<aside> ℹ️ In this section, we will tell you about Picker's journey from idea to the present. What motivated us to create the startup, the pivots we have made to survive the competition, and where we are today.
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<aside> ⚠️ Warning: You will likely fall in love with the project as we did. Whoever reads this can consider themselves warned.
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<aside> 📅 2007
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After graduating from high school, Juan Daniel (Founder) started his first venture called [despensaenlínea. com] (http://despensaenlínea.com/). It was an eCommerce of supermarket products for the homes of Guayaquil. What was interesting about this project was the business model that Juan Daniel decided to implement.
[Despensaenlínea. com] (http://despensaenlínea.com/) was not a regular eCommerce; it was, in fact, a kind of Marketplace when they were not yet well known. The eCommerce sold products from local supermarkets but did not have its inventory. The operation consisted in that for each order received; a delivery guy was sent to buy from the supermarket with a previously enabled credit line. Products were repackaged and shipped to customers with logistics providers of the time.
To not extend the story, this startup, after two years and thousands of dollars in loss, ended up closing its operations in 2009. But the reason for said failure that Juan Daniel learned would be the opportunity for a future venture. These reasons were:
<aside> 📅 2016
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On a sightseeing trip to Barcelona, Spain, Juan Daniel has the opportunity to meet a Glovo delivery man in the company's early years. He manages to have a conversation of several minutes with the delivery man, who happened to be an employee of the company since Glovo had his employees make deliveries. Here Juan Daniel learned about the coming gig economy, about the idea of operating with people who did not work directly for you, about having business allies and taking a take from each sale. And so it was that one by one, he crossed out the reasons for his previous failure and had the idea of trying again.
<aside> 📅 2017
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Juan Daniel returns to Ecuador, and coincidentally one of his best friends and one of Picker's original co-founders, Victor Pinoargote, was also returning from an MBA at IE Spain. They decided to go live together as roommates, and along the way, they decided to join forces and knowledge to undertake. They would use all of Juan Daniel's experience from his previous endeavor and the fresh insights from Victor's IE MBA to shape the idea.
In the first Value Proposition and BMC exercises to theoretically shape the idea, the team realized something important. Educating restaurants and supermarkets to turn over part of their margin to Picker would be challenging and expensive. The only marketplace that operated locally at the time was [Domicilios.com] (http://domicilios.com/), and it had a bad reputation for not paying or delaying. So JD and Victor decided that starting with a similar model was not the most efficient.
<aside> 🧠 First Idea
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The middle- or upper-middle-class Millennial of Guayaquil at that time was most likely raised with a family driver or house messenger. So at least in Guayaquil, the custom of "writing to the driver by Whastapp to ask him to come by buying something was very established, and when you arrived, you paid him." That's when they came up with the idea for Picker. They were going to create a platform that would work like Uber to locate messengers, but the way to ask them for something was as simple as writing to them through a chat. Picker was going to democratize the drivers/messengers for everyone in Guayaquil.