DelivApp

DelivApp is a software as a service product for businesses that do local on-demand deliveries. The majority of the orders that our system powers are food and our main customers are restaurants that manage their own delivery people or delivery service providers that serve restaurants that want to deliver but do not have their own couriers. Empowered by our solution, local businesses have an alternative and don’t have to turn to the global delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, Deliveroo, and the likes.

More than five years ago, in addition to my technology career, I became an investor in a restaurant. With time, I got more hands-on and we ended up getting into deliveries. I saw how cumbersome the process was and coming from tech, I could not help but see a problem waiting for a solution. So initially the system was created to cater to restaurants with their own delivery fleets, it then evolved to serve the needs of delivery companies that work with smaller venues and deliver for them.

Before talking about software alternatives, we need to look at the existing ways to get orders to local consumers ASAP. So how can a local restaurant do it? First, today they can work with one of the third-party delivery apps. The advantage is that they would bring orders and they would take care of deliveries, and the restaurant can focus on cooking. We can call it the Amazon way. But there are two problems with this scenario. First, the math does not add up. According to recent McKinsey research, in each such order, a restaurant loses money, we are talking about a contribution margin of about -2%. This is significant. Second, this approach moves customer relationships from restaurants to platforms, and this is even worse. In Long-terms, restaurants lose their loyal regulars, who stick with the platforms. So an alternative way which is gaining more and more popular today is what we call the Shopify way. In this case, a restaurant would have its own way to accept and deliver online orders. This is where we come in, helping them better handle the deliveries.

We focus on the restaurant industry and restaurant delivery services industry. But we also see that those customers of ours who are delivery companies, move into serving other industries, for example, many also delivery flowers, alcohol, pharmacy, groceries, even apparel. Because consumers want everything on-demand today, not just food. Our system is flexible enough to allow that.

There is a number of delivery solutions in the market today, our main strength is that we were created to handle fast-paced food deliveries. We built the system to dispatch on the fly and this is very unique – most of the solutions we know come from traditional e-commerce and they are good at planning ahead, but this is not what you need when you have 100 orders right now, that need to go out into different places in the city and that customers need to receive them in within the next 30 minutes.

We learn from our customers that we allow them to handle the same volumes with 2 or even 3 times smaller workforce, thanks to the visibility that we provide and our even-improving automation. And, of course, customer support. We are a mission-critical software, so we are there when our customers’ need us.

We sell software as a service, so all of our customers stay with us for as long as they are in the business. Our oldest customers are with us for 5 years and we work hard to make sure the new ones stay for as long and more.

We actively help our customers at the initial stage of getting started, this is when we work hand in hand, making sure they go the settings right and the processes work well for them. After they feel confident with the system, we stay in touch through the support chat and they also have access to our Knowledge Base.

We always have our email and support chat available to all customers, and then depending on the client size and needs, we may offer dedicated support channels and account managers.

We are at a stage of very active growth now but have grown several times in the past year and we will grow several more times this coming year. The on-demand delivery market is huge, and food and groceries are only the tip of the iceberg.

A decade from now, no one will be waiting for a day or more for anything to be delivered at their doorsteps. Our product will enable hyper-fast deliveries of everything, but we will make sure to do so while keeping local businesses in business, meaning that we will always serve their interests.