In our first post, we followed one cake from Yaba to Lekki. This time, let's zoom out.
Look closely at almost any business in Lagos or Abuja and you'll find a small delivery company hiding inside it. The pharmacy has a boy on a bike. The tailor has a cousin who "knows a rider". The caterer borrows her brother's car on Saturdays. None of them set out to run logistics, but every one of them does, a little badly, every day.
Relay exists so they don't have to. And once moving things across a city stops being the hard part, a lot of ideas that used to be too much trouble start to look like good businesses.
Here are some of them. A few are obvious. Most, we hope, are not.
First, the ones you'd expect
Restaurants and cloud kitchens. The order is packed, a nearby rider is offered the job, and your customer watches the food come to them instead of calling to ask.
Pharmacies. Medicine goes out the door with a rider you can see on a map. Anything that needs to stay cold can be matched only with riders who can keep it cold.
Online shops. Whether you sell on a website or through Instagram, your customer can see the delivery price before they pay, and it won't change halfway there.
Groceries and errands. Someone else does the market run. You follow it from your phone.
These are the reasons most people come to Relay. The interesting part is what else becomes possible.
Across town, right now
Some deliveries are small and urgent. They don't need a van; they need someone reliable, quickly.
The contract that must be signed today. A law firm in Ikoyi needs a signed agreement at a bank in Victoria Island before three o'clock. It goes out as an urgent job, only to riders above a rating you choose, or only to riders from a fleet you trust. Everyone involved can see where the envelope is.
The part that gets the car moving again. A driver breaks down on the Lekki-Epe Expressway. The mechanic knows exactly which part he needs, and it's sitting in a shop at Ladipo. An app that connects roadside mechanics to parts dealers, and sends the part out the moment it's paid for, is a real business. It only ever needed a delivery network that nobody could afford to build alone.
The thing you forgot at home. Your laptop charger. Your ID card. The keys your sister needs. A simple "send anything across town" app, built for the everyday version of this problem, is maybe a weekend of work on top of Relay.
One pickup, many doors
A single Relay delivery can have several stops, and that one detail opens more doors than you'd expect.
Aso-ebi season. One tailor, forty guests, forty outfits, all due before the wedding on Saturday. Instead of forty phone calls and a very long week, it's one pickup and a list of drop-offs, and each guest can see when theirs is on the way. Anyone who has ever coordinated aso-ebi for a family wedding is already smiling.
Subscriptions that go out on a round. Weekly zobo and smoothies. Meal prep for busy professionals. Fresh bread every Friday morning. A small subscription business lives or dies on getting the same thing to the same thirty doors, reliably, every week.
Giving, delivered. Churches, mosques, and community groups that send food packs to families can plan a run of drop-offs and know that every stop was reached, with a record to show for it.
Many pickups, one door
Flip it around. Several stops to collect, one place to deliver.
A personal shopper for Balogun. The fabric from one stall, the lace from another, the shoes from a third. A shopper walks the market, and one rider collects from every stall and brings it all to one customer. For someone in Abuja, or just someone who can't face the market, that's a service worth paying for.
The morning ingredient run. A restaurant buying fresh produce from Mile 12 every morning. Peppers from one seller, onions from another, everything to the kitchen before lunch service.
Event day. The cake from Yaba, the flowers from Obalende, the small chops from Surulere, all arriving at the venue before the guests do.
There and back
Some ideas only work if the thing comes back. Those used to be twice as hard. With Relay they're simply two deliveries: one out, one home.
Laundry and dry cleaning that collects on Monday and returns on Thursday, without the business ever buying a van.
Phone and laptop repairs. The cracked phone goes to the technician; the fixed phone comes back. The customer never has to sit in traffic to Computer Village.
Renting instead of buying. Cameras for a weekend shoot. A PlayStation for the holidays. A dress for one wedding. Baby gear that's only needed for a few months. Rental businesses are held back by one question: how does it get there, and how does it come back? Answer that, and a whole category of small businesses opens up.
Handle with care
Not everything should travel on the back of an open bike. When you create a delivery, you can ask for the right kind of vehicle: a bicycle, motorcycle, keke, car, or truck. You can also require a box, air conditioning, or refrigeration.
Cold chain for small producers. A poultry farmer in Ikorodu, a fishmonger in Epe, an ice cream maker in Wuse. Refrigerated deliveries mean small producers can sell directly to restaurants and homes without owning a cold truck.
Home sample collection. A diagnostic lab that collects samples from patients at home and brings them back, kept cold, on a route the lab can see. The lab still follows its own clinical rules. Relay moves the box.
Fragile and beautiful things. Cakes, flowers, artwork. Air conditioning and a proper box make the difference between arriving perfect and arriving sad.
Heavy things. Cement and tiles to a building site. A finished wardrobe from the carpenter's workshop to the new flat. Bulk deliveries by truck, followed on a map by the site manager who is waiting for them.
People, not parcels
Relay can move people too.
The night shift. Hospitals, restaurants, call centres, and hotels all have staff who finish work when it isn't safe or easy to get home. A staff ride service, using your own trusted drivers in air-conditioned cars, with every trip on record, is the kind of care your staff will remember.
Guests. A small hotel or guesthouse that offers airport pickups, with the guest watching their driver approach instead of wondering whether anyone is coming.
Bring your own riders
Maybe you already have riders.
A pharmacy chain with ten riders of its own, a fleet owner with twenty bikes, a logistics company that has done things by phone for years: all of them can run their own people through Relay. You can keep a job to your own fleet, or open it to independent riders when you're busy. You can see which riders are free nearby and pick one yourself. Our rider engine is open source, so a fleet can build a rider app of its own on the same tracking Relay uses.
The pattern behind all of these
Every idea above has the same bones. Something needs to get from one part of the city to another. Someone is waiting for it. Someone needs to trust that it went well.
Relay takes care of that part:
- it finds a suitable rider nearby, on the right kind of vehicle
- it agrees the price before anyone moves
- it shows everyone where the delivery is, live
- it holds the payment until the job is done
- it keeps an honest record of every step
That leaves you free to work on the part that's actually yours: the idea itself.
Your turn
If you want to find an idea of your own, try this:
- Where do people around you wait for something to arrive?
- What do you regularly drive across town to fetch, or ask someone else to fetch for you?
- Which business near you still says "sorry, we don't deliver"?
- What would people rent, share, or subscribe to if getting it to them were easy?
Somewhere in those answers is a business that would have been too much trouble last year.
A note on honesty: Relay is live in Lagos and Abuja for now. It moves things and people between places. Your business still does its own part, whether that's checking a prescription, following a lab's procedures, or deciding what your customers are allowed to send.
If you build software, our step-by-step guide walks you through your first delivery in a few lines of code. If you run a business, write to hello@sendrelay.com.ng and tell us what you're trying to move. And if one of these ideas sparked a better one, tell us in the comments. We'd love to hear it.
Start at sendrelay.com.ng.
Illustrations by Relay. Photos from Unsplash: Lagos market by Fahd Aminu, ankara fabrics by WyteShot, keke view by Joshua Oluwagbemiga.
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