Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we’re talking with Steve Fanale and Johnny Timbs , founders of food delivery service Drive Yello.
In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.
Drive Yello ensures the efficient and reliable delivery of food by allowing food service businesses to recruit, book, manage, pay, train and monitor their delivery drivers whilst providing a marketplace for drivers to build their business, picking up shifts or one-off deliveries. A B2B2C logistics platform supported by a driver market, helping businesses provide a better service to their customers.
What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?
Investor funding and now revenue growth. We closed a seed round back in March 2015, $300K. Now in the process of closing a $1M round and have been generating revenue since our launch in November last year. We are building our driver community in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne on the back of demand in those regions.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?
Scaling quickly – needing to do that to build up the benefits of the market place and the challenges that result when scaling quickly.
How do you differentiate your business from your competitors?
We are not just another uber for food. Drive Yello is a full driver management platform and market place specially designed to deliver food. You can use Drive Yello to manage your own team, book a driver for a shift or a single delivery Uber style.
We are B2B. We are not targeting consumers. We are building a product and service targeting businesses, so we are not competing for the consumer and our mission is to make it easier for our customers to be loved by their customers.
Finally, we are focused on food delivery so our product, service, training and processes are all designed to be hyper local and to ensure the safe and timely delivery of food.
What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?
Evernote (work). Instagram (pleasure).
What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
Perseverance generally leads to success. Something I was told early on in life about not only business but anything you want to do. Also supported by a Steve Jobs quote – “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”.
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