Around March 2015, while out drinking with friends, we started wondering about what happened when people needed alcohol and they didn't want to leave their homes(In Nairobi). A little bit of research later, we found a few delivery services, but none that was trying to tackle a huge market.
That's how Boozeit was born; myself, two friends and almost no capital at all. Two of us had just parted ways with Kilimall, a startup we had been part of. I'd just moved into a shared apartment and had about two months' rent worth of cash.
So there we were; three co-founders and very little money. I'll refer to the other co-founders as co-founder 2 and co-founder 3. Co-founder 2, who was the more technical one among us, built our first website as I worked on branding and initial marketing strategies. Co-founder 3's forté was operations. The website was ugly and buggy, but we were exhilarated to have something up.
Our initial thought was to convince a liquor store to give us some of their stock which we would have in our apartment and do deliveries from there using bodaboda(motorcycle taxis) riders as the link to customers. It seemed pretty straightforward. A friend with some connections managed to get us some sizeable stock (worth around Ksh. 300,000.
After creating some social media buzz, we started getting orders. It soon became apparent how difficult and expensive it would be to get the products delivered beyond a couple kilometres. With us operating from Ngong' road and orders coming in from South C, Thika Road, Lang'ata, the rider fees would average around Ksh. 700. With an average value per order of around Ksh. 1000 at the time, it made zero sense for a customer to pay an extra 600-1000 bob to get drinks delivered. We couldn't get anything delivered for a couple weeks and the owner of the stock became impatient and came to collect it. It was back to the drawing board.
We then decided to work with a liquor store, where we basically listed their inventory on Boozeit, and since their prices were already relatively high, we couldn't add any margins. The plan was to drive the order numbers up first before we could negotiate better prices. One problem sorted. Next was the riders. We managed to convince a small deliveries company to station one rider outside the partner liquor store. They'd charge us a flat rate of Ksh. 200 per delivery - if we'd give them a minimum of 15 deliveries a day. We thought that was a good deal, and we started delivering the orders.
Of course we were losing money per delivery. By this point I had been kicked out of the apartment and was crashing with friends. Co-founder 3 had at this point borrowed some Ksh. 70,000 from the mum which kept us going for a few weeks.
The Boozeit website was our weakest link at this point; buggy, crashing all the time and struggling to cope with the few orders. It also wasn't well optimized for mobile, at a time when over 70% of e-commerce transactions were through phones. As such the cart abandonment rates were high, with many opting for alternative ways to get their drinks as the more patient customers opted to place their orders via call. It was both hectic and exhiliarating: a weird amalgamation of excitement and terror. Our days were spent doing customer care, ensuring orders were delivered and writing tens of emails & making calls to anyone we thought would want to invest in our startup.
From the onset, I had envisionined a marketplace model, one that would allow us to work with various stores closer to customers; saving us big on delivery distance(and subsequently cost); but we had neither the skill-set to build one, nor the money to pay someone to do it. The order numbers were growing though, and I hoped we'd find a way to fix things before the boat became too heavy to float.
Around September of the same year, our store partner store(who also had distribution rights), told us of a greek Vodka and Ouzo brand that he had been granted rights to distribute. We came up with a collab model where we'd do joint marketing campaigns that would get Boozeit, the store and the brand some much needed attention and traction. We reckoned we'd use the opportunity of pooled resources as a chance for an official launch for Boozeit!
The friends we(myself and co-founder 3) were crashing with were into media production, and were extremely helpful with the campaign, taking charge of photo shoots - including getting some volunteer models, making the posters and campaign videos. It was a three-week social media campaign, culminating in an event at the liquor store's venue.
On the week of the main event, the website started acting very funny. The event was to be on a Friday. We'd wake up on Monday with all banners not displayed; a category would go missing the next day, products would disappear and so on. Co-founder 2, who had developed and had the credentials to the website, had been extremely hard to get a hold of for some time now. It was frustrating! All the attention we were directing to our website had seen a spike in traffic, only for users to find it lacking in basic functionality. On the day of the event, the site was completely unusable. We lost almost all existing and would-be customers in that one week.
Continue to Part 2.