Bystro - an online water delivery platform

Hyderabad city has a huge demand for mineral drinking water. There are more than 3,500 mineral water plants in and around the Hyderabad city. As per the estimates, the rough drinking water jar requirements are over 500,000 jars a day. The delivery of water jars was mainly managed by nearby depanneurs, who used to deliver the cans at their convenience. This often causes a problem for the buyers and they are left thirsty for a long time.

At Bystro, we aimed to solve that problem. Our initial idea was to build a platform that brings the buyer and the seller on the same platform and present multiple buying options for the buyer. We did a basic survey to identify the root cause for depanneurs for delayed delivery. 

After surveying 73 depanneurs, we found that each depanneur sells 30-40 water jar daily on an average. Over 40% of shops were willing to be part of the new platform, while close to 23% of owners were interested to join the platform but they didn’t have a smartphone. Coming to delivery, water jars were just an add-on product for most of the depanneur owners and they were very honest to admit that they will deliver once there are no more customers in the shop. 

After the survey, we were back to ground zero. If we have to solve the problems for buyers, we need to think about something different. Thus, we revamped our business model and decided to set up our delivery system as well as our warehouses. 

We digitized the entire eco-system by creating two different mobile applications - Buyers and delivery boy. We adopted the lean startup methodology and first launched our MVP in March 2016. Following the agile software development methodology, we added several key features to both buyer and delivery boy applications. 

The key benefits for the buyers:

1. Multiple water brands

2. Three different types of delivery

3. Schedule recurring orders

4. Track the GPS location of the delivery boy

5. In-app payment option as well as cash on delivery and PayTm (e-wallet) transfer

The key features for the delivery boys:

1. GPS enabled delivery assistance

2. Equal order distribution among delivery boys from the same warehouse

Our primary target audiences were IT working professionals - family or bachelors. We also developed a unique priority service for businesses. Over the first year of operation, we expanded the Bystro service in several parts of Hyderabad city by setting up the five warehouses. 

We adopted several marketing strategies such as carpet bombing, email marketing, social media marketing, pamphlet distributions, and others. In two years of operations, we delivered more than 75,000 deliveries and generated over six million INR in revenues. 

Despite more than 2,300 regular customers and over 5,200 customers with more than two orders, we were unable to hit the target of 500 cans a day from one warehouse, which we defined as our KPIs. The best we achieved was 228 cans a day from the Madhapur warehouse. 

After overseeing the product, operations, and sells for two years, I realized there were several things we did wrong. To learn more about sustainable business and to learn why the majority of fortune 500 companies come from North America, I quit Bystro and moved to Canada in 2018.

I’ll talk about the mistakes I made as a founder of Bystro in my next article.