Riding 6,500 miles in five months to find product-market fit

Adriano Goncalves and his co-founders spent four months coding only to publish their website and get no orders. Confused, the team put through a test order. Everything was working, but no one was buying.

“We were really excited about it and we were like ‘this is going to explode, it's going to be massive’. And then when we put the system live and not even a single order came in.”

That led Adriano to take to the streets to find customers.

He ended up riding 6,500 miles in five months as Onelivery’s team worked to find product-market fit and scale.

Going the extra mile to understand your customers

Onelivery offers a same-day, 60-minute delivery service to small businesses that’s carbon-free.

Four years since Adriano first got on his bike, it’s made more than 100,000 deliveries. Adriano explains that started with a pharmacy in his local neighbourhood.

“We helped one business here and they referred another business.”

That was during the COVID-19 pandemic when pharmacies needed support delivering prescriptions and tests. Although any retailer could use Onelivery, the use case gave the team a starting point.

Adriano advises other start-up founders to focus on solving a specific problem for a specific target customer.

“Find a pain to fix, then focus on that pain and make your product add the most value.”

Evolving based on customer feedback

Winning customers face-to-face allowed Adriano to focus on who they were building the product for.

“My advice is to start small and contribute big. Make an impact on one business, one customer. Don't think about finding one thousand customers, add value to one customer first and then you build up from there.”

Onelivery grew through referrals because it was adding a lot of value to the lives of a specific group of people, argues Adriano.

“People will talk about it and they will refer you to what they need. And this is what happened.”

Onelivery’s features were often based on in-person requests. Adriano remembers relaying them to the team after finishing his routes each day:

“‘There's this customer they're asking to have this, can we build that? How long does it take?’

“We thought let's get our hands dirty. Let's start building and they can order more and that's how it goes.”

Making an environmental impact

Adriano was inspired to start Onelivery by his MBA project, which looked at the causes of carbon emissions.

“I got fascinated about last-mile delivery, which causes a large amount of carbon emissions, and about creating an idea to help businesses minimise emissions.”

Growing through word of mouth and SEO

Adriano did all of Onelivery’s deliveries until the volume of miles became too much.

He met someone on his routes that could do deliveries part-time during the day and intern as a coder.

The business was bootstrapped, so the team focused on SEO as an affordable way to reach local businesses; Onelivery’s monthly Google impressions have grown from 2,000 at the start of the process to 135,000 today.

Getting funding to help with expansion

Onelivery was bootstrapped with the team doing the riding and coding themselves up to two years into the business, says Adriano.

At that point, they realised an investment would help them launch into new areas and raised £50,000 from an Angel investor.

“We started operating in three districts and then we expanded to 55, and that money helped us to build that presence.”

Onelivery is currently raising a £500,000 investment round.

Building a retail platform

Onelivery now allows local retailers to open online stores easily and manage logistics for online sales.

The team’s grown to 20 people and they’re serving 70 to 80 businesses a month, including a number of hospitals.

Adriano advises founders to be patient about growth and says the mission to support local businesses keeps him inspired.

“So, for me personally, it’s about building technology and resources for the underdogs – the retailers, the local businesses – to compete with the big players and to enable them to sell online and deliver fast.”