My name is Alex Blum, and eight months ago my Co-founder, Mike Chevett, and I bootstrapped and launched Relay, here in NYC to make deliveries more efficient.
Relay currently enables restaurants to offer delivery of their food without the headaches of hiring and coordinating a staff by outsourcing this part of their operations to us.
In eight months we’ve fulfilled deliveries worth close to $1 million dollars, and since no one has heard of us, we figured now might be a good time to tell our story.
How did we get here
I had moved to NYC about a year earlier and was living in Manhattan. I decided to order from a restaurant that was far from my apartment, but had great reviews. I remember being a bit uneasy as I placed my order wondering how long my food would take to arrive. When the delivery person showed up, I noticed he was only carrying my order. I asked if I was the only delivery he had to make in that trip, and if he now had to go back to the same restaurant he had come from. He confirmed both of my suspicions, and as I shut the door I remember feeling bad about the distance of both trips. As I ate, I started thinking how inefficient this was… there were five other restaurants on the block I lived on — surely one of those restaurants had a delivery he could have taken, rather than make an empty-handed trip back. With this hunch, I spent the next few weekends walking into restaurants and talking with owners and GMs to discuss how they operated their delivery services. I soon realized that all restaurants worked independently from one another for their delivery services. “Insane,” I thought. “What would you think if I offered to handle all deliveries for you,” I started asking. Many of the owners I spoke with, told me that in fact, the first thing they had done when they were considering doing deliveries, was to look at the Yellow Pages for a similar service, but that none existed. “Bingo,” I thought. I started cold-calling professors at Cornell, MIT, Columbia and GTech in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research departments there to understand whether consolidating deliveries across multiple restaurants would make the system more efficient. Across the board, none could believe this wasn’t the case already. Again, I had that “bingo” feeling. Traditionally, restaurants that offer delivery have to hire, manage and coordinate a team of delivery personnel. Logistics is most definitely not the core-competency of restaurants; food is. Not to mention the inefficiencies with the delivery guys making out-and-back trips, each return trip empty-handed (in logistics this is referred to as a dead-head trip). I knew I had to do something to make this experience better, for everyone.
How we got started
By trade I am a technical recruiter, so I started cold-emailing software engineers that could be a good technical fit, and after meeting with many of them was lucky enough to somehow convince Mike that this could be huge. He was working at AppNexus at the time. (Funnily enough, we met at a restaurant that today is a customer of ours).
We started Relay with $15k of savings. This is all the funding Relay has ever taken.
Launch
We launched December 1st, 2014. It was the coldest months of winter, but we were badly itching to do delivery #1. I would spend most of the day at one of the few restaurants we were working with, managing the delivery guys, updating Mike on new bugs and features we could use. When we were short-staffed, I hopped on my bike in the freezing weather to try and put a dent in the high volume of orders being placed. I found that doormen treat delivery guys with immense disdain. Customers don’t answer their doors or phones, or tip $0.75 for a 1 mile trip in -12 F. There is not a lot of empathy in the life of a delivery guy. I remember riding around through the snow at 10:30pm on a Sunday in mid December thinking “If I’m still doing this next month, I’m out”. The first week or two we were shocked and dazed. “What have we gotten ourselves into” I thought. But we plowed forward. By the end of the month, we had fulfilled close to $10,000 worth of deliveries.
After launch, and our initial growth spurt, I found that I was spending most of my time running the company. To put it mildly, operations and logistics are incredibly, incredibly tough. The writing was on the wall, and I could see our sales pipeline dwindling as I had less time to drive sales forward.
Enter Corey Manicone
We needed someone to help us with our sales efforts, and once again started cold-emailing possible candidates. Corey was at Foursquare at the time running sales for their Chicago market — and had a job offer on the table at a great startup — but he shared our vision of the immense potential Relay had. Finding Corey was another huge stroke of luck, and our revenue would be a fraction of what it is today if not for him. He is one of the most tenacious individuals I have ever met. He’ll meet with restaurant owners at 11pm to sign them up. He will be negotiating our contract with one restaurant owner while riding his bike to sign another restaurant up. His drive is ineffable. He has been instrumental to Relay in many other aspects beyond sales, and I can’t thank him enough for taking a huge gamble in joining us.
Beginning to grow
As Corey doubled and then tripled the number of restaurants we had on-board, our daily delivery volume exploded. Mike furiously built new features, fixed bugs, triaged our development roadmap and fleshed our software out. I started receiving 5–10 phone calls or texts a week from couriers asking for work, as word spread throughout the NYC courier community of what we had going on at Relay.
Where do we go from here?
Through high-volume deliveries (food ), we are operating a logistics network that will allow goods to be delivered within 30–45 minutes to your door. We aim to be the panacea of last-mile fulfillment. The challenge is extraordinarily daunting, but, we think we’ve already built the foundation to give us a damn honest shot at this.
If you’re still reading this and are interested in being a part of the Relay team, shoot me an email alex@deliveryrelay.com. We’re currently looking to hire engineers with a strong interest and experience in Vehicle Routing Problems, machine learning, data science and logistics/operations optimization. You should take pride in your resourcefulness, and your work should reflect that. The problems we’re solving are insanely tough, but extremely fun.
Don’t forget to tip your delivery person :)
