Our delivery train has come to a halt
We’re sorry to announce that as of today Spencer will no longer be available as your personal shopper. While we’ve received nothing but positive feedback from you, our trusted customer, we have to remain realistic in our efforts. And the truth is, Spencer hasn’t been growing as fast as we believe it should have.
We set out with a mission. We worked day and night to direct the traditional delivery industry toward a more service-oriented and tailored experience. What started out as an on-demand delivery service that catered directly to businesses — we delivered online purchases in an instant — and evolved into a more consumer-oriented service that aimed to combine the convenience of online shopping with the perks of the shop around the corner. We launched Spencer: delivering anything on-demand to consumers directly, with top-notch service for an affordable price.
We can proudly look back at a wild couple of months in which we’ve reached over a thousand people with Spencer’s service. To whom we’ve delivered the most varying items: from a cargo bike full of chocolate wafer cookies, to instant-confetti-shooting-surprise-parties.
Every single day we enjoyed trying to change the status quo, celebrating successes and learning from many mistakes. From the very first start of our adventures with Saddl, we decided to review our adventure with an unbiased view which lead to a "go or no-go" decision at regular intervals. Sadly, the conclusion from our last review was to stop our activities and liquidate the business.
We’d like to share the following three points which were part of our consideration to pull the plug and form three major lessons learned over the course of our adventure:
- Dream big, start small
In our efforts to combine service with delivery, we started the smallest we could think of: open up a phone number to which people could text their wishes. As soon as an order would come in, one of us would run off to the city while another person was calling ahead to check in-store availability and price. An inefficient process to say the least. But by doing so we were forced to stop viewing the process as a logistic process, but rather as a personal shopping service of which logistics formed an undeniable part. Bringing Spencers into the store, allowed us to transfer the in-store experience to the remote customer while simultaneously cutting away at delivery times (which in turn greatly enhanced the customer's experience of ‘online’ shopping). This direct and continuous contact with our customers not only gave us valuable insights into buying motives, but also the energy needed to keep running ahead and the feeling that we were "on to something". However, the downfall from this approach is that it's easy to lose focus and lose yourself in day-to-day business. Building a platform from scratch meant tackling multiple chicken-and-egg-problems, and through different experiments we aimed to tackle different problems at a time. Plenty of material to pick a focused route, you'd say. But the actual decision should have been made earlier in the process, allowing us to get to critical mass earlier before burning out. - If it’s a numbers game, make sure you hit the numbers.
Running a delivery startup is a numbers game and you need enormous volume to be able to keep the business running and growing. Although we grew week-by-week, the revenue was still far from reaching the level to sustain our business in the long run. Although finding a match with our service and the service people ask for was critical, we should’ve either more quickly hit volumes high enough to sustain a bootstrapped company or secured funding to provide a long enough runway. Unfortunately in our case we failed to do either and got stranded somewhere in the middle. - ..but make sure you get and keep everyone on board
It’s on every list of startup tips and so may seem obvious, but building a company for growth takes an enormous effort which you can only pull off with the right people around you. Yet what is often left out on these lists is that, aside from assembling a team of talented and energised people, it is equally important to offer everyone in the team with enough room to develop not only the business but also themselves. The people that are willing to step into a startup need to be challenged, otherwise you’ll lose them quicker than you got the on board. The pressure to work day and night on something you believe in weighs hard on everyone. Especially between co-founders. It’s vital to manage expectations; keep the entire team involved on their personal performance as well as the team’s performance; and to give your team the right tools and attention to keep everyone motivated and energized.
So to conclude, we’d like to use this moment to especially thank our Spencers for racing across town to get our customers whatever they ordered; Startupbootcamp for their support, network, and belief; and of course everyone else that believed in us from the start. But most importantly, we’d like to thank our customers. We’re proud and very grateful to have put a smile on so many faces and to get your honest and enthusiastic feedback with every order. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to take this journey. We’ve learned a great deal. Don't forget to stay in touch, we’ll definitely be back in the future :)
For now, all the best!
