Two Seattle-based entrepreneurs visited town last week promoting their company OpenTug, a digital freight network similar to Uber or Airbnb but for cargo shipping, that will lower shipping rates for customers who can wait. Their long-term goal would be for Haines to become a regional shipping hub used by Canada and the interior.

Jason Aristides and Mike Baldwin, both 22-year-old recent college graduates, aim to aggregate cargo from different areas and connect it to barges sailing to and from Southeast that currently sail empty.

“Haines is a pretty interesting market for this because in the region you have hundreds of barges that are moving past Haines annually, mostly a little farther out in the ocean,” Baldwin said. “For them they’re not in the business of being a marine line, they are not AML, they do not see a need of being AML but they have a lot of capacity.”

Baldwin said most residents and small business owners can’t meet the necessary freight requirements to justify the cost to make an extra stop in Haines.

“These operators have huge barges and it just does not make fiscal sense for them to stop in Haines for just one, or a couple of containers; however, if you’re able to aggregate the demand of all of the businesses over time in the Yukon and other parts of Canada, then you start to get a little bit closer to the levels of cargo where it makes sense for these operators,” Baldwin said.

The company hopes to create a network of all the businesses in the region and Canada and a network of barge operators. A person wanting to ship cargo would log onto the OpenTug platform and operators would bid on their cargo request.

“(The platform) notifies operators of the opportunity and automatically matches the cargo to different types of barges that are capable of handling it,” Aristides said. “It’s all done online so there’s no need to pick up the phone and call and it’s all managed through a software platform that the barge operator can use without having to spend time with additional overhead.”

For now, the company is starting slow and attempting to build the demand. They’ve organized a north- and southbound barge that will arrive in Haines in late June or early July. As of last week, about 1,700 tons of cargo are scheduled for shipment, with a 3,200-ton capacity each way.

“What we are offering is, if you are willing to be flexible with your timing and wait for us to build a load, we will offer you more competitive rates,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin said he estimates customers could save 50% on shipping rates on a backhaul, an otherwise empty barge on its return leg, that OpenTug fills with aggregated cargo.

Baldwin and Aristides spoke at a public meeting and Haines Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week. They also met with Craig Dahl, the director of the Juneau Chamber of Commerce. In a Juneau business freight survey researched by the McDowell Group, the cost of shipping goods to Juneau was identified as the second highest barrier to business growth, next to the cost of health insurance.

Dahl said he was impressed with the research OpenTug has done and suspects the biggest challenge to their business model is distances barges would be required to travel and those associated costs.

“I think their idea has lots of potential challenges, (like) if it will work in this sized market. The distances are great,” Dahl said. ‘We’re so engrained into a long-haul environment with a lot of expensive equipment, it didn’t seem to have a lot of immediate practicality. I was impressed with the work they’ve done and I think they’re very serious about taking a look at the opportunities.”

OpenTug can be reached at opentug.com or by emailing [email protected].