After going through the internal exercise of creating personas for our target customer, we interviewed a delivery business owner who happened to also be a food vendor needing to drop off packages with customers. He started the delivery business to meet his own demand.
What are your general Business Problems
- Electricity
- Pumping machine
- Car
Tell us about a Day in the Life of your business
- Bike guy resumes
- Stays at office until customers call
- pick up from me, drop off with customer
- pick up from someone, drop off with me
- not involved, pick up and drop off elsewhere
- Charge customer according to distance
- N500 - near-by locations
- N700/N800 -
- N1000 -
- N1500 -
- How do you estimate distance?
- good knowledge of road network
- adopted price that other people in the business use
- Business Goals
- Make profit
- Ease existing business (food delivery)
- Grow business, get customers
- Ease food delivery
- other dispatchers not reliable
- need dispatchers at own beck and call
- If grown properly: 1 bike = N2000/day, as much as N60,000 revenue with N20,000 profit.
- How do you think the rider app will solve your Problem
- keep track of bike (real-time) on map
- challenge: knowing where biker is
- drivers are usually not literate
- no more calculating how far it is
- never really used a rider app
- don't want to argue about price with customers/Nigerian factor
- Removes manual nature of doing things
- Monitor how much fleet makes
- Payment
- agreement (for trusted customers)
- preferred is bank transfer (60%)
- give customer cash on delivery 40%
- Package weight identification
- Everyone knows what bikes look like
- specify for delicate items
- delivery bikes stationed at spare park markets are fitted with larger delivery boxes
- his bike is specific for food, cake, light documents/packages
- Call delivery guy
- tell him destination
- gives contact number
- Thinking about how to monitor bike
- install tracker on bike. cost around N30K
- there might be maintenance costs
- spoken to people around solution
- riders don't branch all the time, only when someone calls them directly and/or they are already en-route with an authorized delivery
- 2 Main types of delivery business models
- Balance and carry: riders take possession of vehicle and make periodic quota payments till pre-agreed sum is reached then ownership of bike is transferred. if payments not made for agree period, agreement is cancelled and bike is repossessed
- Pay riders salary: delivery vehicles remain at office, difficult to monitor them, riders do personal business with company assets
- Communication with Fleet/Rider
- WhatsApp? most not educated, no compatible android phone, can consider providing phone as part of setup costs, in-app chatting might work although people go straight to calls
- Business owner has to follow up on en-route delivery with constant calls to dispatcher
- where are you
- do you know the address (pickup or destination)
- have you called (sender or receiver)
- call me when you get there
- Customer communication when delivery is enroute
- talks to dispatcher directly
- calls owner if there is an issue
- Failed deliveries
- mixups are rare, mainly with multiple orders
- label packages for multiple deliveries
- called, no pickup > come back, park bike > rider handed over undelivered goods for safekeeping > customer called to apologize > gave new delivery address > paid for delivery
- Delivery
- Rider has customer number already
- Sender notifies recipient
- Rider notifies sender (delivery business)
- Fuelling
- N600 for full day,
- sometimes finishes, rider top up at gas station, delivery business owner stores fuel home
- After Sales
- friends do videos
- munch chats
- phone calls
- customers end up getting drivers number for private trips
- Pricing
- personal estimate of cost: N4000
- comparable to shop assistant: N10,000 - N15,000