Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Roberts.
Hi Chris, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I feel like my story is very intertwined with this great city. I grew up here, and this city has shaped the way I think about community, opportunity, and what it means to actually solve problems for real people.
I took a somewhat unconventional path to entrepreneurship. I studied business administration at George Washington University, then went on to earn my law degree at Pepperdine University. From there I built a career that spanned criminal law, in-house counsel, and real estate development — three very different disciplines that, looking back, were all quietly preparing me for what I’m building now.
The legal and tech work help me assess risk, contracts, and how platforms actually operate under the hood. Real estate taught me logistics — how physical things move, how transactions close, and how much friction exists in markets that most people just accept as “the way things are.” That friction became the seed of HAULa.
The idea came from a problem I kept seeing play out in real life. People needed to move bulky, oversized items — furniture, appliances, equipment — and their options were either expensive full-service movers who weren’t built for short hauls, or renting a pickup or box truck or asking favors from friends/family with trucks. There was no clean, reliable, on-demand solution for that gap in the market. So I decided to build one.
HAULa is an on-demand transportation marketplace that connects customers with vetted drivers for short-haul transport of large and oversized items.
The entrepreneurial journey hasn’t been a straight line. But every detour has added something. And I genuinely believe the combination of legal training, tech exposure, and deep St. Louis roots puts HAULa in a position to get this right, not just as a business, but as something that actually makes people’s lives a little easier.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth? No. But I’d argue the bumps were part of the education.
Building HAULa has been one of the most humbling experiences of my professional life. In my naïveté, I underestimated how long it would take to get it up and running by a significant margin. Starting something from scratch is a different kind of hard. There can be a steep learning curve and surprisingly limited existing framework to operate within.
It’s just you, your vision, and an endless list of things that need to be accomplished; most of which you’ve never done before.
The development process alone tested my patience in ways I didn’t anticipate. Building a two-sided marketplace — one that must simultaneously serve customers and drivers — means you’re essentially building two products at once, and neither side works without the other. There were stretches where the tech wasn’t ready, the timing felt off, and I had to make peace with the fact that “almost ready” and “ready” are very different things. I pushed back our launch timeline more than once, and each time it stung. But each delay also revealed something that would have been a much bigger problem if we’d gone live before solving it.
Driver onboarding was another reality check. You can have a beautiful platform and a compelling pitch, but convincing people to trust a brand-new marketplace with their time and livelihood requires more than a good idea. It requires building credibility, which is earned over time.
Then there’s the fundraising side. Walking into rooms and asking people to bet on something that doesn’t fully exist yet is a skill set that doesn’t come naturally to most people — myself included. You have to learn how to translate your conviction into language that resonates with investors, how to absorb a “not right now” without losing momentum, and how to keep refining your story and your numbers without losing confidence in your core vision.
What kept me going through all of it was honestly pretty simple: I still believe this problem is real, the market is ready, and St. Louis is the right place to prove it. Some days that belief is louder than others. But it’s never gone quiet.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
HAULa is an on-demand transport marketplace built for the way people actually live. Where you need something moved today, not next week, and you need it done by someone you can trust.
At its core, HAULa connects customers with vetted drivers for the short-haul transport of bulky and oversized items. We’re talking about furniture, appliances, equipment, estate sale finds, building materials, and everything in between. The stuff that’s too big to fit in your car and too small to justify hiring a full moving company or dealing with the inconvenience of renting or borrowing a truck. That gap in the market is exactly where HAULa lives.
We specialize in speed and simplicity. The booking experience is designed to be frictionless — you describe what you need moved, where it’s going, and HAULa connects you with an available driver with the proper vehicle and equipment. No lengthy quotes, no back-and-forth, no waiting days for a callback. On-demand means on-demand.
On the driver side, HAULa creates a real income opportunity for people who already own trucks or trailers and want to put that asset to work on their own schedule. We’re not asking anyone to buy a vehicle or make a major life change. We’re offering a platform that turns something you already have into something that earns.
What I want VoyageSTL readers to know is this: HAULa isn’t just a startup chasing a trend. It’s a practical solution to a problem that people deal with all the time. We’re close to launch, we’re building something real, and we’re doing it right here in St. Louis.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
When I decided to build a tech platform, I didn’t have a deep software or app development background. What I had was a stubborn refusal to treat that as a reason to stop. So I started learning. I pushed myself into tools and frameworks; diving into app development environments, prototyping platforms, and product design processes that were well outside my comfort zone.
I think that’s something people close to me have come to recognize as a pattern: I genuinely believe that the discomfort of learning something new is one of the most useful feelings you can put yourself through. It keeps you humble. It keeps you curious. And practically speaking, it can pay-off in a big way because you understand the bones of what you’re building, not just the vision of it.
That same instinct is what pushed me on my trajectory into entrepreneurship. I share in the belief that if something matters to you, the skill gap between where you are and where you need to be is just a problem to solve.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.haula.app
- Instagram: @haulaapp
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chris-roberts-stl
