Scenario: I am in a movie, I need some of my things to be transported to a particular place in the city. If there could be a service to pick my stuff and deliver it to the concerned person, I would be so relieved.
Day in and day out, I would always have some stuff to be transported to some other place in the city.
I might want to courier some stuff. But they don't come to me. I wish they do.
I might want to post something. I wish somebody pick up the posts from me.
Okay. So the goal is provide service that could transport anything within the city.
Disadvantages: We only have very less scenarios like this. Most of the times, if we might want to take some money or valuables (like Passport :P), we would transport it ourselves.
But if am ready to pay for it, I wish there be some service.
Implementation: We could initially target a famous courier service in the city. All those people who would have to courier something. We say we could go to them and pick up the stuff.
We might want to target a very big post office too.
Actually, it might be better if we can crowdsource this. That way, managing the supply chain which has to carry the goods around is easy.
ReplyDeleteThe crowdsourcing part goes like this: Suppose I am at my office in gachibowli. I want some stuff from Miyapur to come to me. I would register for the babai service (which moves things around, say babaibook). I will place a request with the size of the item, place, urgency (normal/high), reward i am willing to pay for it. Then someone reaching office late can pick it up from my home and give it to me and the reward will be tranferred to his "babaibook" account.
Thoughts?
Did not really understand what you meant.
ReplyDeleteDid you mean there's a service, that registers people like groupon ? And do we maintain their credit for the carry work they have done? And so we only get paid through ads or something ?
If that's the case, there's a major demerit. Colleagues in office might not want to do this. They don't care for money that much. So when there is a situation to choose between time and money, they choose not to do this service. So, this would not guarantee that the service will be done on the same day or worse, the book might not get delivered at all!!!
This loses the focus and commitment too. No guarantees.
Clarity Please!
Fedex and all the other major courier services in the US already have this. Pretty sure there would be something like this even in India.
ReplyDelete@Babe:
ReplyDelete1. Yes. I meant a service (which can as well be a facebook app).
2. Ads is definitely not the business model. While
I am only half-sure if Indians will do it (I knew strangers from Microsoft who just saw my MS Id card and gave lift till office in their Honda city - they might help if there is a need on the way. And, we used to see a lot of "Anybody going to Bangalore/Redmond and willing to carry medicines/small package" mails in the internal mailing list), Americans will surely do it.
3. If people can share their homes with strangers (AirBnB) and share their cars with strangers ( GetAround), people can do this too.
4. Why does the carrier (carrying person) give a commision to us? We provide the transit insurance for the object being transferred. And we know some information about this guy's identity (we took this while he registered). So, everyone knows that he took the object. He can't escape with it - coz we know his real identity. If a person agrees to take the object, then there is not much of a problem - we can work things out.
The only problem is whether people will actually agree to transfer things (which I "believe" that people will do).