"Where is my cake?" A Saturday in Lagos, told twice

Say you bake cakes in Yaba.

It stopped being a hobby a while ago. The oven is on by six, your phone buzzes with orders all day, and on Saturdays there is barely room on the table for the boxes. People find you on Instagram, fall for a photo, and send a message: Can you do a two-tier for my mum's birthday? Lekki. Saturday, 3pm.

You say yes. Of course you say yes.

The cake is the easy part

By noon on Saturday the cake is done, and it is lovely. Now the real work starts.

You call the rider you used last week. He doesn't pick up. You call another one, who says he's close, then names a price well above what you told the customer delivery would cost. You agree anyway, because it's already 12:40. He says he's coming. Twenty minutes later, he is still coming.

When he finally arrives, you hand over the box, say a small prayer, and watch him ride off into Lagos.

Then the calls begin.

At 1:30 the customer asks if the cake has left. At 2:15 she asks where it is. You call the rider. "I dey Third Mainland, I dey come." At 2:50 she calls again. The guests are arriving, and you have no honest answer for her, because you don't know where your cake is. All you have is his word.

The cake arrives at 3:25. It's fine, thank God. Her afternoon wasn't, and neither was yours. You spent an hour and a half as a switchboard. You paid the rider in cash and have nothing written down to show for it. Tomorrow, you'll do it all again.

If any of that felt familiar, this is for you.

Now play it again

Same Saturday. Same cake. This time your orders come in through a website, and behind that website sits Relay.

At noon you mark the order as ready, and that's it. Relay looks for a rider near your shop, one with good ratings and the right kind of vehicle for a cake that can't be tipped on its side, and offers him the job. You haven't made a single call.

The price was settled before anyone moved. Your customer saw it when she ordered, and it doesn't creep up halfway across the bridge.

She doesn't need to call you, because she can see for herself. The page she ordered from shows the rider moving: picked up, on the bridge, turning into her street. When her friends ask whether the cake is coming, she turns her phone around and shows them.

The money is held safely while the delivery happens and settled once the job is done. Every step is recorded, so at the end of the month you aren't trying to remember which rider you paid, or how much.

The cake goes to the same address either way. What changes is the afternoon you both get to have.

So what is Relay?

Relay is the delivery engine behind apps and websites that sell things people need brought to their door. It isn't an app you download. It's the part underneath that finds the rider, fixes the price, shows everyone where the delivery is, and keeps an honest record of what happened.

We're starting in Lagos and Abuja.

When to reach for Relay

You'll know it's time when:

• someone on your team spends part of every day calling riders
• customers ask "where is my order?" more often than they say thank you
• you've paid for a delivery and been left with nothing but a phone number
• you're building an app or website for food, medicine, groceries, errands, or anything else that has to reach a doorstep

If you run a business, mention Relay to whoever builds your website or app, or write to us at [e-mail] and we'll talk it through with you. If you're the one who builds things, the next post on this page shows you how to send your first delivery with a few lines of code.

Either way, start at sendrelay.com.ng.

The cake deserves to arrive calmly. So do you.

Next: What would you build if delivery were the easy part?

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Photos from Unsplash: cover by ib daye, baker by WyteShot, Idumota by Opeyemi Adisa, Abuja by Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim.