What was the insight behind Pidge and how did the founder identify the opportunity for a radius-free, on-demand delivery service in India?

There were a couple of personal pain points, and I'll just give you one incident. I was traveling to India and being a rainy day four Ubers canceled on me and I ended up missing my flight. I kept asking myself, ‘Why does convenience come at the cost of reliability?” Would my own driver have ever canceled on me?

As a global business leader, I saw how rapid digital adoption was enabling the businesses to reach their consumers directly and focusing on leveraging experience as the differentiator in a world that was increasingly becoming commoditized. Concurrently, increasingly new businesses were being set up as digital first often with no offline presence. I would ask myself how do these new age businesses provide experience to differentiate themselves if there was no physical interaction with the customer?

The food delivery companies were fast but unable to bring me my food from any restaurant that was not in their small radiuses. The courier companies could bring me stuff from anywhere but often taking days to bring things from even within the same city. Why were speed and reach at odds with each other?

As I dived deeper into the problem, and appointed a market research firm based in Mumbai to help us better understand the extent and size of the problem, we realized how the version 2.0 of commerce was leading to democratization of the individual elements of the value chain. But all online needed to end in a delivery—and not a compromised one.

Around the same time, I came across an independent research report at the same time that mentioned that 3 out of 4 businesses were choosing to do their own deliveries and how over time that proportion had increased. I asked myself, that why with all the new delivery options, with billions of dollars in investment, was actually failing to convert people who were doing their own deliveries?

I have always been inspired by Steve Jobs' launch of the iPhone—he described it as “a product bringing together a phone, music player, camera and web browser in one device”. And I asked myself why can’t a delivery be reliable and convenient; fast with reach; and provide an exceptional experience at the customer’s door? Why do things have to be binary, why should the customer have to make a choice and thus a compromise. Why can’t they have it all?

So all these questions led to the creation of Pidge.