A VC in Vacationland

.@jason's perspective during the boxbee.com presentation. #launch2013 #launchfestival (Photo credit: kate.gardiner)

According to xconomy, the San Francisco-based Boxbee took home the best overall new startup award this year at the Launch Conference based on its plans to breathe new life into the messy offline world of urban storage. Simply put, the service aims to simplify the storage process so that users can just box up what they want to store and let it take care of the rest.

For those who are moving, traveling, or are just looking for extra space at home, the startup’s “secure storage hive” allows you to order boxes, which it claims it can deliver to your doorstep within the hour.

Once you’ve packed your boxes, Boxbee helps you to schedule a pickup, taking the lifting, truck-packing and transporting out of your hands. On top of that, the startup claims to go the extra mile to adapt the whole storage process to its busy customers, by allowing you to schedule pickups and returns on the Web or via its mobile app and promises to complete pickup and returns in less than two hours. Well, two hours for “carloads” and next-day pickup and delivery for storage that requires a cargo van or truck.

The service then stores your possessions until you need them again, and provides complementary services to sweeten the deal, allowing you to ship your boxes elsewhere from its app or web dashboard or have them donated. To streamline the process of pickup and returns and offer more flexibility, Boxbee’s dashboard keeps an inventory of images for the contents of each box in your account, including tagged descriptions, which allow you to choose the particular box you need without requiring someone to open it and rifle through its contents. It will then return the box to you in two hours.

The M4 had opened all the way to Bristol in 1971 (Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

My good friend Adrian Gonzales had the following news item on Logistics Viewpoints. Interesting freeium model to penetrate the SMB routing marketplace? We'll see:

Out of
the UK, an interesting startup called Speedy Route launched a free, online
multi-stop routing solution. Here are some excerpts from the website:

Speedy
Route calculates the best route when visiting multiple locations and then
returning back to the start. It is ideal for delivery drivers, sales people on
the road, or anyone who needs to make multiple stops. Speedy Route re-orders
the locations you enter into the best optimal order, so that every location is
visited once before returning to your start location in the shortest and
quickest way possible. Speedy Route also provides full driving directions
between all stops.

Speedy
Route is brought to you by Magic Hat Solutions Ltd. Speedy Route is currently a
free web service, but we reserve the right to charge a fee to use the
service in the future [emphasis mine]. Speedy Route incorporates
Google Directions in its results, and uses portions of the Open source software
OpenOpt to help calculate the optimal route.

On the
one hand, you can dismiss this solution as a "toy" compared to more
sophisticated routing and scheduling solutions. But on the other, this solution
coupled with a freemium business model (it's clear the company plans to charge
users in the future to solve more complex routes) might be an effective
approach to penetrate the low end of the market. To me, this is another example
of how software companies continue to experiment with go-to-market strategies
and deployment models to cost-effectively service the SMB market.

English: City seal of Detroit, Michigan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As fireworks bloom in the night sky over Comerica, we’re idling in a Detroit Bus Company bus across the street, in front of the Fox Theatre, and Lanzon is driving. A Detroit Department of Transportation bus has jumped the curb a half block in front of us, and an ambulance puts on its flashers so the bus can back up without getting rammed by impatient drivers. “Oh my God, are you kidding me?” Lanzon says with exasperation. Andy Didorosi, the 25-year-old founder of the Detroit Bus Company and Lanzon’s patient co-pilot, passenger ambassador, and all-around transit cheerleader, turns to me and says with pride, “Gail drives this thing like a Corvette.”

“This thing” would be a 1995 Ford Bluebird bus known as Bettis, which for Pittsburgh Steelers fans is self-explanatory. (It’s named after Detroit native Jerome Bettis, a running back better known by his nickname: The Bus.) It runs on biodiesel and sports a spray-painted mural by a local artist on the side. Inside, there’s a mounted iPad playing tunes off Spotify. Bettis is one of two Detroit Bus Company rigs out on the road this busy Labor Day weekend, which also counts music festivals in Hamtramck and Royal Oak among its offerings.

This is also the first night of the Detroit Bus Company’s new on-demand method of delivery. “Routes are super old hat,” Didorosi says. “We switched to on-demand—we were taking data all along on where people were riding. It opened the range within the city and every time the bus is parked, we save money.”

Instead of one bus traveling all night between downtown and the immediate suburbs to the north, Royal Oak and Ferndale, and another bus doing a downtown “party loop,” riders can now call for a ride from anywhere in a “green zone” that encompasses the neighborhoods of Woodbridge, Corktown, Midtown, downtown, Eastern Market, and Lafayette Park/East Jefferson. For $5 per person, cash or credit, they can get a ride to anywhere within this green zone or to suburban drop-off points. The buses run on the weekends from 6:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.

Didorosi describes his self-funded startup as “the bus company built on the back of social media.” Though it’s only been in operation since June, it already has 2,746 likes on Facebook and 472 followers on Twitter. His clientele comes to him almost entirely via word-of-mouth, and he has already purchased three more buses—one of which may be running as soon as next weekend—in the hopes of expanding to more suburbs like Birmingham and running buses during the day.

Didorosi created the Detroit Bus Company as a reaction to Detroit’s well-known public transportation issues. In short: The buses are always late or sometimes don’t run at all. And the suburbs have their own system entirely, which makes getting outside the city a hassle. Didorosi’s operation is almost the opposite of the Detroit People Mover, a $210 million system opened in in 1987 that circles the downtown area in an endless 3-mile loop and attracts only a tenth of its projected ridership.

Didorosi, who is in favor of regional transit authorities that combine private ingenuity and dollars with the public domain, points to the game Sim City as a good lesson for city planners everywhere. “If you cut out transportation funding, your city immediately turns to shit,” he says. “Transit is the secret linchpin—cities live and die by public transportation.”

Though Detroit’s city bus system is trying to modernize, and in fact just launched a new transit app designed by Code for America at the end of August, funding shortfalls have meant that progress is slow. As Didorosi puts it: “What good is an app telling you when the bus is coming if the bus is three hours late? Technology can only support a good bus system, not create it.”

The Detroit Bus Company app, launching any day now, will allow riders to summon a bus using their smart phones. Didorosi, who currently serves as the dispatcher, says he hopes the app puts him out of a job. The Detroit Bus Company is also working with another local startup, Flocktag, to create a frequent rider loyalty program that he hopes to have up and running at the end of the month.

New tech aside, what Didorosi enjoys most is exposing new riders to the city. He plans to start hosting all-inclusive dinners, where riders will enjoy food and drink while taking “guided expeditions” of Detroit. He wants his riders to use the Detroit Bus Company to get comfortable with downtown, which he calls “the DMZ” of Detroit, and eventually want to venture further and further outside the green zone. “I’m so excited to bring people downtown—it’s a great, non-committal way for people to see the city.”

Lanz0n, a Roseville, MI native, actually typifies the kind of rider Didorosi hopes to attract. “I’ve seen more of Detroit on this job than I have my whole 43 years of living here,” she explains. “It’s actually a beautiful place. It’s a whole new world that I never knew existed.”

The Detroit Bus Company isn’t Didorosi’s first entrepreneurial gig. As a teenager, he started a business buying distressed vehicles and fixing them in a shop at Detroit City Airport. He later went on to found the Paper Street incubator in Ferndale, which he has since sold. He also spent a year writing for Jalopnik, the Gawker Media site devoted to automotive news. (Didorosi still freelances forPopular Mechanics, Hell for Leather, and other niche publications as a way to raise capital for the Detroit Bus Company.)

Didorosi represents the new brand of Detroit entrepreneur frustrated with a city government that doesn’t always seem eager to partner with them, and sometimes even seems to throw up bureaucratic roadblocks just because it can. What he sees himself doing with the Detroit Bus Company most of all, perhaps, is disrupting an old model of doing things that seems to hold progress at bay and frustrate residents and business owners alike.

“The city should be a lubricant instead of a hindrance,” Didorosi adds. “There are real structural issues behind why people don’t do businesses with the city. It’s just upside down. There’s demand, there’s people, but the last thing in the way is the city itself.”

As Lanzon swings the bus back around and heads toward the suburbs to drop off the passengers who hopped on downtown, Didorosi chats with the riders and passes them his phone so they can see pictures of an accident that occurred a few weeks ago when a drunk driver slammed into one of the buses. (Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and Didorosi says the bus was built so solidly that riders barely felt it.) 

As Bettis pulls up to the drop-off point in Royal Oak, Didorosi says that he plans to grow the company by continuing to court his prime demographic: Digitally aware early adopters who are interested in Detroit."

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