TheGepek

The Gepek is a new platform for package delivery based on a carpooling model. It’s intended exclusively for the carriage of packages, not people!
Also, it’s really convenient for fast cross country package delivery (way cheaper and faster than classic postal services). Platform has security features to ensure safe delivery like driver ratings and identity check through social platform login. All drivers below average rates are excluded from the platform!
Because of post-COVID recession and high costs of owning a car, there is a need for additional income.

We finished beta version and product is live on www.thegepek.com. We’re now in a phase of attracting users on our platform. In this
stage we plan to invest mainly in advertising costs. We just
launched this product and already have 80 followers on Facebook and about 30 registered users.

Our target group are private users on both sides of the distribution chain (package senders and drivers) who need to send smaller packages in a faster and more flexible way than offered by the market of traditional postal service providers or package distribution. Both groups are interested in additional savings. According to statistics from similar services, the average user is between 25 and 45 years old, and 94% of users use such services to save money.
Sender market statistics:
The number of parcels in the European Union increased by 17.2% compared to the previous year. In the Republic of Croatia, the trend in the number of parcels is also increasing with a tendency to grow.
Statistics on potential users of the platform:
Croatian citizens are interested in using applications that would help them share costs - showed a survey by Erste Bank on a sample of 227 clients. 74% of respondents have a habit of sharing costs, most often for accommodation and fuel. According to data from the global transport sharing service, BlaBlaCar, decided to share on the occasion of the first year of operation in Croatia, local users offered 60,000 vacancies in the first 365 days and shared a total of 1.6 million kilometers on intercity travel. These are data from 2017, but they are relevant because they speak of the entry period of the application and the extremely upward trend of using applications for cost sharing. It is interesting that Croatia has proven to be the fastest growing country in the CEE region, which speaks in favor of good indicators for the acquisition of users.
Product can be use in any country , it's very scalable and does not depend on specific market.

The platform solves the problem of high prices for sending smaller packages, long delivery time of state postal services or impossibility of delivery (weekend). At the same time reduces transportation costs for drivers with lower risk of the classic "carpooling" model because people are not transported but goods.Our target group are private users on both sides of the distribution chain (package senders and drivers) who need to send smaller packages in a faster and more flexible way than offered by the market of traditional postal service providers or package distribution. Both groups are interested in additional savings. According to statistics from similar services, the average user is between 25 and 45 years old, and 94% of users use such services to earn extra income.Because of post-COVID recession and high costs of owning a car, there is a need for extra income (earn money while driving your own car).

The Gepek is a platform for transporting and sending packages based on the carpooling model. It is intended to connect users solely for the purpose of delivering packages. It is an already well-known and popular model of cost sharing. Final product is a platform for connecting sender, driver and package recipient, with user ratings system, messaging system and search system based on location.

Classic parcel distribution market involves the delivery of parcels within three days, but these deadlines do not include the day of receipt, time of delay due to incorrect and incomplete address of the recipient or traffic jams. So, in practice, this deadline is often longer than the proclaimed 3 days and difficult to accept for the end user, but in the absence of competition, they use well-known distribution channels.
Packages are often sent to bus carriers, and there is almost no bus line that, in addition to standard passenger transport, also performs package transport as a secondary activity. All this speaks in favor of the fact that the market exists and that small private users are dissatisfied with the offer of package distribution on the market. So they are dissatisfied with the deadlines, but the price.
By a simple search on search engines, we come across numerous articles that deal with the dissatisfaction of users of such services .
More flexible players like Locodels have emerged in the market, but their focus is exclusively on city delivery and most of their customers come from a group of small businesses with the need to send fewer packages each day.

Our target market is just the opposite: private individuals and intercity package transportation. We believe that a significant number of platform users like BlaBlaCar would prefer to choose package transport (and switch to our platform) as an option to reduce transport costs because the risk of transporting people is much higher as well as the uncertainty of unknown social interaction with passengers.

Globally, users are increasingly leaning towards the so-called rental economy, which is clearly shown by the successful financial indicators of Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Uber, technology services that live off the commission. All these services charge a commission of 10-20% with exceptions for market penetration needs (eg BlaBlaCar in Croatia does not charge a commission). Our model would be similar to the BlaBlaCar approach and in the first period (six months minimum) we do not plan to introduce a commission model but will focus on product development, brand growth through promotion and gathering platform users.We plan to cover the rest of the financing with advertising packages that would be offered to marketing agencies and companies, and we believe that such a platform would be interesting to potential investors. The team we gathered has knowledge and experience in project writing and in business relations with the investment market and the business community.

If we occupied a conservative 0.5% of the package distribution market (only in Croatia) in the second year of operation, it would amount to about 125,000 packages per year. If the average price of package delivery is HRK 40 (includes the whole of Croatia and packages up to 15 kg), which is significantly lower than the average price list for package distribution in the Republic of Croatia, this would represent around HRK 5 million of turnover through the system. Our commission would be 10%, which would be around HRK 500,000 of annual turnover only from the basic service alone in the second year of operation.We plan to cover the rest of the financing with advertising packages that would be offered to marketing agencies and companies, and we believe that such a platform would be interesting to potential investors.

While client acquisition is our key focus, this breakdown shows how we will allocate capital in first year:
Expenses (fixed and variable): 45%
User acquisition (marketing, promotion, distribution network): 30%
Upgrading Product: 24%
Intellectual Property right: 1%

Share offer really depends of investor network and ability to push our startup to a new level.

Main risk is that big players switch on the same model. This is not the case yet.

Not applicable.