Flybyknight | Creatures of the night
They home-deliver things you might suddenly need when everything else is shut
Past life
Neha Jain, 27, worked for Google in Mumbai for over five years, till the end of 2011, as a solutions consultant. She quit “without a plan" because she wanted to explore more career options. This later included joining a design school—and the discovery that she “did not have a creative side"—and working with an NGO till her focus shifted to e-commerce last year.
Jude de Souza, 26, did a bachelor’s degree in economics from Luther College in Iowa, US, and returned to India to join Deutsche Bank, but could not handle the “suits everywhere". He stopped showing up one day, “like a mature adult", he says, laughing. After a brief stint with Brag PC, a brand of hardware vendor Prime ABGB, de Souza became a partner at Nova Starke Audio Pvt. Ltd, which owns an audio store, Nova Audio, in Mahim, Mumbai. He is currently a director with the company.
Eureka moment
In April-May last year, for want of something to do at night, de Souza and a friend loaded their cars with a few snacks and started a service called Night Call. The idea was to give people late-night options for munchies and smokes—“for people who get desperate at 2am". Once his friend moved on, de Souza was left alone and boredom forced him to start “eating into his own stock" at nights.
Coincidentally, Jain had started something similar between Bandra and Andheri—Flybyknight—after spamming friends with an informal market survey. Since many of her friends were independent professionals or artists, they did not have conventional working hours, and therefore, were often “awake at 4am and out of food". Initially, the idea sounded ridiculous, but she went ahead.
Once de Souza found out someone had “stolen his idea", he wanted to take the “rival down", he says jokingly. The two met and realized there was synergy, so they decided to work together on Flybyknight.in from around June-July 2012.
Genesis
Flybyknight offers door deliveries, between 11pm and 4am, of things that people might need at that time of the night/morning—usually mid- and post-party requirements like cigarettes, soda, chips, chocolates and some hot food like biryani. Their service is between Colaba, at the southern end of the city, and Goregaon in the north. Their most sold categories are cigarettes, brownies and pav bhaji.
On their website, they sell about 30-35 items, including condoms and Eno, in a section titled “Just in case". One of the things they may add on are diapers—not because, as de Souza says, they want to run an “underground market for diapers", but because they have requests for them.
Jain says there is a misconception that their business needs to be below the radar—the reason why others perhaps have not tried it. She says they are registered as an e-commerce business and it’s completely legitimate.
Reality check
Flybyknight charges a delivery fee of ₹ 100 for orders under ₹ 500. Jain says they want to bring this fee down as they scale up, but they need to charge for it now because they do not refuse any order as long as it’s within “standard protocol".
Initially, the Flybyknight delivery boys wore a Batman-sort-of costume, but the company proprietors realized that not only did it attract the attention of policemen, but not all customers were happy to receive someone wearing a mask in the middle of the night at their doorstep.
Their biggest problem has been with the delivery staff which, due to the odd working hours, has often held them “to ransom". The frequent churn—people leaving because their families did not approve, people going back to their villages in the summer and the unpredictable nature of volumes of demand—has made their job challenging.
Jain calls this a logistics company, while de Souza has learnt that to run this successfully requires suitable man-management. “We often have to play good cop, bad cop," he says.
“We jumped in with no parachutes," says de Souza. “If you have other assurances, then... it’s best not to do something like this on a part-time basis."
Secret sauce
Jain says they are constantly trying to be “creative and innovative, however clichéd it may sound". So they have a provision on the site for those who order online (there is also a phone option) to add comments, which might include not ringing the doorbell, or collection near the gate, etc. Flybyknight is flexible with its orders—they once delivered milk to all residents of a building for a week because a customer asked for it.
“It’s a common sense thing," says de Souza about their business. “Just that no one was addressing it." He says a false sense of pride stops people; even he was asked if he wants to sell Ruffles (chips) all his life.
“We just think differently," he speaks for both of them.
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