How we raised the delivery service

My little story about how the project ekipazh-service.com.ua developed, launched as an additional income of a taxi company, and as a result received an investment from a large investment fund, becoming the main business. What problems I had to face, how the site developed, and how I started working with the site as a freelancer, and as a result I got a job at the company.

Start

Once back in 2009, a client called me and offered to meet to discuss an order. I then worked as a freelance programmer and was open to discuss projects. The customer, in turn, was the owner of the Kiev taxi service, which during the crisis began to experience financial difficulties. At the meeting, Vladimir said that he wanted to create something like a delivery service. Having a small call center and controlled cars, he was looking for the direction in which to try to expand. In fact, it was necessary to make a website with a product catalog and a phone to order the delivery of these products. Vladimir agreed with one restaurant that he would carry sushi from there to his customers. The first site was unpretentious - without a basket of orders, with a photo of one dish on the first page, which you could click through to browse the proposed menu.

After the first option, the second option with a basket was developed almost immediately:


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Made and forgotten. As I understood, Vladimir himself did not really count on anything, and I understood that in order to get some feedback, it was not enough just to launch the site, it was necessary to have infusions in advertising that were not actually intended. The call center works, so customers will call and order anyway. On that and said goodbye.

Perspectivity

As it turned out later, orders began to appear, first 1-2 per day, and after a couple of months it reached 10. Clients began to order not only sushi, but also other goods that were not in the catalog - someone asked to bring cigarettes, someone then to call in another supermarket, and looking at the moon, someone wanted a beer. Traffic came from search engines, solely due to the content on the site.

The variety and number of orders grew, so Vladimir asked his contact center operators to record all new customer requests. And there were very extraordinary orders. Once they called from a travel agency from Austria with a request to deliver their ice cream to 30 Ukrainian partners, and another client bought a bicycle from the Children's World. Such requests prompted the idea that almost everything could be delivered, of course, within reason.

Having seen some “flags” of perspective, Vladimir again turned to me, but already with ideas on how to improve the project. It was necessary to make it possible to start on the site different restaurants with lists of the proposed menus. The number of dishes and products on the site increased, more partners were added, many began to come themselves. The business model has changed - if at first they earned only on delivery, then over time, the partners began to provide the company with a discount on their menu. So there was another important source of income for the taxi service.

Development

In 2010, there was a need to further improve the company's online resource — add more category buttons, news and a product catalog, put up thematic links for those products that are primarily looking for, order a good layout and work on the design. We started thinking about the usability of the site, and thinking about the fact that the user could make the order as comfortably as possible.

The layout of the main page of the site of the time (left), compared with the present design (right):



In parallel with the appearance of the site, by the efforts of the staff of the team, which already then consisted of 10 people (who were in the state, who were freelancing), started its SEO promotion - placed unique subject articles on the site, increased the internal and external reference masses, thus gradually increasing it appeal to search engines. The result was not long in coming - after some time the attendance increased to 600-700 unique users.

And here they made one significant mistake, which later turned into serious problems. We decided to turn to a seo-specialist who promised to bring the site to the TOP - 3 for ten key requests at a price of $ 50 / month for 1 key request within 1 month. At first everything seemed to be going well, and the promises taken were kept.

Filter

But, somehow, one day in August, having checked indexation in the morning, we found that the site did not appear at all in a search engine when entering certain key queries that had previously been the first. SEO specialist assured: this is most likely a temporary situation, a search engine update. But after three days it became clear that our site fell under the filter. It was a stress for the whole team. The flow of orders immediately began to fall. Over the next three weeks, Vladimir and I shoveled the entire Internet in search of a comforting answer to one single question - can we get out of the filter?

All SEO companies to which we then turned for help, in one voice asserted that we had no chance. As it turned out, we flew under the filter for the use of flashing links. The self-made SEO specialist bought links on “Sapa” and didn’t fill up the bill at the wrong time, which is why links to our site either appeared or disappeared.

But to our happiness, we still had a chance - we were recommended to the company, whose specialists undertook to remove the site from the filter in a month. By the way, we wrote an appeal to Google in the panel of webmasters with a request to reconsider our attitude to our site. But as time went on, there was absolutely no confidence that everything would work out for us, so over the course of a month we created two more specialized delivery resources that we began to actively develop.

Our joy knew no bounds when, at the end of 2010, on New Year's holidays, the site came out with a filter, and positions in a search engine for some queries even jumped to the previous level. As a result, we cooperated for some time with the company that saved us. And later they returned to the classic method of promotion with internal content.

Going to the regions

Soon the understanding came that there is a similar delivery market in the regions. So why not go there, having at your disposal a “run-in” model in the capital, a call center and an effective technology for building logistics? First came to Krivoy Rog, hanging the site on the subdomain. So from the main site with one click of the button you could go to the regional one. As it turned out later, the use of the subdomain was inefficient in terms of optimization. When they expanded to Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk, Kharkov, they decided to abandon this practice.

In the regions, the development was with "surprises". For example, in Kryvyi Rih, problems arose because of the cost of delivery, people were not ready to pay for it. Therefore, we were not immediately confident in the correctness of our decision to open up in this region. But later we noticed that foreign citizens, who are accustomed to using similar online services in their homeland, became our reliable customers. Then we realized the potential is there, but it is necessary to translate the entire menu of the site (which could be the main source of local customers traffic) into English.

In other regions, the expansion was no less painful - we were often not understood. Sometimes it came to funny moments - at one meeting the director of a serious restaurant in Dnepropetrovsk asked: “Guys, do you have few restaurants in Kiev? Well, while you take, the food will cool? ". With some it was even harder - we simply were not taken seriously. By the way, access to the regions took away a lot of manpower and resources, and the effect was initially not at all tangible. Well, at least we did not look for regional representatives - active people themselves found us and offered cooperation.

Taxi refusal and transfer to courier delivery

Understanding that the delivery service has good prospects came at the beginning of 2011. Even then Vladimir told me that he would complete the year without a taxi service, and invited me to work as a full-time programmer, I agreed. We started to develop a new site, deciding to completely rewrite it. Discussion of innovations was conducted from early spring to autumn 2011. At the beginning of 2012, we introduced them. With the delay of course, because it was necessary to go through the New Year holidays, and only then test our innovations.

We have ordered a layout team with which we have collaborated, ordered layout using Html 5, improved the cart, entered the registration form, put the distance calculation on the website, translated it completely into English, the sites of other cities have now become autonomous, each with its own banner system. We also added bookmarks for social networks, improved the menu, made the site tree, began to develop an interactive search. Instead of the category buttons, we put handy icons, more information began to be posted about partners. We wanted the sites of cities to rule as efficiently as possible, so that regional specialists could add information quickly and conveniently.

The site has been made modular, scalable, which allows it to be expanded without serious consequences now. A few months later, they developed their own applications for Iphone and Android, mobile device users received an additional service. Also entered an interactive search.

Modern view of the resource:

Search for working capital

Improvements, expansion to the regions, investments in advertising and marketing have hit hard, and did not develop as quickly as we imagined. Often it was not very easy. The unwillingness of the call center and the logistics service to the rapid increase in the number of orders in certain seasons, the discrepancy between the revenue and expenditure side led to financial problems.

We understood that it was necessary to grow rapidly, because sooner or later serious competitors could appear on the market. And only due to the company's turnover to grow, and even at the proper level, it is impossible to protect your business.

Moreover, someone has already tried to “drown out” us by organizing a DDos-attack on the resources of the company's website. Which also made a couple of days nervous. Fortunately, there were additional resources, so we quickly moved the sites to them and practically lost nothing.
As air needed financial injections. But where and how to look for them - no one from the team had a clear vision.

As usually happens, quite by chance, acquaintances offered to participate in IDCEE (an investment forum in Kiev), and we thought that we could attract a lot of users there. But as understood later - we were wrong. Members after the participation did not increase much.

But in the end we had one very important acquaintance, which later greatly changed the fate of our company. When we stood at the booth, a foreigner approached us and began to talk with us about a similar project that is already successfully operating in Germany. He saw photographs of dishes on our stand and became interested. In response, we told more about our project, and his eyes lit up. As it turned out, it was one of the leaders of the Swiss Investment Fund, which had already invested in a similar company in Germany. As a result, the company raised several rounds of investment, the last of which amounted to 16 million euros. He was pleasantly surprised that a similar service also works in Ukraine, and was very interested in our project. In the end, he asked us to send the company’s development indicators and promised to contact us. We sent. Time passed, but no one called. As we learned later - six months or a year of waiting is common practice for such funds. Although then for us it was important every month. At that time, we were interested in several other foreign and domestic investors. But in April 2012, the Swiss appeared and we signed a memorandum of intent to invest in our company. They conducted due diligence, valuing it at $ 1 million. And now we have moved to a new office, expanded our staff, are now full of strength and energy to grow and scale.

As we later learned: the online food ordering segment of restaurants today is a trending trend in e-commerce in the world. Similar companies are opening in all emerging markets, similar to those already successful in Europe and the USA, such as GrubHub, Lieferando.de, LIeferheld, JustEat. Then we did not know it and just started to carry food from one good restaurant. And then the market itself showed us the right path. Now we have opened our representative offices in 7 cities, the call center serves about 5 thousand orders per month, there are more than 2 thousand regular partners on our website, and the company has also attracted investments in addition. The plans include expanding the market, improving the quality of services, and moving to a more progressive model.