State of Shoffr Tech: Feb 2023

Originally posted on the "Building Shoffr" blog.

The last 7 days have been absolutely insane at Shoffr Tech. We shipped out a huge amount of stuff some of which will make our guest experience better and the rest will make our operations more efficient.

I will share details on most of these individually – but here’s a high-level recap of everything that got done.

• Website Redesign – Our website went through a complete redesign to better reflect our brand aesthetic. This had been in the works for a long time, and both Vikas Bardia, CFA and I spent a lot of time getting this right. It isn’t perfect but – but it still looks gorgeous (even if I do say so myself)!
• Trip Edit – Guests can now edit their bookings on the website. So far this was only possible via our customer support – inconvenient for customers and time-consuming for us.
• Invoices on the website – Invoices for all trips are now available for download on the website. Getting invoices for reimbursement is a key problem for many of our loyal guests, and again this was done over phone and email by our customer support. The full story of this involves a Zoho integration and driver app/SOP changes, all of which manifests in a simple “invoice” link for our guests.
• Fixed pricing for cusp locations – We set our prices by distance buckets. For places at the edges of these ranges, Google maps can sometimes show different routes leading to different prices. We identified such places among our most frequent guest locations and made sure the price remains stable going forward.
• Drivers can record the payment method used by the customer (Cash/UPI) in their app now. This helps in payment reconciliation later on.

All this and a bunch of smaller stuff, bug fixes, and so on. Plenty of reasons for me to feel smug :)

This marks a nice little milestone in our tech-product journey. Actually, I think of this as the second milestone.

The first was in early December when we launched our website. Shoffr was a 2 car shop running exclusively on phone and excel sheets till then, and guests were just beginning to love us. The first version of the website and the internal operations portal provided the preliminary customer experience like booking and messaging that everyone takes for granted these days. But the way people took to it showed us that Shoffr was headed the right way.

Two months of intense work from mid-Dec to mid-Feb have brought us from that formative stage to what I think of as the foundational stage. Our customer experience is stable and “sufficient”, and our front-line operators (drivers and managers) have the tools they need to manage the foreseeable scale efficiently. Of course, everything has plenty of room for improvement – a customer app, more messaging options for customers, better driver allocation automation for ops come to mind readily. But the foundation is laid.

Over the coming weeks, tech takes a bit of a back seat as Vikas and I will spend time focusing on growing both supply (via funding and partnerships) and demand (via promotions, tie-ups and whatever else works).

The next phase of tech work will focus on scaling and refining the customer and ops experience. More on it as we get to it.

Cheers!