Decoding Uber for X in India

“Uber for X” evokes different reaction from different people — If you are an Investor, you are probably cringing at the mention of it; if you are a consumer, you are probably looking a coupon code for this startup that promises you nirvana and instant gratification. If you are Kashyap Deorah (Loved Golden Tap BTW) or a seasoned entrepreneur, you are telling yourself to be wary of the thoughts that lure you into cheap pleasures and escapism on the pretext of instant gratification. And lastly, god forbid if you are an entrepreneur building your start up around it — you get a sparkle in your eye with the hope that Masayoshi Son sees it.

I, fortunately (or unfortunately) fall in the last category — Co-Founder at Quickli, we are building a logistics network by seamlessly connecting businesses to riders through our apps, opening up more possibilities for businesses and more business for riders. No? We are “Uber for Deliveries”.

If you have been following this space, you may have come across a brilliant piece by Sarah Tavel Medium on taking the Wrong lessons from Uber. The highlight of which is — The magic of Uber is that it used mobile to create a 10x better product than the incumbent (taxis), and did so at a lower price. The “and” is everything.

The world agrees with her and I believe, irrespective of which of the above four categories you fall in, you must agree — The “and” is truly everything.

So does this come as a revelation to our industry? Did we focus too much on the design? Should we have not gotten the embroidery done on the T-shirts? But the merchant only had 1 captive rider; I placed 10 riders at his premises for 10x better experience. The riders love the smartphones we have given to them — they can even play games during lean hours. (Disclosure — At Quickli, we do not give any dedicated rider to our merchants or devices to our riders. Yes, we are cheap like that.)

Did we totally miss the miss the point? The answer is No and I will demonstrate why –

RETHINKING UTILIZATION

India has one of the world’s largest retail touch points and any typical market in India has a perfectly healthy mix of Restaurants, Grocers, Bakers, Pharmacies and others. With a captive rider, you cannot avoid the rider downtime that mirrors the peaks and troughs of your business. However when u pool all of them, it’s a different story.

RETHINKING VALUE CREATION

One of the world’s biggest and most advanced Pizza delivery company has a brilliant and secret way of meeting their customer promise every time — maintain excess capacity — plan for max demand. Most other businesses unfortunately do not have that luxury, give a call to my good friend Nitesh Jha at World in a Box and he will tell you how erratic can demand be. So what do you do when all your riders are out for delivery and you have a dozen more orders waiting to be picked up? A potential APP with dozens of riders, maybe just the answer to your prayers.

RETHINKING VALUE CONSUMPTION

Unless it is a bike manufacturer or a petrol pump owner, I don’t see any reason for a business owner to believe that every time a rider drops an order and returns empty, is not a loss of time and money. Here is a delivery graph of a business we work with — Cook Gourmet (Amazing guys — best ready to cook boxes; do check them out)

These blue dots look like secluded islands without much two way traffic and a ride back home would be pretty lonely.

However if add few more businesses that we would be serving during the same time duration, it looks like a busy Monday morning -

RETHINK SCALE AND LOWER COSTS

I agree, it’s one thing doing it right once and another thing doing it right every time and therefore for us at Quickli, technology becomes the biggest leverage to scale and with scale we get better and more efficient with every delivery and lower the costs. To explain which, I will borrow a beautiful back-of-the-napkin sketch tweeted by David Sacks

Image Credit — David Sacks

More scale leads to higher coverage which leads to more riders and as more demand and supply flood in, the empty run and idle time for rider falls and businesses get orders picked up within minutes. With lower empty runs and idle times as well as higher availability of drivers, the platform can offer better prices to Businesses. This, in turn, brings in more businesses into the system and the loop gets strengthened further. And that is how, you create a 10x better product than the incumbent, and do so at a lower price, whether in logistics or the next disruption that you are planning.

For all the remaining detractors questioning how the platform makes money, well we are making money on every order we complete and to know how we do that, you will have to write us a very big cheque :)