The company will now shift its focus to a new offering named CTRL, designed to assist businesses in routing and tracking deliveries, facilitating communication with drivers and customers, processing payments, and providing operational insights through a dashboard.
While DLVR was aimed at small and medium-sized businesses in need of last-mile delivery solutions, CTRL is intended for larger corporations that already have logistics teams in place. These organizations may operate their own fleets of delivery vehicles or collaborate with third-party providers.
The decision to phase out DLVR is unexpected, especially given the cofounders' assertion that it served 20,000 businesses, generated $250,000 in revenue, and achieved profitability post-fulfillment.
Nonetheless, cofounders Ifeoma Nwobu and Emeka Mba-Kalu indicated that DLVR was merely a stepping stone—an opportunity for Sendstack to gain insights into the challenges of logistics management that CTRL aims to address.
“We probably should have let DLVR go earlier,” Mba-Kalu remarked during a conversation with TechCabal. “There might be a scenario where we could have operated both, but managing both became difficult.”
CTRL aligns the two-year-old startup more closely with its ambition to establish a digital logistics infrastructure for African businesses seeking various logistics providers for their goods, according to the company.
Mba-Kalu believes that CTRL is also a relatively easier product to scale. “It can be easily replicated in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, which has significant economic activity and a fragmented logistics landscape.”
While this offers a cost-effective growth avenue for the startup, it also introduces a new challenge: persuading traditional businesses to embrace new technology, which may necessitate substantial structural adjustments, including training for delivery drivers and logistics teams.
Sales processes with these businesses can often be quite prolonged. As Guy Futi, the founder of Orda, highlighted during a Moonshot panel discussion, the process of selling software to large enterprises can take as long as six months. Additionally, the integration of such software across various branches may extend to a year or even longer.
Ifeoma Nwobu, co-founder and COO of SendStack, remarked on a podcast that many businesses prefer manual operations due to their speed.
SendStack aims to persuade these businesses that unifying all aspects of their logistics on a single platform can lead to substantial reductions in overhead costs and minimize the time lost in addressing issues stemming from poor communication among delivery partners.
Younger, digitally-oriented businesses in sectors such as e-commerce, food delivery, and telemedicine may represent a more approachable target market.
Technologies like SendStack’s CTRL are steadily gaining popularity, and for valid reasons. The B2B logistics landscape is fiercely competitive, but software that enhances the existing infrastructure allows new players to compete effectively.
In Kenya, startups like Leta have experienced notable growth. The company claims to have expanded into five countries—Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Zambia—within its first two years. It has also secured clients such as the fast-food chain Simbisa Brands, Chandaria Industries, and Twiga Food. More startups are likely to follow suit.