Jevon dropped out of high school to become a pro surfer, then built Nike's Hurley brand in South Africa, ran PE Nation and Surf Stitch, and now he's building Keeyu, an AI platform that stops ecom complaints before customers even notice problems.
This episode covers his pivot from selling a "vitamin" to a "painkiller," why distribution beats product-first, and the customer who said she "wouldn't come to work" without Keeyu.
Chapters
0:00 The Ecom Problem Nobody Talks About 1:05 From Pro Surfer to Brand Builder 4:27 The Covid Crisis That Sparked Keeyu 7:53 Second Time Founder Mindset 10:05 The Pivot: From Vitamin to Painkiller 12:40 Raising Capital & Getting First Customers 17:45 When Distribution Beats Product 20:30 Dealing with Founder Roller Coaster 23:34 The Customer Who Won't Work Without Keeyu 26:30 Rapid Fires Transcript Search or select a timestamp to jump ▾ 0:00 Thea Ngo: Imagine this: your e-com store is drowning in late orders, lost parcels, and customer service tickets. What if there was a tool that plugged into all your systems— your Shopify, ERP, warehouses— and fixes issues before customers even notice? Helpdesk manage complaints; Keyu stops them. Javon, co-founder of Keyu, felt the operational pain while running Surf Stitch and PE Nation. Now he's fixing it by defining a whole new category: proactive post-purchase operations. 0:31 Jevon Le Roux: There was 1,000 customers that had bought something that weren't going to get what they ordered. If I could have spotted that issue in real time, I could have stopped the problem from snowballing. We kind of don't have a product today, but would you be our first pilot customer? And we got 3 pilot customers that way. It turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers. It wasn't a painkiller because it wasn't really solving the crux of the problem. Um, took My partner and son out for lunch, and I said, "Okay," years ago. You remember what that was like? It was chaotic, right? Living on the edge of being technically insolvent. So it's going to be like that again. Just don't stop. Hi, I'm Jevin LaRue, a co-founder of Keyu, and this is Founders in Motion. 1:09 Thea Ngo: Quick thing before we get started: We have a huge goal this year of hitting 10,000 subscribers. Yes, it's ambitious. But it lets us help more people build really great companies. So if you enjoy the content, learn something new, the best way to support us is by subscribing. Okay, let's get back to the video. Everyone else is trying to manage complaints faster. Keyu is saying, what if there were no complaints at all? What are you building at Keyu? 1:37 Jevon Le Roux: We're building an AI-powered platform for proactive post-purchase ecom ops. And what that is, in simple terms, is when Shoppers hit buy on the button online, there is that bit of angst that what they've ordered is not going to arrive on time as promised. The brand doesn't know something's gone wrong until the customer says, where is my order? And so what we're doing is we're fixing that ops issue proactively before the customer even says, where is my order? 2:07 Thea Ngo: I love that. Most people know you from leading huge retail brands like PE Nation or Surf Stitch, But your story actually starts on a surfboard. So how did that early world kind of performance pressure flow shape the way that you build now? 2:24 Jevon Le Roux: You know, I dropped out of high school to become a professional surfer and compete on the world tour. And I did that for 5 years. 2:30 Thea Ngo: Amazing. 2:31 Jevon Le Roux: From like the age of 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, like into my mid-20s. You know, I spent 9 months of the year traveling the world competing. And competitive surfing is exactly that. It's super competitive. I was competitive. This is you. I would figure. It's all about winning. It's all about winning. And I was highly competitive, like ultra competitive. 2:55 Thea Ngo: Competition. 2:56 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, exactly. And I was well known for being the guy that would paddle over the guys in my heat and paddle around them and kick water in their face to distract them. 3:07 Thea Ngo: So aggressive. 3:08 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, aggressive competitive. But it taught me the art of marketing because I had to market myself. It taught me the art of living on a thread because I didn't make a lot of money doing it. 3:20 Thea Ngo: Mm-hmm. 3:21 Jevon Le Roux: But I loved doing it. But there was a point on that journey where I said, I want to do something more and I want to build a brand. And that's when I sort of threw in the towel on competitive surfing and went down the path of becoming a sales agent for my sponsor Billabong. And so I did that for a bunch of years and I was outta my comfort zone at an early age having to build that. But then That got a little boring, you know, just being, just selling clothes. And I'm like, no, I wanna build a brand. I love that. And in the mid-2000s, I built the Nike surfwear brand Hurley in South Africa ground up. So that was kind of my first, I wouldn't call it a startup because I wasn't building something from nothing, but I had to build a business ground up with my own working capital. So it certainly has given me that competitive drive, like that foundation. gave me a competitive drive as I've gone through my career to like want to win. 4:19 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:19 Jevon Le Roux: And win it and win not at any cost, but win in a very competitive way. 4:24 Thea Ngo: Okay. So through your experiences in retail, you've seen the operations from the inside. What was the first moment where you were like, this system is broken? 4:35 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, that's a really interesting experience. In fact, it was at the start of COVID I think in 2020. And everything shifted online. 4:44 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:45 Jevon Le Roux: No one could shop in retail 'cause stores were closed. And so what happened was the business that I was at, Tracy, my co-founder, was there also. We sort of met each other at this business and that brand ran a big online warehouse sale and the volumes just went through the roof. And the Shopify storefront, or actually the BigCommerce storefront, stopped syncing orders with the warehouse. And so customers were buying things that was sold out and oversold, but they could keep placing the order. And we were running around the offices going, this is awesome, we're crushing it. Look at this revenue. It's like high fives. 5:26 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 5:26 Jevon Le Roux: And the problem is we're selling things that were sold out. And when the dust settled 2 or 3 days later, There was 1,000 customers that had bought something and given us money, but they weren't going to get what they ordered. 5:43 Thea Ngo: Oh, really? 5:44 Jevon Le Roux: And so Tracy had to hire a bunch of people, like she had to double the size of her team and she had to get on the phone and she had to call all these customers and say, we're really sorry, you've bought something, but we can't actually give it to you because it's sold out. And had to process refunds. And so it was incredibly manual, incredibly time-consuming, very frustrating for the brand, but also very terrible for the customer because if you don't get what you want, you're gonna go shop somewhere else. 6:17 Thea Ngo: 100%. 6:18 Jevon Le Roux: And Tracy said something really interesting. She said, if I could have spotted that issue in real time, I could have stopped the problem from snowballing. 6:28 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 6:28 Jevon Le Roux: And that's at the heart of what we do at KEU is that we're the only solution that tracks an order from the moment it's placed, paid for, processed, picked, packed, shipped, delivered, and returned in real time, tracking countless metrics to see whether it isn't going to reach the customer on time as promised, and then take proactive action in real time. And so that situation never would've occurred because the second it triggered, we would've had an agent. Now look, there was no AI at the time. But Tracey was like, hey, if I could've spotted it, I would've been able to put a fix in place. That was a really painful, painful, painful experience. 'Cause like— 7:15 Thea Ngo: I can't imagine. 7:16 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, as the brand, you're like going, We totally crushed it on revenue, you know, and that was 1,000 customers that had spent $200-something each. So a lot of revenue went out in one, one, two, a lot of frustrated customers that didn't get what they want on time. 7:33 Thea Ngo: Yeah. So you've scaled established brands before. 7:36 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah. 7:37 Thea Ngo: And you're used to working at kind of bigger brands. So how did it feel to start again from scratch with like no logos, no product? 7:46 Jevon Le Roux: I sort of honed my skills in sales and marketing in my early 20s. And then I actually built Hurley, the Nike surfwear brand, ground up from like nothing, absolutely nothing. And I knew, didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to run a warehouse. I didn't even know how to cost a product or a margin and had to learn that through trial and error, systems and failures. So I've had experience building brands ground up. 8:11 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 8:11 Jevon Le Roux: But established brands, but that weren't available in that market. And then spent, you know, obviously time running larger businesses. I think it's not really that fun running bigger businesses. No, it isn't. You know, they're not messy, they're not crazy. And stepping into this, I really had a clear understanding. And I remember when I'd reached the conclusion, well, Tracy Tahira and I'd reached the conclusion, we wanna co-found KeyYou. I took, I took my partner and son out for lunch and I said, okay, at a really nice restaurant, I'm going, hey guys, we've got a big life decision we gotta make. You remember what it was like 10, 15 years ago? You remember what that was like? It was chaotic, right? Living on the edge of being technically insolvent 'cause the business was growing so fast. We didn't have the working capital to keep funding the growth for 7 years. Like it was chaos. 9:04 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 9:04 Jevon Le Roux: I said, it's gonna be like that again. And I just want everyone at this table for lunch to know what we are signing up for. With a startup that's got a tangible product that you're selling, you're generating revenue from day one and it sort of just can keep going. So this one's going to be harder. Are we all up for this? And I got the, yeah, let's do it. 9:24 Thea Ngo: Yay, I love that. Taking them to a nice restaurant helps, you know? Everyone's in a good mood before you break the news. Okay, so everyone preaches the idea of building alongside your customers. Did you actually do that? 9:40 Jevon Le Roux: 100%. And we had a, we sort of had a raw MVP, so to speak. We had some kind of raw MVP that we had built that hadn't yet, but I remember to get the first couple of customers, what I did was I went in at the user level inside of the organization and said, hey, would you, we're working on something. I'd really like your input. I'd like you to complete the survey and share with us the frustration that you're experiencing. And so I got user-level feedback and then came back up at management and said, hey management, I've had a chat with your team. They're really struggling with this problem of reactive customer service, putting out fires. It's time-consuming for them. It's manual. We're building, we're launching Keu and it's a startup and we kind of don't have a product today, but would you be our first pilot customer? And we got 3 pilot customers that way. Budgie Smuggler, EHP Labs, and Heli Hansen. We then said, we're going to launch just the absolute bare minimum of what we, our MVP, but like a version 1 of our MVP. We were clear that we were going to just put something messy out there. It didn't have beautiful UX/UI. It was all focused on functionality. Like, is it going to be able to detect the ops issues? 11:00 Thea Ngo: Mm-hmm. 11:00 Jevon Le Roux: And is it going to be able to be used by the customer to then prevent those ops issues? Because when we launched, we actually had no vision around AI. It wasn't a thing. It was just after ChatGPT had we envisaged Keyu, like soon after that. 11:14 Thea Ngo: So what was the first iteration of the product? 11:17 Jevon Le Roux: It was a centralized platform to detect issues. And that centralized platform brought all of the e-commerce systems that manage an order, your shopfront, your payment gateway, your ERP, your WMS, your carrier integrations, your returns modules, your help desk. It brings all of those systems together. So there's no solution in the world that does that. So it was a novel idea at the time. It turned out that that was a vitamin for retailers. It wasn't a painkiller because it wasn't really solving the crux of the problem, which is, yeah, you can detect the issue, but you still have to manually fix it. Roundabout when the tech started showing up that, you know, the— 11:58 Thea Ngo: The agent tech started coming out. 11:59 Jevon Le Roux: The agent tech side of things, exactly. And I remember us coming back to the office and we were like, and we had a conversation with the customer and that conversation was, I liked not knowing I had all these problems because they just sort of semi-sorted themselves out. Well, that's a really terrible thing because that means you had frustrated customers and you just didn't know about it. We were like, hey, can we automate fixing this? And that's where the penny dropped for us. 12:22 Thea Ngo: I think a lot of things, right? Like you're adapting super quickly to different customer feedback as well as AI trends coming out in terms of how you could do, how you could fix the problem in a different way, maybe not in the way that you envisioned it at the beginning. And I think that kind of like idea of pivoting super quickly but being very grounded on solving problems rather than like select solutions. 12:47 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I think we talk to our customers a lot. Like we're always talking to our customers. And we're not afraid. We were never afraid to release an imperfect product. We certainly didn't go down the path of saying we're going to build the Gaudí Cathedral in its entirety. It was releasing parts of it in real life, like in real play all the time. 13:09 Thea Ngo: When you introduce this kind of agentic problem solving almost tool to e-commerce's operation stack, you're touching pretty sensitive APIs, right? You're touching all the Shopify, the ERPs, the warehouse data. How did you think about ensuring quality in those early days? 13:32 Jevon Le Roux: When we rolled out that specific workflow with a customer, we do a bunch of testing with them and then we just do 5 workflows and they observe it, they watch it, they go, yeah, we're okay with that. And then we increase and expand. And so it was a bit of testing and iterating, you know, And so the team have had to, one, do our own internal dev and testing in our own environments before we started rolling those out. And then when we rolled them out, it was like working closely with them to gain their confidence. Part of it is that we haven't fully automated it. Tech's not 100% there where this is truly like, it needs some guardrails. So it's semi-autonomous in the narrow sense in that we've Giving it a clear, this is the finish line, here's the start line, these are the sort of parameters you need to work within. 14:21 Thea Ngo: Okay, so this is quite a complex product in terms of there's a lot of different intricacies and workflows that an e-commerce brand would work in the background. So how do you balance speed of rolling out new features, new workflows, versus ensuring kind of accuracy, trust within the workflows that you already have? 14:42 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, so we're going to know instantly from our retailers if there isn't accuracy because it's going to go wrong. And so they'll be— and right now we are in a trust-building phase that they can feel comfortable. So it is very user in the loop at the moment. The user is participating. They can see the workflows. They're watching things unfold and they can intervene wherever necessary. 15:04 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 15:06 Jevon Le Roux: And there are prompts for them if need be, et cetera. So our users are involved in what we do. is we're taking away all that manual repetitive tasks of checking systems, writing emails, waiting for responses, updating systems, closing tickets. That all gets taken away. As far as the speed of like delivering new features, we've actually just, it's just ongoing all the time. And we've got a little thing around the office. It's called the Wow of the Week. Wow of the Week. Wow of the Week. 15:37 Thea Ngo: Whoa. 15:37 Jevon Le Roux: Whoa. It's Wow of the Week, right? And every engineer— 15:42 Thea Ngo: Or it could be like week on week growth. 15:43 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, week on week. No, it's the wow of the week. And it's Tahir, Tahir, the co-founder and CTO. He is his thing with the engineering team. And what that is, is every engineer joins one product call. And we've got 4 in Sydney, 4 in Pakistan, and they join a product call with a customer once a week. They've all got to join one one call for 15 minutes and they hear something and then they go off and try to figure out that wow of the week to solve like a really small little thing that could actually turn out to be meaningful. 16:18 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 16:19 Jevon Le Roux: And yeah, we're pushing out features every week. We're just constantly pushing out new features and our customers respond really well to it. Yesterday Tracy did a Slack and she was on calls with customers all day and she's like, I can't believe how excited they are because all this stuff's coming out all the time and it just keeps the customer engaged. 16:40 Thea Ngo: We spoke about this briefly, but you're building a new category, not just a feature. So how do you think about framing Keyyo's values for customers? 16:51 Jevon Le Roux: When you're building a new category and e-commerce is the journey with e-commerce is there was never an e-commerce storefront, right? And someone had to then figure out how to put products online and then somehow to figure out how to take secure payments. You know, the Amazon thing came and then cart abandonment and And automated email flows. There's just constantly new categories in e-commerce every 2, 3 years. More recently, like order editing, for example, your ability to edit an order afterwards or buy now, pay later or instant refunds or easy returns or next day delivery. So there's this sort of constant evolvement on new categories. And part of the job for us is when we're reaching out to potential customers, We're like, oh no, we've got a help desk. No, help desks manage complaints. Keewu prevents them. What's that? Well, we fix the root cause that causes a complaint so that they never happen. We're very mindful that while we build our brand, our product, we've also got to build a category and we've got to educate and inform potential users and customers about this new way of working because for decades they've been doing customer service Reactively firefighting, waiting for customers to complain. 18:06 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 18:07 Jevon Le Roux: And we sort of have to show them a new way and then they go, oh, light bulb. Yeah. When they see the product working, they go, oh, that's, that's really smart. Like, why didn't someone else think of it before? 18:18 Thea Ngo: You talk about preventing problems before they happen with Keyu, but what's one early mistake you wish you prevented in building Keyu itself? 18:28 Jevon Le Roux: We went down the path of not really understanding the difference between sales-led and product-led growth, right? And we'd be chatting to people that like, you've got to be product-led. We sort of got some advice that, oh, you could be product-led if you had a Shopify app, because then people could just go to the app store and download it. So we built a light version of Keyu, which didn't include all of the integrations. And that was before we actually had gone down the path of building the agents, that it was a watered-down version of the vitamin. So— 18:59 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 19:00 Jevon Le Roux: And someone had said, and we had a bunch of potential investors say, oh, it's gonna just explode because the Shopify ecosystem is so big and there's so much opportunity in it. And, but one smart person said to me, you can't expect to just put an app up on a Shopify store and then suddenly get a million downloads. It just doesn't work like that. And they were proved to be right. You know, it didn't work. We spent 3, 4 months building it. It didn't work. We didn't get the downloads. And we now got even deeper conviction that we're sales-led. And to make the unit economics work, it's about getting our ACV right. 19:42 Thea Ngo: Okay. So were there anything that you learned the hard way about what AI can't do, at least not in the way that you hoped it would? 19:50 Jevon Le Roux: It's certainly a lot more complex to build out what we're doing simply because it isn't just a wrapper. We're building a vertically trained agent tech environment, vertically trained in that we're pulling the data from many, many, many systems. Oh, I see. Yeah, so all the data is coming from your Shopify storefront, it's coming from your warehouse, it's coming from your ERP. It's coming from your carrier integration, from your help desk. So we're pulling all this data together from a bunch of different solutions and then applying workflows and agentic architecture to it. And it's not like us just tapping into an existing LLM. This is an actual model that we're building to be able to drive this. And so it's far more far more complex in that regard because you're dealing with so many different points of data to be able to run it and then so many variables. Every business is different. 20:57 Thea Ngo: So the decision-making engine between like what to do if this situation happened, this happens, you're building that like based on a niche model itself, like not on any of the open source. 21:08 Jevon Le Roux: We are using to write the emails, for example, we are using a model, but the actual engine that's driving the process is our own. 21:20 Thea Ngo: Yeah, yeah. I think that's super interesting. And it speaks to like a broader trend that I've been seeing. A lot of people have been moving away from the bigger models just because like, it's closed source. So it's very hard to determine decision-making rationale. What's been the most valuable lesson that you've learned as a founder? Maybe something you wish you knew earlier? 21:40 Jevon Le Roux: Most valuable lesson is don't take rejection too hard. You're going to get no 99 times more than— you've gotta get really comfortable with being rejected. You've gotta get really comfortable being told it can't be done. You've gotta get really comfortable with naysayers and have absolute conviction in what you're doing. And stick by that. And, you know, that to me is the key thing is, in fact, I was chatting with a founder earlier today. He's out raising, he's just come through an accelerator, he's out raising. He's not getting a lot of yeses. He goes, what should I do? And I'm like, just don't stop. 22:23 Thea Ngo: Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, startup founders are crazy, right? 22:27 Jevon Le Roux: Absolutely crazy. 22:28 Thea Ngo: The odds are crazy. Like, think about making an investment. knowing that like 90% of the time or 95% of the time you're going to fail. 22:36 Jevon Le Roux: 100%. 22:37 Thea Ngo: It's like crazy thinking, but it's really about North Star, right? Like, what do you want to achieve in your life? And I think it's like this idea of purpose, of vision that's so intoxicating. 22:48 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah. And the wins are incredible. Like yesterday, I pitched to a customer at like lunchtime. And they came into our— it was our first organic inbound. 23:02 Thea Ngo: Congrats. 23:03 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, which is a real big deal when you start up. When you get like an inbound as a result of LinkedIn and they booked through our website, like I was like, oh, awesome. The booking link on our website actually works. 23:13 Thea Ngo: The LinkedIn campaign is working. 23:15 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, so that was 7 days ago and I pitched them yesterday and I didn't think it went like great. So And sent them the pitch deck afterwards. I did a customized, sorry, discovery call with them a week ago, then did a custom demo yesterday, sent them the deck afterwards and they responded like an hour later. Yep, we're happy to move forward. And it wasn't even like that. I was like, I just jumped out of my chair. It's like, yeah, sign another customer. So those wins. 23:46 Thea Ngo: You gotta celebrate the small wins. 23:47 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah, that wasn't a small one. It was a big win. You know, so that's what really makes it good. You know, you leave work with just a pep in your step. And the thing is, in the last 3 weeks we've signed 5 customers, but I had like 3, 4 weeks before that where I didn't. And I started questioning like, am I doing things right and am I not? And, you know, you get into a down mood. 24:14 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 24:14 Jevon Le Roux: So you gotta deal with like the rollercoaster of emotions of like, Getting it right and not getting it right. And sometimes you are getting it right, but the winds are not showing. 24:23 Thea Ngo: So you've done this a few times, build a business from scratch. What is easier the second time around? 24:28 Jevon Le Roux: Knowing how hard it is. 24:30 Thea Ngo: Coming in eyes wide open. 24:34 Jevon Le Roux: Eyes wide open. I will say though that there were moments over the last 18 months of building KeyYou that that, um, I think we're almost on 24 months from when we first got going, but 18 months that we've had a product in users' hands. There's certainly been moments where we're like, this is really, really, really hard and can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we, and there were times when we were like, our back's up against the wall. Like we had a runway, like what's going to happen? Like how are we going to keep moving forward? And We said to ourselves as a founding team, this problem we're solving is real. Like everyone, how can an entire category exist, which is complaint triaging, complaint management, if there isn't a problem to solve? 25:27 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 25:28 Jevon Le Roux: And we're like, we just stayed super focused on the fact that our users of Keu, the 8 or 10 customers we had at the time, They relied on the product. Like it was really, really meaningful. And we saw that when we did some case studies the other day, video case studies. And the one customer was asked, what would you do if you didn't have Keyu? She said, I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow. She was like, I would not come to work tomorrow. And, but like, she's, that was her immediate raw answer. I just wouldn't come to work tomorrow because I could not do my job without it. It's too much. And then like the follow-up conversation to that with that same person was she said to me, you know, a company called to poach her to go work for them. And she said, look, I'm not really interested in leaving. They said, well, what would it take for you to leave? Oh, I'd only come if you got Keith. 26:25 Thea Ngo: Okay, so I want to do like a little founder gut check with you. 26:28 Jevon Le Roux: Yeah. 26:29 Thea Ngo: So I'm going to give you 2 scenarios and you tell me which you prefer. You can give me a rationale or not. Okay, hire fast or hire right? 26:36 Jevon Le Roux: Hire fast, fire fast. What about hiring right? You're just not going to get it right all the time in startups because we move too fast. And so, you know, bigger companies are designed to hire people, hire slow, fire fast, which they don't do. 26:50 Thea Ngo: Okay. Product first or distribution first? 26:52 Jevon Le Roux: Distribution first is the approach we've taken. 26:55 Thea Ngo: Built in stealth or built in public? 26:57 Jevon Le Roux: Depends on how deep your moat is. You've got a bunch of startups that are building in stealth because they don't have a moat. And so they have to because they need to get that jump to get the traction to get the customers. 27:08 Thea Ngo: Do you still DJ and where do you DJ? 27:12 Jevon Le Roux: I still DJ and I, you know, being on a founder salary, I do need to substitute some of my income with like side hustles. So I DJ every weekend. 27:22 Thea Ngo: Thank you so much, Siobhan, for coming on the show. 27:24 Jevon Le Roux: Thanks a lot for having me, Thea. Really appreciate it. 27:27 Thea Ngo: That's a wrap. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, level our production, and bring on new series you'll want to watch. And if you want to hear more early stage builder stories, check out our other episodes. Okay, see you next time. No transcript lines match that phrase. Try fewer words.
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