“Our only competition is your friend.”
That’s what Ron Cade says about his new mobile application, Urban Delivery, which launches this week offering users the ability to hire a bike messenger to retrieve and courier, well, whatever a user damn well pleases.
Cade, a 26-year-old Howard Law School graduate, says his app is inspired in part by a brief stint he had as a bike messenger, skidding and swerving around town on his beloved fixed-gear cycle. He figures that D.C. residents and office-dwellers to hassled to run their own errands might be happy to punch up something on their smartphones and get one of his team of couriers to ferry it over.
Bike couriers are commonplace enough, carrying interoffice correspondence and small batches of supplies around town. Cade figures, why not offer it to people with personal needs. He floats the all-too-familiar peril of a freelancer or coffeeshop-dependent professional finding him or herself with a dead laptop, and a sprint to the Apple Store for a replacement battery a task that would consume the entire workday.
“You can’t send a MacBook charger through email,” Cade says during a Wednesday night launch party at the Shaw bar Cause.
With Cade’s app, that technologically screwed individual could request one of Urban Delivery’s 18 or so hyperactive cyclists to quick-pedal it to 1229 Wisconsin Avenue NW, pick up a new charger, and huff it back to the waiting customer. Cade equips his couriers with prepaid credit cards, which are used to purchase the desired goods. The cost, plus a delivery fee that varies depending on time the errand takes to complete as well as the size of the parcel, is applied to the customer’s account.
Cade also says the whole operation is trackable; he compares it to Uber, the livery app that shows its customers estimated arrival times and routes of the taxis and sedans it dispatches.
“It’s injecting new life into an older industry,” he says. And Urban Delivery, which is available for Apple iOS and Android devices, will pick up just about anything, Cade says, from a customer’s dry-cleaning to a liquor store run.
Of course, apps that specialize in getting complete strangers to complete personal errands are nothing new. TaskRabbit, for instance, has built up a network of 4,000 people who earn side cash by completing odds and ends for users who decide they are to busy to pick up lunch or fold their laundry
So why the bike courier angle?
Urban Delivery was in development for seven months. During the party, Cade relays an anecdote that, while not the germ of the idea, served as something of a justification for the service. He pulls out his phone and shows me a photo of a woman standing next to a sport utility vehicle idled on U Street on a chilly January night. The SUV had run out of gas, and the woman’s boyfriend had pedaled up with a small carton of gasoline to get her running again.
