We realize that in Singapore, there is a growing need for proper food to be delivered.
We realize that in Singapore, there is a growing need for proper food to be delivered.
With so many services moving into an app-based platform, with food delivery being one of the oldest, why did Deliveroo decide to come in to the market at this time?
Basically, when we decided to come to Singapore, we realize there is a growing need for proper food to be delivered. Why? Because Singapore is a market that looks for convenience, it is a super-fast paced market, but what doesn’t exist yet is a reliable delivery service – in terms of operations – and lack of technology that allows you to track the status of your food. We decided to come to Singapore because of the growing market and its density – we’re looking for cities that are highly populated that are not so big – for example, Amsterdam is highly populated but it’s completely flat. We also look at cities like Barcelona, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore – cities that highly populated with a huge demand for restaurants.
Besides its users, what are the other things that delivery-service apps should do to be sustainable in this rapidly growing field?
When managing a food delivery business, the first stage needs you to focus on the customer acquisition strategy, and what really makes the difference here is service levels. It means that when you order, you want to eat your food now. The other thing you want in order to remain sustainable is your riders’ utilization, and becoming more efficient with your fleet. Also, consider how you can combine your technology with the efficiency of your fleet, and increase productivity of your riders. Instead of doing only two orders per hour, see how they can do four, five, six. How our technology works is we connect restaurants with a tablet each to our back-end, and we connect that to riders on our app. Being efficient in managing your fleet is probably one of the most important things for the long term.
What’s the biggest challenge you have in running this mobile-based service?
The problem here is how we can hire so many riders on this path we’ve gone. I’ve started the company here alone in October. Three months after our launch, I have 450 riders. What I need to think about, is how I can just use my technology to become more efficient with the way we deliver food, because in Singapore, there are limited riders – it is not an infinite thing. We need to think about is the new ways and features in our technology we need to put in and work. For example, instead of motorbikes, we can do it with bicycles or runners.
What’s your next step after achieving island-wide delivery, then?
What I want in Singapore is to become a brand. What I want to be is to have that synergy when someone says they want to order food, the first thing that goes to their mind is “Deliveroo”. Making Deliveroo as a brand, or as a need to consumers, isn’t going to ‘happen’ in the next month. It takes time, it’s about service, and it’s also the quality of the service. Imagine – Singapore has a potential market of 2.75 million people. With all the food delivery players we have in Singapore, we’re barely covering more than 0.6 percent of the total population that is eager to order food online.
In the United States, you have all these players doing – I don’t know – a hundred thousand orders in Manhattan in one day with a population of 1.5 million. I think that this is a long path. We deliver island-wide, we provide more convenience, and we become even better in terms of using our technology along optimization, adding features, developing our corporate functionality – all that’s in place, but we need to improve more things. At the end, when we do Deliveroo, we try to get feedback from consumers, and we incorporate all this into new features for them.
