Dunzo: Deliver anything, anywhere
Food delivery apps are commonplace. But what if you want to retrieve the laptop charger forgotten at home or photocopy an important document and send to your colleague or send a large potted-plant to a friend? Just Dunzo it.
What is Dunzo?
Dunzo originates from the slang abbreviation meaning “Done, finished” and aptly captures the spirit of the image the founders intend to portray for the service. The company is a hyper-local, on-demand, delivery service startup in India. Dunzo takes pride in being able to complete and deliver any task their customer requests.
For instance, if a customer wishes to purchase a pair of jeans they browsed through at the mall but are not in the frame of mind to go get it themselves, Dunzo can be approached to do the same.
Dunzo can deliver items spanning the entire gamut including sanitary napkins, laundry, a laptop charger forgotten in the office, cigarettes, beer, or even a large potted plant. It can even print and photocopy important documents for you and deliver them to the chief, pick up repaired speakers from the service center or collect or deliver the laundry. Dunzo offers the service equivalent of a personal assistant that can run errands for you.
Dunzo operates through a data-driven platform where it connects a delivery person to the nearest user. The activity of this delivery person can be tracked by the customers throughout the delivery.
Filling the void: Where Dunzo creates Value
While food-delivery apps such as Swiggy or FoodPanda (equivalent of Uber Eats or DoorDash) are commonplace in India today, there aren’t adequate specialized services to handle the miscellaneous, unpredictable errands to run in the course of day-to-day life. Unlike typical food-delivery partners, Dunzo caters to the entire conveyance layer.
Dunzo’s USP lies in being able to provide convenient access to all commodities on one unified platform — be it grocery items, pet supplies, health and wellness, bike rides, laundry delivery, pick and drop services or whatever other requests creative customers can imagine.
In its formative days, even when there were more numbers of requests than the team could handle, Dunzo allowed the users to place multiple orders. Customers could give new tasks in the middle of an already existing order. This customer-centric service gained Dunzo big-time popularity and the crucial loyalty and trust of their clients.
The platform additionally has tie-ups with various restaurants, clothing stores, and other general stores, and has its network spread into several major Indian cities today — Bengaluru, Noida, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.
Dunzo in the news… for funny reasons?
Testimony to Dunzo’s popularity, this bizarre incident recently went viral in Indian media. This customer ordered coffee from a popular local coffee chain, via a food delivery app, `Swiggy’ (an equivalent of Uber Eats in India). To his astonishment, however, the customer received his coffee via Dunzo. A few minutes into his order, the customer received a message from the Swiggy delivery partner confirming that he had picked up his coffee. The delivery partner, however, felt too lazy to deliver the coffee himself, so decided to Dunzo it to the customer instead! Full coverage:
Super interesting, Aditya! While it seems like Dunzo has done phenomenally since it launched, your post makes me wonder about the business’s sustainability. To date, a lot of the success seems to be driven by the team’s operating excellence and great customer service. I would guess that customer acquisition costs are particular high given the competition in the on-demand delivery space and the need to attract a robust supply of drivers on the platform to deliver on the platform’s customer promise for quick service. My main concern would be competition from the ride hailing and food delivery services, given the tendency to multi-home (as your anecdote at the end illustrates). It seems like it would be relatively easy for these platforms to expand their service offerings to compete with Dunzo.
Incredibly exciting business, thank you Aditya for introducing us to this start up. You write in your post that Dunzo can deliver items spanning the entire gamu. I was wondering while reading if the company had to implement any ethical fundamentals or something like order filters which weeds out or prevents morally unacceptable orders. Furthermore, I asked myself whether a customer has to indicate the contents of the package to be delivered. I could well imagine that this great service could quickly fall victim to abuse. I am thinking of transporting drugs or criminal items, for instance. The question then also arises about who would be liable in the event of illegal transportation. In my view another interesting issue to observe will be a potential expansion into other countries where Dunzo has to consider whether cross-border services are going to be possible or not. All in all, a great idea, which from my point of view has or already had to clarify some pretty big legal questions.
This is an amazing service! we have a very similar one in Chile and I’ve used it because I forgot my computer at home 🙂
A big concern I had back home and one that would replicate in this case is how does the delivery person make sure that the package that he or she is transporting is safe and or legal in whatever state/country the transaction is being made.
Whenever I used the service I would give a sealed package to the delivery person, assuming they would not open it.
Also on the logistics side, does Dunzo provide motorbikes to the delivery person? or is it a requisite for the supplier to have the asset?
Great post! Super interesting to have such a similar service in India and in Chile