A Roadie For Everyone

When the average person confronts broken bathroom tiles, they can be expected to go through something like the five stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The important part is that the average person gets to that last phase, acceptance, and resigns themselves to ordering new tiles and hoping for a better outcome.

But Roadie Founder Marc Gorlin is not the average person. The co-founder of the FinTech firm Kabbage did something unusual when he found himself with a box full of broken bathroom tiles that were about to put him off schedule by three days.

He did not accept his fate.

It occurred to him that the tiles he needed were already in existence, sitting in a shop and his holdup was shipping. It further dawned on Gorlin that they odds were pretty good that someone already pretty close to the tiles he needed might be driving his way and willing to deliver the tiles he needed.

At which point the lightbulb went off, and the idea for Roadie was born.

“Where we go, where we drive, those patterns already exist,” Gorlin noted in an interview. “There’s someone leaving all the time … Why not take stuff on trips you’re already doing and get paid to be a good neighbor?”

And so Gorlin built a platform he described as “the Uber for Stuff”  to connect people with stuff to people willing to drive their stuff to them. And Roadie accepts a pretty expansive definition of “stuff.”

Since users are essentially putting items in their trunk or car, there are no boxing or packaging requirements. Roadie shippers are to a unique degree encouraged to come as they are. And what they come with varies. According to Gorlin, Roadie has been used to take a forgotten tennis racket to an out-of-state championship, several garbage bags of clothes to an ex-fiance, the vast and various contents of a college student’s room on their move out day, a custom-made crystal chandelier and any type of furred, feathered or scaled animal companion one can imagine (though delivering pets does take a bit more verification than delivering inanimate stuff).

Pay for the gigs range from $8 for local deliveries to a top price of about $200, meaning the site is often reviewed as an excellent way to pay for one’s gas money if they happen to already be going on a road trip.

To use the app, the driver and senders alike must create accounts. Senders post “Gigs” to the service, drivers bid on the gigs and the winner gets to drive whatever it is across the country. Everyone involved gets a free waffle at the Waffle House for downloading the app, which makes some sense considering that Roadie is based in Atlanta and most popular so far in the Southeast United States. Roadie also offers driver and sender discounts with Zipcar and StoreX, respectively.

Drivers tend to review the app positively, especially in the context of using it to offset the cost of a desired road trip. Users have also had generally positive things to say about the app.

“I’m not a technology person so for me to be able to even do it was really good,” Kim Witzak noted of her positive experience using the service to transport her daughter’s stuff back from college. She said the pricing made it much more sensible than using a moving company for such a small one-way move.

She did note, however, that one does have to mentally adjust a bit to letting someone who goes by the name “Big Sam from Louisiana” take your stuff and go someplace with it, but Big Sam had performed his task admirably.

And Gorlin notes that users have every reason to feel safe sending their stuff with Roadie since the platform itself automatically protects items up to $500 at no additional charge. Bigger ticket items are now also eligible for $10,000 worth of insurance, due to Roadie’s new partnership with UPS Capital Insurance Agency. That is the same firm that insures day-to-day UPS shipping. Users can also track their item with the app’s GPS.

Also, for just straightforward practical reasons, Gorlin notes users are often better off with Roadie.

“It is just so much safer to send through Roadie,” Gorlin says. “Usually, packages bounce through four trucks and then on to an airplane. Or you could personally just load it safely to the back of my Expedition.”

He further noted, “I love the way we take care of the community. We’re honestly built on neighborliness.”

Neighborliness, and a healthy shot of investor funding. In June, Roadie bagged $15 million in Series B funding with participation from Stephens Inc., the UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund and TomorrowVentures. The immediate priority for that funding is developing its analytics platform and increasing its market share. The app is also working on fine-tuning the routing patterns for its “Homeward Bound” program that connect drivers to deliveries that coincide with their daily commute.

These days, Roadies is growing quickly. After a little under a year in business the app has 300K downloads and 22K drivers nationwide, even in far flung regions like Alaska and Hawaii. And Gorlin is bullish about his firm’s future. He believes he can double the size of the firm in six months.

Because, he notes, at the end of the day, Roadie is just not quite like all the other players out there.

“We had a couple of guys road tripping from Texas to Oregon,” Gorlin said, “and they picked up gigs to pay for gas. They went to a pick-up at a house and found a dying grandmother and grieving family, and they asked to pray with the family. Then they delivered the grandmother’s stuff to her granddaughter in Oregon. You don’t pray with your postman.”