-by-turn directions that are engineered for a school bus. The app runs on a tablet that has GPS and telematic sensors in it which we use to track fleet performance, predict fleet schedules, broadcast the live location of the bus to parents, and more.
Our parent app ensures peace of mind for parents as they can track the live ETA of their child’s bus whether going to/from school, field trip, or sporting event.
Finally, the web app is the brains of the operation. It's where routes are designed, fleet performance is analyzed, drivers are dispatched, and more. It’s also used to communicate to parents in one click. Overall, our suite of web and mobile apps increase bus safety and efficiency, one bus at a time.
What is the story behind the founding of BusRight?
Growing up, my bus driver Joy was one of my best friends, and new drivers took over when she retired. They were staring at these physical paper route sheets at 6:15AM when it's pitch black outside, and they’re having to match the 10-point font on a route sheet to a mailbox number that's tucked behind a bush. These drivers had no idea where they were going, and my stop was skipped a number of days in a row. I realized that it wasn't the driver's fault that they were failing at their job, they just didn't have the right tools and resources to do what they do best: focusing on the road ahead of them and building relationships with the kiddos on the bus.
I ended up pursuing BusRight as my Capstone Project during my senior year of high school, and it was the only reason I went to Northeastern University in Boston. Ever since graduating, it's all I've lived to do since. But during that journey, I met my co-founder Phil Dunn, who grew up in the Bronx in New York when it had the highest crime rate in the country. He credits a school bus route that took him to a district outside the Bronx with his ability to ultimately go on and study applied math at Cornell, quantitative methodology at Columbia, and law at Seton Hall Law School.
Both of us came at this challenge by first recognizing that the school bus is so much more than people give it credit for. It’s such important infrastructure that's really the backbone of our nation's K-12 system and economy more broadly. If we can build tools to support these transportation directors thrive in an era of increasing route complexity, overwhelming parent demands, and crippling driver shortage, then we can build something really impactful and long-lasting.
How did you notice the need for a school bus management platform?
When I was in college, I met with the transportation department at Boston Public Schools. They spend over $600,000 a year on a call center made up of 28 full-time employees for just the transportation office. I realized that something was really broken. Most transportation directors in the country are now having to drive their own buses almost daily. Different people are put in different roles because there are experts and there are specialists at those functions, and when you have this kind of mismatch, it creates huge gaps in the organization. For example, when a transportation director is now driving every day of the week, what is falling by the wayside?
People are more focused on school safety, especially in K-12, and there's so much investment going into cameras and other security measures in the classroom - but what about school buses? My co-founder was at Broward County Schools where, unfortunately, the Parkland shooting event happened. These school buses are sitting ducks, so how do we build technology onboard the bus to help drivers not only during their regular course of action, but - God forbid - if something more severe happens? All this to say: there were a number of different trends that made it very clear that the current state of student transportation is really not sustainable.
Can you tell us the story of the BusRight customer that got a tattoo of your company logo?
We work in an industry that is severely underserved, and with people who are really under appreciated. These transportation directors get up at 4:00 AM - or sometimes earlier than that. They get to work and 15-30% of their drivers don't show up on any given day, and they have no idea which group of drivers are not going to be there. They are making calls to try to figure out how in the world they are going to get thousands of students to school, while they sit alone in their cold office in the basement of the school or off on a trailer site. It’s an incredibly lonely job, where the only time you get called is when something is going wrong and parents are screaming at and threatening you.
With that backdrop, when you're a company like BusRight that actually appreciates these people and provides them with a listening ear all the time, it makes them feel a lot more connected to us, the product, the company, the mission, and even their own work. Our life's work is to make these folks the heroes that they are in our community - sometimes through technology, sometimes through storytelling.
In this case, one of our customers got a tattoo to memorialize what BusRight and the team means to them. I was on a flight from Florida to New York when I got a Slack message from a team member because a customer emailed us a photo of a permanent tattoo of BusRight on her leg - it was absolutely surreal. There's this connection that we're able to forge with these folks because we're in the trenches with them, building alongside them and appreciating them as people. It creates a sense of customer love, connection, and community that is beyond just a vendor partnership.
"These tablets aren't just technology; they're lifelines, providing critical information in real-time to ensure the safety of everyone on board.” - Samantha Steed, Transportation Supervisor at Pocatello Schools
We think of nerds as people who are obsessed with something. What are you nerdy about or obsessed with?
I’ve always loved exotic animals and especially bearded dragons. I wanted one my entire life, and in my senior year of high school I had the opportunity to use my AP Biology classroom’s terrarium to raise one. I headed straight to PetCo, but it turned out that you had to be 18 years old to purchase a bearded dragon. I persuaded a woman on the street to act like my mom so she could sign off on it, and sure enough, I got to spend my mornings in the school basement feeding crickets and mealworms to my bearded dragon, Oscar! Oscar is how I met Phil Dunn, Co-founder & CPO at BusRight, but that’s a longer story.
What would you tell your past self if you could give them advice?
One of my favorite quotes is “the reward for solving problems is more problems”. I think you need to be so energized by day-to-day successes and challenges because the initially understood reward looks and feels very different once achieved.
In startup land, it's all about the end destination - the acquisition/fundraise/partnership - but if you ask any of those founders and teams behind the scenes, it's a game of inches. The real feeling of gratitude and excitement is usually not at that final inch. If you don't have that appreciation along the way, I think life can be pretty hollow at the end, if you're lucky enough to get there.
What’s your advice to budding technical founders who haven’t yet taken the leap to launch their new company?
The only thing that matters is paying customers. Having paying customers means you're actually delivering value to the world, and everything else that doesn't directly contribute to accelerating the time to acquire a paying customer is totally pointless, especially in the early days.
It's kind of liberating to know this; the job of a founder is a lot less daunting when you can cut through the noise and cut out all the other steps you think you need to take. You just say, “what is the least that I can do to go from where I am today to getting one person to give me a thousand dollars a year (or ten bucks a month or whatever it is)?”. I believe so much of the learning is when someone actually gives you money - there are so many people that want to get feedback out there but the real voice that matters are from real paying customers. They really have a stake in the game and have bought your product to solve a problem, so they’re the most qualified to let you know what you can do to support more people like them moving forward.
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.
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