JKUAT nursing student says that Speedball was a result of boredom

(Photo: Courtesy)

The Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology nursing student says that Speedball was a result of boredom as he tried to find an internship earlier this year.

“My brother ordered a shirt from an online store which took days to be delivered. Within the waiting period, we could not trace where the shirt was and I kept wondering why such a simple task took forever to complete and why there lacked real time communication between a client and a rider?” Ouma recalls.

With the help of a cousin who had a background in IT, Ouma says he put up a website to advertise courier services and began operating from his brother’s house. Ouma says that after research, he discovered that the only available tech-based courier company was not satisfying an important need.

“People don’t want to be told to get out of their desks to pick a parcel at the office entrance. They also need to conveniently hold conversation with someone making the delivery. We are interested in providing for the last mile delivery service people increasingly need to have their items delivered at their very doorstep the way it happens in developed countries,” Ouma says. 

Within a short period of setting up shop, delivery inquiries began trickling. One client seeing the potential the business held, made a partnership offer. Ouma says he used the money he had made from phone deliveries and rented an office in Nairobi’s Nyayo estate.

And now, apart from its main office in Nyayo estate with a pick-up location in the Nairobi  CBD, Speedball is a combination of a courier system and an online app that facilitates delivery of items to individuals and organisations.

The business has also grown to include a trusted clientele including Wina, an online shop that requests for more than 20 deliveries in a day; Liku, also an online shop, and Amaco insurance company. The items delivered come small as a key or as hefty as furniture delivered in trucks.

Speedball serves an average of 100 customers daily all around the capital,  charging a flat rate of Sh200 for deliveries done within five kilometres and an additional Sh25 for every kilometre after that.

The venture has not come without challenges. A past scenario where a rider vanished with a client’s Sh300,000 was an eye opener for Ouma who has since made recruitment of riders at the organisation a stringent process. He says during recruitment, a rider is supposed to present original documents including a valid driving license, a national ID as well as a fresh certificate of good conduct from the police.

This is followed by an equally hard-nosed vetting process that looks into the experience of the rider and the state of their motorbike. Riders who pass the vetting process are then subjected to rigorous training sessions where they are schooled on customer service skills and best approaches in security issues. The riders are then distributed in key operation areas where they stay put to make deliveries. Crowd sourced drivers take 75 per cent of each delivery they make while permanent riders are paid a similar amount weekly. 

The app which is available on Google Playstore also has security features that addresses security concerns that come with the high-stakes business. A user is given an option to enlist insurance cover in case of loss or damage of their items.

Speedball boasts 21 permanent employees; four in marketing, four IT crew, four in operations, three charged with customer service and an individual charged with the finances of the company, while Ouma and four riders sum up the human resource. 30 riders and drivers are crowd sourced and work part-time.