Why I started Dispatch
I built Dispatch for me.
I built Dispatch for the hustler entrepreneur and the GSD developer who wants to focus on building what they truly need to in their business, and leverage existing tools and technology for everything else.
I built Dispatch because as an entrepreneur, it’s the vision of life with your business or product in existence that drives you to wake up every morning and hit the ground running.
The faster you can go from idea to something tangible and the faster you can focus on: growth, optimization, fundraising, marketing, hiring, biz-dev, etc., the higher your chance of success.
As is mentioned in every industry blog post, article and tweet these days, we’re in a very unique period of transition: software is eating the world, technology is becoming commoditized, user experience trumps all, and “Uber” for everything.
Almost two years ago, I met my partner and mentor Avi Goldberg through another mentor, Eli Sapir. They were mulling on an idea — Uber for home services — and were looking to evaluate the opportunity. It was a weird time during which I was graduating school and wasn’t sure what to do about the future of my last company, SocialRent. The pitch was convincing, and I agreed to spend some time working on it — I was living on a friend’s couch nearby — and so it started.
You know the process:
Step 1: Domain name, Twitter handle, logo attempt and all of the fun stuff (that ends up to not really matter).
Step 2: Start mapping out the user experience and figure out how to kick this off as soon as possible. Though the Paul Graham “Do things that don’t scale” wasn’t yet published, the mentality was prevalent and I did my best to limit technology and focus on experience. But it was tough — It’s tough to build an incredible experience for the customer and focus on the outward-facing challenges while needing to spend so much time and attention on backend technology and internal tools.
Step 3: Find your product-market fit and focus on growth.
Over time, the concept for Dispatch began to evolve — some enterprise businesses who wanted to join our network ended up leveraging our technology to manage their own network and create an Uber-like customer experience of their own.
Interesting? Sure. We opened up our technology to enterprise businesses to build on top of. Soon, startup buddies working on their own “Uber-for-X” started reaching out and wanted to use the same APIs and infrastructure. Companies large and small, brand new and ancient, all wanted to leverage Dispatch to create an on-demand experience for their business where they could manage and own their customer-facing experience and use our tools for administration of service providers and operations.
We help enterprise customers create an on-demand experience without throwing out their existing systems (average implementation time is 6 weeks — crazy short for an enterprise technology) and we help smaller businesses and startups use our products to kick-off their marketplace in minutes. While we focus on the backend and scaling our product offering, Dispatch customers use our APIs to build their own dream products and enable themselves to focus on every single other thing that matters.
I’m honored today to launch our product publically. Over the past year, we ramped up technology, hired some incredible talent and recently raised over $3 million in funding. For months we’ve watched internally as new businesses were born because of Dispatch and existing businesses grew beyond imagination. I’m thankful to my incredible wife and family for supporting me, to my partner and our CEO, Avi Goldberg, for teaching me everything I know about business and to Vlad Medvedovsky at Foundation Labs and my other co-founders and our entire team for making this product and launch happen.
If you’re working on an on-demand startup, check out our technology. If you’re not but want to connect, shoot me an email (james@dispatch.me) or hit me up on Twitter (@yjzar).
For more information about our launch, check out our press release here.
