QuickCart: Jamaica's superapp

This interview was conducted and edited by Timothy Motte. 

Biography:

Monique Powell is the founder of QuickCart, a delivery startup operating in Jamaica. Founded in 2016, QuickCart counts around 40,000 registered users and has done over $1M in revenue. QuickCart customers can order food, groceries, medicine and more directly to their home. 

Before QuickCart, Monique worked at Scotiabank for over five years. 

What was QuickCart’s genesis?

I used to work long hours at my previous job. I got home from work tired, hungry and in no mood to cook. The only option available for delivery was pizza. That isn’t a sustainable daily diet. I did some research and realized that startups in other countries had solved this problem via food-delivery apps (Postmates, Doordash, etc…). 

I was also getting close to burnout at my job and wanted something new. I knew I always wanted to be an entrepreneur: this was the perfect opportunity. 

How did you stitch together early traction and funding?

I’d saved up about a full year of salary, around $35,000. I used half of that money for the business, hiring a back-end developer in Africa (I took care of the front-end). 

The first outside check came from a close friend, two years into the business. An attorney couple I knew also pitched in. Both of these checks amounted to $12,000. 

For the first three years, the business was made up of two full-time employees: myself and the person dispatching orders. The developer and a salesperson operated as part-time contractors. Three years into the business, we got our first substantial angel check ($80,000). 

Today, QuickCart has 10 full time employees.

Food-delivery startups are challenged by tight margins. How do you handle that?

We haven’t reinvented the wheel on the business model side. On every order, the restaurant pays a commission and the customer pays a delivery fee. 

What’s important isn’t so much the overall profitability of the business, but rather its unit profitability. In other words: if you strip away administrative costs, are you making a profit on each order? Once you have that, you can pump money into the business to grow rapidly. Your margins are healthy and with enough volume, they’ll eventually surpass your administrative costs.

That’s where QuickCart currently is: we’re unit profitable and now need to get enough volume to get the company to profitability. 

The capital we’re seeking to raise now is mostly directed towards that growth, rather than tinkering with the business fundamentals. 

What are restaurants’ and customers’ most common reluctance to using QuickCart?

This has shifted since our debut in 2016. We onboarded only 12 restaurants during the first year. We now have over 200 restaurants and stores. 

The novelty of the concept (in the Jamaican context) put off some restaurants initially, but Covid was a catalyst. For restaurants, delivery was a lifeline. Our value proposition became compelling: we provided the tools to power their delivery capacities, without them needing to build delivery infrastructure. 

Most of our work at the moment revolves around justifying our commission through stellar service.

On the driver side: what’s the legal setup and are there any overarching, contentious points?

Like other similar startups, our delivery drivers are independent contractors. Placing drivers under an employee regime would be administratively crushing. QuickCart has the particularity of offering two ‘tiers’ of drivers. Drivers can either sign up as part-time or full-time. The ones who sign up full-time, while retaining their contractor status, commit to a certain number of hours and get additional bonuses. 

On the contention side: balancing our fees with what we pay our drivers in light of fluctuating petrol prices is a tight-rope to navigate. Drivers pay for petrol themselves, so what we pay them has to keep making sense even when petrol prices increase.

Were there any missing tech rails that hindered QuickCart’s growth?