5 Minutes with Zoom2U CEO Steve Orenstein
Passionate about business and technology, Steve Orenstein spotted a gap in the market when he experienced inefficient courier companies while ordering items online. He set out to fix the problem by building a customer-focused delivery service that was fast and reliable. Today, Zoom2u has a network of over 1200 couriers across Australia who deliver within 3-hours, same day and interstate nationally.
We sat down with Steve for a speedy chat about how he started Zoom2u and where he feels the industry is headed.
Before starting Zoom2u, I ran a technology business, Connect2Field which focused on dispatch of work to a mobile workforce. After I sold that business I was sitting at home ordering all these things online, and I kept on experiencing courier companies arriving when I wasn’t at home, which was very frustrating. Based on the technology I’d built previously, I knew I could build a courier platform that gave customers a much better experience.
We started in 2014 and in that first month we did about 250 deliveries. Since then we’ve had more than 50,000 customers register on our platform; we’ve done over 600,000 deliveries; and we have a network of 1,200 drivers.
I love the challenge of this type of business because you have to match supply and demand at the exact same time. In the early days we might have only had five drivers but could be doing 30 bookings in a day. It was a big achievement to get through that initial start-up period and get the investment we needed.
Even in the early stages we were able to win some very big companies who now use our platform. It proved that the customer experience was really important. Since then we’ve built a strong team and attracted some really talented people who have helped the business grow significantly.
I think autonomous vehicles are going to become a big part of the business within the next 10 years. There will be lots of benefits from a consumer’s point of view in terms of things moving faster between longer distances. Everyone thinks it’s all very scary but it’s actually going to be safer. I think we’ll look back at this period of time and think, ‘Wow we actually had people driving cars? How dangerous was that?’ An autonomous vehicle can look 360-degrees, whereas a human is only looking straight ahead and can be distracted.
Logistics is a really exciting space to be in at the moment because is going through an enormous amount of change; ecommerce is driving that change and that growth will continue. It’s a huge market in Australia, about 4.5 billion dollars and growing at about five percent annually.
In terms of the future, there’s a lot more development that we foresee – we’ve got ideas about ways we can even further improve the customer experience. Day in and day out that’s what we’re working on – building a much better delivery experience for our customers.
