Your first 10 riders are your whole marketing budget

Hi, it's Sharan.

Almost every founder who comes to me about launching a marketplace app arrives with the same marketing plan. Some Meta ads, an influencer or two, a launch discount, a billboard if the budget stretches. The number in their head is usually a few thousand dollars for month one.

Then, near the end of the call, they ask how many riders they should start with. Almost as an afterthought.

I think that's backwards. For the first 90 days your riders aren't a cost of fulfilment. They're the only advertising channel you have that people in your city will actually notice.

A delivery marketplace is a local business pretending to be a tech company. You aren't launching in Karachi or Lagos or Bogotá. You're launching in about three square kilometres of it, where a few thousand households and thirty restaurants live. That area is small enough that repetition beats reach.

Ten riders in matching boxes working the same zone six hours a day get seen by the same households four or five times a week. Meta shows your ad to a person in that zone once, maybe twice, then goes off to find cheaper inventory in a suburb where you don't deliver. One of those makes a family think you're already established. The other makes them think they saw something.

And this is the part the big platforms can't copy inside your zone. Their riders are spread thin across the whole city, multi-apping between three apps, carrying whatever bag they were given last year. You can put your entire fleet on six streets. Being small is the advantage, for about six months, so use it.

So, practically:

Put the name and the category on the box and the jacket, big enough to read from ten metres at traffic-light distance. A logo nobody knows yet is decoration. The name and the word "food" or "grocery" is an ad.

Idle riders don't go home. Between the lunch and dinner peaks they park where people already are: school pickup, the office block, the café strip at 8pm. Rotate it so the same corners see them on different days.

Give each rider their own promo code. Without that you can't tell whether any of this worked, and you'll quietly drop it in month two.

Now the part that makes the whole thing hold together, which is how you pay them. My advice hasn't changed in years: the rider owns the bike, and 100% of the delivery fee goes to the rider.

Founders resist the second one because the delivery fee looks like revenue sitting right there in the checkout. It isn't. It's the wage of the person doing the hardest job in your business, and shaving it is how you lose your fleet about four months in, usually to whoever pays a little more, usually at the exact moment you can't afford to rebuild. Your revenue is the vendor commission. Keep it there.

Owning the bikes is the more expensive mistake. Buy fifteen bikes and you've become a logistics company with capex, maintenance and a fixed cost that doesn't shrink on a slow Tuesday. Riders who own their bike look after it, and they show up.

Then pay a modest hourly floor for the circulation shifts on top of the fee. In most of the markets our clients launch in, a full day of that costs less than the CPMs they were about to buy, and this version of the ad can answer a question about the app.

If you're launching somewhere rider supply is scarce and expensive, a lot of Europe and North America, the arithmetic flips and paid acquisition may genuinely be cheaper. I'd rather tell you that than sell you a strategy built for a different city.

This is one reason we built Enatega the way we did. You own the code, so the fee split, the zones and the rider assignment logic are yours to set. Nobody takes a slice of the fee you promised your riders, and no platform can change that rule on you two years from now when it suits them.

If you're planning a launch and want an honest read on the numbers, book a call with me. I'll tell you whether your zone is too big, which it usually is.

Talk soon, Sharan