Talking With Couriers Helped Me Build a Delivery App

The following is a preview from Canadian Business

I learned the value of an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. I have vivid childhood memories of afternoons and sick days spent in the travel agency my mom started, napping on the little sofa while she built her business. Meanwhile my dad, an accountant, was a master at building relationships. On our weekly trips to the grocery store he would greet each vendor by name—the produce guy, the baker, the butcher—and always got the best deals on the strength of those relationships. 

We were a middle class family, but my parents made a point to teach us the importance of working hard. I busted my butt in high school, landing a spot on the honour roll. Back in the 90s, when email was just starting to become mainstream, I spent countless hours experimenting with computer code in my parents’ basement, tinkering around to see what I could create. As a side hustle, I wrote programs and built websites—from online store fronts for vitamin shops to homepages for politicians. That got me a scholarship at Carleton, where I earned a degree in computer science with a minor in economics. When I graduated in 2006, building on a piece of code I had previously written, I co-founded a company called Sitebrand, creating software that could tailor online ads based on the users’ behaviour (something a lot more commonplace now). Over five years, we grew to a staff of 60, and took the company public on the TSX in 2009 before it was acquired by Cactus Commerce in 2011. 

That early success led me to a job at Shopify, where I helped grow their Shopify Plus offering and built a global network of large digital agencies that worked with major brands to distribute their products online. We would bring agencies on board and offer their big brands Shopify Plus’ capabilities instead of their platform’s built-in e-commerce features. After several successful years at Shopify, I left the company. It wasn’t an easy choice, but I was driven by a deeper calling—to be there for my two young children, and to care for my father, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. 

During this time, I regularly needed to have items delivered to my parents’ house for my dad, but I kept running into roadblocks: Local stores wouldn’t deliver, and courier services were unreliable or took too long. Frustrated, I started to dig deeper, asking drivers and small business owners about the gaps in the local delivery landscape. I learned that many mom and pop shops simply couldn’t afford to give up sizable portions of their revenue to same-day delivery giants like Uber and Doordash, electing to opt-out of offering delivery altogether. It was then that I had an idea—a delivery app built specifically for small businesses, one that undercuts neither businesses’ bottom lines or couriers’ wages. 

Read or listen to the full article at Canadian Business