Passel - the first crowdsourced home delivery company

My name is Marshall and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Parcel. And our story is that in my 20 years of freight and logistics experience, I experienced home deliveries going through the roof, but our industry having a real problem in being unable to deliver a delightful solution for e-commerce players. And the problem for retailers is they're losing about 70% of their sales online. Because people get to the checkout and don't buy. And a substantial part of that problem is people are dissatisfied with the delivery options. They're either too expensive or they're too slow. So our solution to that is to change the paradigm for home deliveries from being a 3 to 5 day service to being a 3-hour service for around the same price as a 3-day delivery. And the way that works is Parcel has people who are called "Parcers," and they're registered people who are regular everyday people like you and me. They're not courier drivers or professional drivers. The people have got the app running in their phone so that we know where they are. And when our partner retailers have an online order that they're going to ship from store for a local delivery, they let us know that it's ready. And then we look at where all the passes are and we identify what we call the least inconvenienced person. So we're looking for someone who's in the shopping mall right now, but likely to leave very soon and go near that delivery address. They go into the store and do the pickup, and then they go and deliver within 3 hours. We have a 3-hour guaranteed delivery service. One of our key edges over traditional couriers is we can offer this service whenever the stores are open. So weekends, evenings, public holidays, right up until 5 o'clock on Christmas Eve, Parcel can still be delivering for our partner retailers. Our business model is a very simple one. We charge the retailer $15. and we reward the parcel with $10, either via a gift voucher or we can even pay them via EFT. The market that we're in is a rapidly expanding one, growing 20% year on year, and by 2025, it's expected there'll be 25 billion home deliveries every year in the United States alone. So a lot of people who are listening to this are thinking, "I've got it, this must be the Uber for couriers." And it's really important to understand that we're not an Uber for couriers. There are plenty of businesses out there doing that. And one of their big challenges is trying to engage and retain drivers. Drivers in the gig economy are people who are running multiple apps on their phone and they're constantly shopping around for which courier company or delivery company or food delivery company is offering the best deal. And this creates problems around scaling and creates problems about dealing with peaks. And because our people are regular everyday people, we're not competing in that market. We launched in September last year and we're doing really well. We've proven the model works, we've proven we can deliver, and we've proven we can deliver under 3 hours. In April of this year, we'll expand around Australia out of Melbourne into Sydney and Brisbane with partner retailers who are signed, contracted, and ready to go. So our ask today is we're looking for $250,000 in funding. To get us to a $25,000 monthly revenue rate. And from there, we'll look to scale out of Australia as quickly as possible around the world to the US, Canada, Ireland, Western Europe, and Indonesia. So if you like what you've seen today, I'd love to get in touch with you. And here's my contact details. Thank you.

All right, awesome. Thank you, Marshall. Again, we got a couple questions coming in here. Any additional questions, put them on the left. Okay. So let's see. So I had a couple of questions too. So from, and this is sort of one of the questions that just came in from David, right? From the consumer, it makes a ton of sense, right? 3-hour delivery, good price point, but sort of, you know, what's, what's in it for the drivers, the parcels as you call them, right? What is the feedback been there?

Yeah. So the parcels are people who are just regular people who are out shopping. So this is not a income source for them. It's essentially offsetting the cost of what they're already doing. So a lot of people who've signed up work in the shopping malls already, whether they work in a store or whether they work in hospitality, and they might work a 3 to 6 hour shift for $20 an hour. And now when they finish that shift, they have the opportunity to make another $10 on the way home. Another demographic is people who are out shopping and it pays for fuel, might pay for parking, or it might pay for lunch for them. Essentially, it pays for that. It's a sharing economy thing. They're already going to go home anyway, and now they've had an extra $10 just for going home.

Right. No, I like that. It's an important distinction, right, that it is a difference between the sharing economy and the gig economy.

Yeah.

Okay, so Raj asked, what if the delivery is cross-city? Is that just not something that would fit into the model, or is that something that you guys facilitate?

Yeah, right now at launch we're a hyperlocal model, so our delivery guarantee to our retail partners is 15-kilometer radius from their stores. So we're delivering cross-city, we're not delivering cross-state yet. But if you look at a lot of retailers with stores in many malls, a 15-kilometer radius in most cities provides pretty good coverage across the city for them. So we won't deliver a 40-mile delivery, but we'll do a 10-mile delivery.

Okay, cool. What were the types of retailers that were in your test that you've been doing that you've been getting some good feedback from?

Yeah, so our first two retailers, one was gifts and small items, quirky items they call themselves, that was Pookie Boyka. The second one was a store called Pure Baby, which is a premium organic cotton retailer for baby clothes. Both those customers approached us and asked to be part of the pilot because they both saw a need for their customers where on a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning or even earlier in the week, there might be times when someone's forgotten something or needs to get something really, really quickly. They knew their customers would be happy to pay the premium for an instant delivery rather than waiting for 3 to 5 days. The next customers to come on board are in apparel, footwear, and even party supplies. So we're going to be delivering bouquets of 5 helium balloons in Sydney in April.

Nice, nice. Okay. So Tim asked the question as well, what is the current monthly run rate, if you are comfortable sharing that? I know that you mentioned what the goal was.

We piloted up until Christmas and we're currently parked until April because there's a stack of tech and dev work to get done. The current rate is $75 to $100 a week. It's pretty low. We're just doing sporadic offline deliveries at the moment. The next customers that come on board will go quickly into that $500 to $1,000 deliveries a month with the signed and contracted customers ready to come on board in April. 1,000 deliveries a month is $15,000 run rate.

All right, and then let's see here. I had a couple. Is there a screening process for these parcels?

Is there a—

A screening process.

So a screening process. So when people sign up, we get their name, address, phone number, and a bit of social information about them as well. And then they're running with the app that's constantly tracking their information. We're partnering with a company called Universal Reputations, which is a company that brings together people's reputation and ratings from a whole bunch of different platforms such as eBay and Uber, with the goal being we can provide a complete picture of who they are.

Okay, cool. So let's see if I have any last questions here. So, okay, so Raj asked, in a two-sided network model like this, you always need to develop both sides simultaneously, right? So how— and this is a good question, right? This is the chicken and egg question that is probably something you're dealing with every day of your life. How do you propose to acquire both the retailers and the parcels at the same time and maintaining a balance so that there's quality and, you know, that everybody has a good experience on both sides of the the equation there?

It's a really good question. So, we tend to do that by not worrying about doing that. So, our key is acquiring retailers. So, we need to get the demand side going. That's the priority. We've already proven that we can acquire passes simply through Facebook advertising and some organic work. So, we know our cost for acquisition is about $3 a pass. We know our landing page is converting at 33%. When we launch around a store, we know that $1,000 gets us 350 parcels within a 15-kilometer radius, which is enough to run each location. A location might have multiple customers within it. From a point of view of the retailers, because we offer a 3-hour guarantee, we also have a backup plan where we underwrite that with professional couriers. If, for whatever reason, we can't get a parcel, then we know that we have a network of professional couriers that can do that delivery for us on demand. We obviously try to avoid that because professional couriers are really expensive.

No, no, that's a great point. And I saw that pop up a couple of times on here too, right? If this was a very risky proposition potentially for the retailers, but if you're backing that up with the professional delivery, then at least to them, that's, you know, provides them with a little insurance, right?

Yeah, we don't want to— the guarantee to the retailers is we don't charge if we don't deliver within 3 hours. And surprisingly, the only time we haven't delivered in 3 hours is when we did use a professional career in testing, and we were 36 minutes late. So that was a lesson learned on that day.

But it's—

yeah, that was a bit disappointing.

All right, cool. So, and again, just like the last presentation, there's a lot of questions coming in. So Marshall, please hop on there. We'll also be sending out Marshall's contact information as well afterwards. So thank you, Marshall. Great job, man.

Thanks very much. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone.