igo: Thinking Global, Acting Local

One morning in a town about an hour from Cali (Colombia), an old friend recommended a restaurant that he said had delicious food that I had to try. I was so busy that I decided to have it delivered. But I found that none of the delivery platforms had coverage. Second, I was recommended an app that worked intermittently and finally, thinking that the third time is the charm, I managed to communicate with the restaurant to discover that my order could take an hour to arrive… What a frustration!

The next day, the person who recommended the restaurant asked me about my experience… And well, you can imagine my answer…

After similar experiences with other businesses, where delivery times of more than an hour per order and sometimes receiving the wrong order were frequent, we decided to speak directly with them. We managed to understand that although the restaurants wanted to deliver, they simply could not, they did not know how to make an intelligent logistics in their business and how to achieve the satisfaction of their customers who today demand more speed and better quality in their order; in addition to having to download applications that today they do not know and learn to manage them. At the same time we discovered that in this city and in most of the emerging cities, there is a figure of informal transporters or “motoratones”, who had too much free time and wanted to earn extra money in that space of inactivity.

We were inspired to come up with a solution that would put an end to this problem: one that would help not only small businesses but also emerging cities to be smarter. We put together the best team and with few resources we created igo’s first MVP: a Chatbot on WhatsApp that took orders and plotted the most efficient routes to make the +600 deliveries, a network of 70 commercial allies, in a city of 200K inhabitants (Tuluá)in just 24 days…. At this point we knew that we wanted a solution….

Can you imagine not only being able to connect with your brand friend but also being able to order your transport and buy on your favorite ecommerce with just one click? So you can say, “I want a burger” or “I need to get to work” and in less than 15 minutes, someone will do it for you?

That’s our ideal world and that’s how we do it at igo.