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.
Multi-stop tasks follow the stages in the order you provide. A return journey uses two tasks.
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. You can request riders whose vehicle profile records refrigeration. Your business still needs to verify the equipment and handling required for the medicine.
Online shops. Show a quote at checkout, then create the same task with its quote ID before it expires. Relay uses that locked amount for the task.
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. You can set an urgent priority and a minimum rider rating, or manually offer a pending task to selected available riders. Your app can show the envelope's progress with tracking events; the deadline is the firm's aim, not a delivery guarantee.
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, can use Relay for task creation and tracking while you build the rest of the app.
One pickup, many doors
A single Relay delivery can have several stops. The task follows the stages in the order you provide.
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 your app can use task location and stage events to show guests progress. 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 a customer elsewhere in Lagos, 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 two deliveries: one out, one home. Your app creates the return task when the item is ready; each task has its own quote, tracking and payment.
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.
Choose vehicle and equipment filters
When you create a task, you can filter by vehicle type and by box, air-conditioning or refrigeration flags recorded on rider vehicle profiles. These filters do not verify temperature, packaging quality or suitability for sensitive goods.
Refrigeration requirements. For goods that need refrigeration, request the refrigeration flag and verify the available equipment and handling with your delivery operation.
Fragile and beautiful things. For cakes, flowers or artwork, you can request a box or air-conditioning flag. Confirm packaging and handling separately.
Heavy things. For a proposed bulk-delivery integration, choose a bulk-delivery task and filter for a truck. Verify suitable vehicle capacity and handling with your operation; the API does not guarantee truck supply.
Passenger rides
Relay supports passenger-ride tasks.
The night shift. A hospital, restaurant or hotel can build a staff ride service. Your app can create passenger tasks and use tracking events to show progress. Driver suitability and vehicle availability still need to be checked.
Guests. A hotel can build a guest pickup flow using passenger tasks and tracking events. Suitable vehicles, driver checks and any airport permissions remain the operation's responsibility.
Bring your own riders
Maybe you already have riders.
For manual dispatch, create a live task with autoAssign set to false. Retrieve available riders and offer the pending task to selected rider IDs. A rider must be eligible and accept the offer. The repo also includes an MIT-licensed Flutter location engine for integrating tracking into a rider app.
Equipment flags describe vehicle profiles. Earnings stay pending through the dispute window.
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:
- filters nearby rider candidates by your rating and vehicle preferences
- locks a matching task quote when used before expiry
- provides location and stage events for your app
- debits a wallet or pre-authorizes a card, then records pending earnings after completion
- records stage progress and settlement state
Earnings release follows the dispute window; bank withdrawals are separate.
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 piloting in Lagos and Abuja. It supports delivery and passenger-ride tasks. Your business still does its own part, whether that's checking a prescription 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.
Next: The first two minutes of a delivery
Illustrations by Relay. Photos from Unsplash: Lagos market by Fahd Aminu, keke view by Joshua Oluwagbemiga.
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