Running a delivery company on a college campus.
Do you know how much money is spent on burritos and hamburgers by college students each year all over the world? It is an astounding 33 billion dollars. Yes, that is how much money students spend each year on food alone — just burgers and burritos. Well, college students want good food; they want good, hot meals for themselves when they get back from class exhausted at the end of the day, or when they’re having a challenging day. Well, I’ve had awful days in college, and after a long day of work, all I want is some excellent food. However, I want something better — a meal delivered to my dorm, removing the necessity for me to go get my food — so that it can be brought wherever I want. Additionally, a delivery mechanism for everything on the campus is possible. For example, you can pick up and drop off laundry, deliver stationery, etc. As a result, you can start a successful business on campus, trying to take advantage of your fellow classmates’ willingness to pay for comfort. On my campus, I attempted something similar, but I had to discontinue it before it became profitable, and I got canned as a result. In my post, I’ll go into detail about what I did on the campus of my college.
My college students had money, spent a fortune to obtain a quality education, could afford everything, and typically spent 400–500 Rupees each day, which is higher than the average for students in the rest of India. In addition to that, they were indeed lazy. When wealthy and lazy get together, everything becomes better because you can reap the benefits of their laziness. RoadRunner — is exactly what I’m about to introduce to you. We first built a system that linked those who wanted to make deliveries in order to make money with others who wanted to have things delivered, and trust me when I say that there were many people on both sides of the equation. We were making 30 to 40 deliveries each day when we first started this service, and I was confident that number would increase to 100 in the next few days. We didn’t even need marketing since at the collegiate level, word-of-mouth travels quickly. In terms of revenue, we made about 1.3k on the first day of operation. All of the money went to the students who were delivering packages because we needed to keep them motivated or else they would drop out because they were taking time away from their studies and, the more importantly, since they were going to deal with college stereotyping. We started off with a team of about 5 runners, and on average they were each earning 180 rupees, which made them quite pleased. However, the earnings might have been far greater because we could have increased the cost of each delivery because customers were willing to pay more. Because the service was so inexpensive and they did not like paying so little for one delivery, many consumers did not utilise it at all. You might not observe this peculiar market behaviour very regularly. We were arranging pickup and drop-off of laundry as well as delivering food. The laundry model was quite popular, and individuals were willing to charge a high price for it. But since we were arbitrarily allocating orders and in need of more personnel to ensure that someone was always available to deliver, the system needed to be better organised if the order fulfilment rate was to increase. Although the earnings may have been very low, this model would have eventually been very profitable. There was also the possibility of expanding it to other colleges, but I was unable to do so. I hope someone reading this might find my idea useful. Best of luck!
