Happy birthday to us!
The story of how URBANTZ came to be
URBANTZ just celebrated its third birthday. Yay! A significant percentage of startups fail within that timeframe. We’re thrilled to still be standing. A birthday is always a good moment to look back and to reflect on achievements and all the hard work. As for any such endeavor, we had our highs and our lows, our near-death experiences, our crossings of the desert, our first fail, our first win, and then, eventually, our second win. Today we see some bright light shining on the horizon as we’re signing more and more customers, small and large, and we know much more where we’re going, what we want to achieve and how we’re going to go about it.
At URBANTZ, we’re building a software-as-a-service solution for the retail and logistics market. A bit more than three years ago, I met Mike, one of our co-founders, who was running a eco-delivery business in Paris, called The Green Link. He needed a user-friendly and efficient solution to manage last mile operations. Unable to find a good match on the market, Mike had turned to a big integration company to build a tailor-made application to do just that. Unfortunately, one year and 100 K€ later, it was becoming clear that that was not going to happen. The balance of power was too big, costs too high, and the process too slow. The ROI for a medium sized company was just not there.
When Mike and I met, I was building a sharing economy delivery app called Sidebox. Sidebox was meant to match people wanting items delivered somewhere with people already making a journey to that destination. In Europe, the sharing economy was still nascent — and after a few months of running our MVP, it was clear that this was not going to work either. Perhaps it was too soon, and the right timing is one of the few startup essentials. Apparently.
So, I was somewhat working in logistics and Mike clearly had been doing that for years — he saw a business opportunity in providing a flexible and easy-to-use solution to the booming last-mile eco delivery market. We met a few times, discussed it a bit more and finally decided to go for it. RIP Sidebox. Our new project was born on Sidebox’s ashes: codename: “Miles” — a SAAS solution for small-to-medium size last mile delivery businesses.
Year 1
A month or two later, Dani (a developer, who’s still with us today) and I sat down for the first time, had a little chat, and wrote our first lines of code. Naturally, we had no specs, no clue about actual last-mile operations — yet a vague idea that this was going to be complex. Indeed, analyzing operations at The Green Link (TGL) we were faced with the following key epics for our minimum viable product (MVP):
- A mobile app for drivers to follow their round
- A web app for dispatchers to generate rounds based on constraints (fleet, orders, etc.)
- A need to manage configuration data such as hubs, vehicles, drivers
- A need for real-time updates from the field
That’s some solid scope for an MVP. Sidebox’s ashes saved us some time (app skeletons, sessions, etc.) but still, it was a long way to go before we would be able to run this MVP pilot with The Green Link, let alone confront with the market at large.
Nevertheless we set sail, and I’m not sure, had I known then what I discovered along the way, that I would have had the courage to persevere. At the time the seas were calm, just two guys coding away, no users, no customers, no planning, no “stories” — no problems: just hacking an MVP as quickly as possible. We made choices, mostly the right ones, but not only, and time flew by at an astounding pace.
By November of that same year our MVP was ready. We did our official unveiling and started our pilot with TGL. Things were not catastrophic, as we had indeed built something useful, but sure enough, there was a lot of room for improvement. I remember the TGL operations guy calling us “URBANTZ and a half” — clearly meaning we were not there yet. Naturally, we set on to improve things.
In February one of our co-founders, Dimitri, said we needed someone to help run operations, and yup, he was right. He believed that perhaps Melanie, someone he had worked with in the past could be interested. So, he called her up for lunch and explained to her what we were up to. Something did pique here interest as a few days later, she came over to know more and was shown a demo by Dani and myself. Some magic must have been operating, as a few days later there she was, an extra co-founder in the team! Her hard-working style and enthusiasm was quickly apparent. We made the lucky choice, and looking back, this kind of events are what makes or breaks such an adventure.
Quickly after that we signed one of our first real customer, Ecolotrans. They’re still with us to this day and I’ll always be thankful to these early adopters who make a bet and believe in a product and in people. Things were moving. We found another great developer: Justin. So, counting on the fingers of one hand: 3 devs and 1 operations. Finally, Mike stopped working for TGL and joined us full-time in June 2016, nearly one year after the first line of code.
Things were accelerating! Great, we thought, this is all going to be a slam-dunk!
Wait. Not so fast…
Year 2
During the second year, from July 2016 to July 2017, we discovered this was not going to be as easy as we had hoped. There was competition, naturally. Mostly old stuff from the 90s, but people have their habits, “ya know”. Also, we were building a product which sits at the core of delivery operations, the moment of opportunity is infrequent and users tend to change systems once every 5 to 10 years — causing massively long sales cycles. Furthermore, the product is complex (aka sophisticated) and that means going through Requests for Proposals, on-site presentations, contracting, you name it.
So yes, the second year was not that great. It started with TGL going bankrupt. Our biggest customer. Yes indeed. We had also a few paying customers from the Colis Privé network, a French company subcontracting deliveries and partly owned by Amazon. Colis Privé had negotiated a very low usage price, on the idea that they would use us nationwide across their network and that a gigantic volume would come. These discussions lasted months. And never happened.
We lost a lot of time contemplating such opportunities. But not all was lost, we learned a lot. We pushed the product forward. We learned how to have a plan B. To be more inventive, to be more hungry. Yet we were accumulating debt. Revenue was still way too low. Perhaps it was time to quit. To call it a day. To get on with our lives.
Actually, in October 2016, Colis Privé decided to go their own way, pushing their own (sub-par) solution to their subcontractors. The last one stopped using URBANTZ in January 2017. We were back to where we started: with a handful of customers.
Thinking about it now, I really take wonder at the crazy headlines on Techcrunch. 20 million Series A, 10 million Series XYZ, … all these nice stories of successful startups going through the roof. What you seldom hear though is the hard work, the sacrifices, and sometimes the despair these founders had to go through.
Year 3
By July 2017 our luck started to turn. We were approached by City Depot, a delivery startup in Belgium. At the time, for us, a giant customer. They checked us out, gave us a list of features they would need if this was ever going to happen. And a deadline.
Again, we worked our asses off counting down the days until everything needed to be ready. At that time, another great news came knocking: our Proof of Concept with Carrefour France had been a success. In 6 to 12 months, we would perhaps be able to go-live on a significant new volume of deliveries. Revenue finally started to grow.
But could we stay afloat so long?
Not if we didn’t find fresh money… And clearly, Brussels is not Silicon Valley.
At the time I had no idea what it took to raise money. I also didn’t understand some key aspects of what we were doing and set out to do. It’s hard to talk to VCs without having reached € 100.000 of recurring revenue per month and without being in a hyper-growth cycle. It really is just part of their checklist. So VCs were out. “Talk to us for your next round” was the common message. Or, “we’re not sure about the go-to-market strategy here”. Finally, we managed to convince business angels, a public fund and a corporate (CMB) to believe in what we were doing.
Today we’re signing new customers every week. We’re hiring aggressively — 3 new colleagues started last week! It’s been a long and twisted road, very intense, with hard and happy moments. We’re three years old this month, but the road ahead is longer still. I would really like to thank our Customers, our Colleagues, our Investors, and our Co-founders who made this journey possible.
Together we deliver.
