Gadgetory

post mates is an on-demand delivery service with a fleet of local couriers who purchase goods and deliver them to customers across a city but within the expanding on-demand industry post mates faces growing competition we're the largest on-demand delivery company in the world we will try to do a delivery from anywhere within an hour no one does as many deliveries as us and if it's serviceable on Foursquare you can put in a note what you want to have done and we will try and do it post mates is an app that lets say you need something picked up from the Apple Store or you are looking for a burrito from Chipotle you can go into your app you can request delivery and for a fee you will essentially get that delivered to you we'd like to believe it helps a whole bunch of people so if you if you think how it works it's local products delivered by local people purchased by someone who lives in that city so when you press that button when you purchase food from a restaurant when you purchase something from a store in your city a local merchant makes revenues a person comes picks up the goods and he gets compensated for that and you pay tax in your own City post meats has made certain things very simple top a couple of buns you're done and it shows up and that's great postdates has evolved from its original idea to better fit the market and serve its customers once the concept for post mates was solidified they face the challenges of compiling inventory from local stores and building their business the first version of post mates was way closer to the original idea of being a ride-sharing for stuff he would open the Avenue selected a pickup in a drop off and you could describe what item should have been picked up and where it should be dropped off to but there was no commerce element there's no one to tell us like what our problems will be there is no playbook out there we can't copy FedEx we can't copy other people in this space we can't even really copy uber or lyft like they they kind of we kind of understand some things from them but our core business how to deliver this like triangle that exists there's no one to teach us so we discover our challenges as much as we solve them and we actually said this weekend only you can have the items that you want to have purchased you can have them purchase through the app and we deliver them and I think that first weekend we sold good anywhere between eight or ten thousand dollars after that test we knew that we had to build this app which we didn't really wanted to build so the next version of the app would allow you to actually browse stores the permutations of things that could go wrong are really really high you have a consumer you have a courier you have a person placing an order you have a merchant who's preparing an order you have a courier that goes there and drops it off that's four different people all aligned within 45 minutes to get something done people do care about affordability when it comes to on-demand services like post meets but there are certain instances where you'll almost pay any amount in some cases just to get something delivered postmates sets themselves apart by bringing merchandise to customers directly from local stores via their couriers this freelance workforce is crucial to make the transactions happen and a big part of postmates success but it's not without issues especially as more and more companies start to depend on independent contractors FedEx and UPS they enabled a lot of the commerce that is happening in the world or companies like them and on a local level really your only alternative to move things around is your other do it yourself you ask a friend to do it you have an assistant or you call a messenger for post mates the ideal scenario is that businesses find themselves making so much money by post mates coming in to deliver to their customers that they want to work with postman it felt like something that is a real problem right connecting local merchants with customers giving the power back to local economies or just at least trying to provide them with better tools so that they compete with big-box retailers and outlets it felt like the right thing to do I do think it is gonna be a challenge for posts mates to figure out what can they do better than Amazon right it's not just enough to exist alongside them they're gonna have to figure out something they can do either faster cheaper or better in some other way I think people would simply just not purchase anything from Amazon anymore if you can have the same product delivered within a couple of minutes in your city and if you can have it out of comparable price our Trojan horse is the fleet is the fleet of Paulo states 16,000 of them that are available in these cities and that are doing deliveries a huge part of what we're doing at post minutes is we want to provide the infrastructure the people on the ground they do the deliveries that allow these transactions to happen a lot of the success is dependent on this part-time workforce something has shifted in the American economy there are more and more freelancers more and more contractors so I think that we're gonna continue to see a lot of you know part-time workers working on demand and people are going to be utilizing those services but there are so many right now that I just don't see how all of them are gonna continue to exist and some of the bigger players are ultimately going to scoop them up the on-demand industry is growing quickly which is great for a start-up like post mates but it also means growing competition post mates has made a name for itself in the industry but will they be able to keep up among major players like Amazon and uber when I think about the on-demand space it's probably gonna have a significant impact just like e-commerce had in the world it took a while for it to actually blew up but now you have a Buy button on every website and guess what Amazon won that right Amazon won the entire category they won the e-commerce app to cadres and they're a great leader in it some people think that eventually uber will just sort of be V on-demand startup that it will buy up startups like post mates and we'll sort of just become kind of the global logistics network for getting you anything you need within a few minutes I think if we look at the portfolio of on-demand businesses we have right now I think we need to just continue to watch it it's evolving and we'll see the things that succeed and fail and I think we'll see a lot of them continue to consolidate and some of them become massive on-demand offers an interesting twist it offers the ability to have access to a service or a product within a couple of minutes so it fundamentally shifts how we're perceiving a product or a service so on a long enough timeline I believe that just like we see biood button or we see a net to Cart button you will see a get it now button a lot more around and people will get used to the idea that they can press a button and something happens to them you