Courier Hell

Lootmaar has been online for 40 days now. In the next few posts, I’ll walk you through the life of a quasi-entrepreneur.

Many a slip, as they say. In the days leading to the beta launch, our courier company backed out of the deal because of a mass exodus of employees on their end, leaving us in the highly desirable position of having a business to launch without the fulfillment capability. We thought about hiring a rider, stealing someone’s driver and scrapping the COD process altogether. The fourth option was for Noman (my partner) to hurl around packages in his glinting new Accord. Noman figured that he could use some (more) driving practice, and the matter was settled. Some concessions had to be made in the process, the most striking one of which was limiting the beta to Karachi. While the immediate problem was solved, the need for a repeatable, mature, scalable process remained.

While this was happening, we came to the realization that our technology development process wasn’t sustainable. To give you some background, over the last 6 months, I had been working long hours to write detailed specifications, which went on to two very smart team members who constituted our technology group. One was responsible for the UI and the other for PHP. Two things happened: The circumstances of our PHP guru changed, and he could no longer give the kind of time Lootmaar required. The second thing was that spending 5 hours a day just to make two people coordinate (they were not co-located) didn’t seem like a very wise use of my time. After an arduous meeting and telecon, Noman and I decided that we needed an outsourced tech team.

References were scanned, specifications were sent out, negotiations were done, but a deal was not made. Choosing a technology partner seemed trivial enough: Find a team, evaluate skill, check references, send specs, get quote, negotiate, sign contract. That’s how most procurement processes go, or so we thought. Of course, we didn’t take into account Ramadan, when productivity also goes into fasting, nor did we consider how unprofessional small software houses can be. Replying to email and meeting commitments is so passe.

Lesson learned: Overestimate, and then double it.

-Adnan

ps. This post was written before the “emergency.” The resilience of my country surprises me. We’ve been beaten, butchered and dismembered, but we haven’t been defeated. Jeay Pakistan.