In this Developer Feature series, Spiffy talks to up-and-coming developers to learn what makes them tick. This time around, we have 26-and-a-half-year-old Natalie Ip, the CEO and founder of delivery startup dilivrit.
Describe yourself in three words.
Hong(kong)kiwi. Resilient. Persistent. = Scrappy.
Describe dilivrit in a sentence.
On-demand delivery at your fingertips.
What motivated you to start dilivrit? How did you come up with the idea?
I love starting up things, it’s like achievement unlocked. I actually started wanting to do a food startup, I even had business cards for the name FOODIP. In the end I opted for food delivery and an investor suggested I should create a great delivery system for other higher margin items as well. So after researching the market I pivoted to a crowdsourced delivery platform. Why now? Riding on the bandwagon of e-commerce and instant gratification!
How did you stay inspired throughout the development process?
There were just more and more delivery-focused startups popping up in the States (according to TechCrunch), which means this is a promising future and I should be on the right track. Oh, and every now and then, I have these delivery needs which I wish my app can be live and cover my needs. Solving my own problem gets me going all the time.
What do your family/friends think about dilivrit? Any funny anecdotes?
Fairly speaking, my mom doesn’t quite get the idea of on-demand delivery mobile app, yet somehow fully supports my decision. And funny anecdotes…There’s an incident that I was getting a pseudonym or something rhymes with dilivrit (i.e. shipwithip), my brother-in-law quite liked it then my sister pointed out it reminds her “shi*”withip instead….
What’s your process for designing the user journey?
Took reference from similar on-demand mobile apps in the States, did a couple of wireframes and got feedback from friends in the tech scene (for the view of early adopters), as well as ran through friends from target market to ensure it’s user friendly. And started developing and repeating the feedback part. It’s all about trial and error.
How long did you take to finish development?
The development of this mobile app started back in Oct last year, and until now we’ve transformed to the third design, in which will be uploaded to the official app store. So roughly 5 months.
What are your preferred platforms/tools of choice?
Ruby on Rails, deployed on Heroku. Native codes for iOS and Android.
What tips/tricks would you share with other aspiring developers?
Shipped is better than perfect. Well at least this is what I’ve been reminding my co-founder as he’s a perfectionist and we really need to check the reality with the actual people using it with ‘something’ than ‘nothing’.
Tell us something people might be surprised to learn about you.
I’ve stayed in an all-male startup hostel for 2 months at the early stage of my start up journey. Yeah, I’m one of the boys!
What’s next for you?
Keep building a billion(s) dollars company! We are extending delivery service to smes and opening up delivery as an API soon. Watch this space.
How can people find you if they want to learn more about yourself?
I will pick up blogging at a later stage in the meanwhile probably my LinkedIn account: http://sg.linkedin.com/in/nataliewyip/, or they can try to catch me at Silicon Straits… or just flick me an email: natalie@dilivr.it
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