EP 583: Crowdsourced Last Mile Delivery with Roadie
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The New Warehouse podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry. A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin.

Hey guys, it's Kevin with the New Warehouse podcast on site here at Manifest. We're in the podcast studio today and I am joined alongside me here with Mark Gorland who is the CEO and founder at Rhody. And we're going to hear about the Rhody

journey and story today. We're also going to talk a little bit about their crosstalk offering and how that's helping with big and bulky logistics, which can be a challenge. And we're going to talk a little bit about those challenges. And we're going to talk a little bit about maybe the solution here today too. So Mark, welcome. How are you? Thank you. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Definitely happy to get you on. I've been following you for quite some time. So it's definitely great to get you on as a podcast guest.

But for people that are not familiar with Rody, why don't you give us a brief overview of what it is? Yeah, Rody is a crowdsourced network. So regular people in regular vehicles that are delivering things from retailers, everyone from Walmart to Best Buy to Home Depot, Tractor Supply, CVS, and many others. But it's using regular people in regular cars, but that's what it is today. The idea started almost...

I mean, the North Star is funny with startups. This is my fifth one. And it sort of stayed the same from the moment I had the idea. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So let's talk about that a little bit because you're the founder of Rody, right? So tell us a little bit about, you know, I guess maybe some of your background and where the idea for this came from and how it kind of came to fruition.

My background is just, I guess, serial entrepreneur. So I started a company called Cabbage, PGP, Vertical One. None of them in the same industry. Last was in financial services, and then I went to logistics thinking that would be easier from a regulatory perspective, and I was wrong. Yeah. Okay. But it started literally with, I live in Atlanta. I have a condo down at the beach in Perdido Key in the Panhandle. Okay.

and the developer didn't put pans underneath the master bathroom shower. So somebody's leaked into six units. Huge pain in the ass. Everybody had to clean it up. And then you're on your own to see if there was a pan under yours, but you couldn't lift it up and look, so you had to just yank it out. So I decided to redo my shower, put tile up, be nice. I'm heading down. It's tile day. It's a Thursday, February 14. I get to Montgomery, Alabama. I'm sitting on the overpass. I get a call from Glenn, the tile guy. Now, he's from UCLA, if you know where that is. Yeah, sure. It's not that one.

Okay. It's actually the upper corner of lower Alabama, and he doesn't talk like that. Probably anyone watching this podcast. Okay, yeah. And the call goes like, he goes, Hey, Mark, it's Glenn. That bullnose tiled, unshowed, broken as shit. Ain't going to be here until overnight delivery, which is on Monday. Okay.

I mean, next day, it should be Friday, not Monday. I'm going to get nowhere. I was like, Glenn, where's the tile? He said, I think it's in Birmingham, which is about an hour and a half north of Montgomery. And so I said, well, fine, I was there, and I hang up, and I'm sitting on the overpass of I-65 in Montgomery, Alabama. I look left, and I see all these cars going south. I look right, and I see all these cars going north. I think, you know, there's bound to be somebody leaving Birmingham right now. If I just knew who they were...

They throw a box of tile in their trunk. Yeah, it's waste. They go this way anyway, make some extra cash going down to Montgomery, probably go all the way down to Florida, and I could have my toes in the sand by the time they got there. Yeah. And that's where the idea came about, that there's this just natural resource of everybody going places everywhere.

every day, nearly 250 million passenger vehicles with 4 billion feet of excess capacity. And if you could just match those up with stuff that needs to go somewhere, you could. It's more space than UPS, FedEx, the post office, and every courier that you could slap together combined. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what got us started and got us letting people make money by delivering things that are

already going the way they're going. Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting. And you mentioned February 14th, 2019, you said? It was in February, late February. So yeah. I was going to say, we're like right around the anniversary. We're getting close to tileversary. Tileversary. Okay. I like that. Definitely. And you know, obviously, you know, a very smart idea. I mean, if you look at

Like you said, all these cars that are driving all over the place all the time, there's a ton of capacity there to take advantage of and then maybe give them an additional value in doing that driving as well. And different size vehicles because you've got Priuses and you've got box trucks that...

work within Rody. And, you know, it's a fun little game of Tetris to put it all together. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. So tell us a little bit about kind of the early days there of Rody and how it kind of evolved to where it is now as this large platform. I found when you've got a startup, it really is helpful as you're trying to find your product market to get an anchor tenant. So we started wrongly thinking small businesses or regular you and me would send stuff and people did. But you've got to

You know, you've got this two-sided marketplace. You know, it's kind of like eBay, Airbnb, and UPS spun together in a bucket. So you've got to get drivers ready to drive, and you've got to get stuff being sent. So we sort of messed around with small businesses for a while, and it didn't pick up. And then all of a sudden I had this idea, like, where are people always going and coming from? And I thought about the airport.

And what else at the airport? There's lots of bags that get separated from passengers that need to be reunited with them in the neighboring, you know, neighborhoods and communities. So we went and talked to our friends at Delta in Atlanta, super good friend of startup companies. And like, we think we could deliver these bags a lot faster than existing providers, which like back in the day, I mean, it could be, it could be.

12 hours or three days before you get your bags and your underwear back. Yeah. So we started with a very humble beginnings in Daytona Beach, Florida, probably doing one or two gigs a day. Sometimes just to dudes at bike week.

Gradually progressed to Charlotte and Phoenix. But what that built out was a steady flow of gigs that got drivers interested, and we started to grind the wheels of deliverability to life everywhere. We now deliver for most of the major airlines and most of the major airports in the U.S. Yeah, absolutely. And for a lot of big retailers, too, as well, right? Absolutely. Home Depot, Best Buy, Walmart, CVS, etc.

a whole lot more tractor supply. So we're doing rural as well, which is sometimes harder for folks to do, but yeah, they were one of the first retailers to launch a same day delivery nationwide in the midst of COVID. And we stood that up for them. Yeah. Yeah. And the tractor supply and I'm in a rural area of, of New Jersey and, and,

And I drove roadie before, as I mentioned to you, to try it out with my son. He wanted a little experience of what it's like to be a UPS driver. So we tried roadie. And that's one of the deliveries we did was tractor supply. What did you deliver? It was some, I think it was some feed to a horse farm. There's a lot of horse farms out by me. And yeah, it was super interesting. Definitely. Did your son like it?

Yeah, he definitely liked it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's past that now. This was a couple years ago, but he was in this phase, like, you know, always looking for the UPS driver and, you know, very curious about that. And so that was a good way for us to actually experience it. It's really fun. There's a community aspect to Rody that kind of might get lost in some of the more transactional gig networks that you see. We've seen people, like, deliver blinds for Home Depot to someone's house, and they're getting ready to put them up because they just had a

baby and the driver just had a baby and had to do the same thing so the blinds actually got there and they got put up by nap time and gave them some tips on how to put them up. I've driven gigs. There was a baby gift going from Atlanta to Chattanooga and I was driving up there anyway and my kids with me and it's just kind of fun. You're helping somebody out and you get a little gas money while you're doing it.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. You pay for that trip, definitely. So tell us now about, because this is the new warehouse podcast, right? So we talk all about warehousing. So tell us a little bit about, you know, how Rhody can work with warehouses and fulfillment centers.

Sure. Well, you see this now with the way same-day delivery and everything fulfilled from store has sort of evolved. Right. But there's a process involved that can be inefficient at scale, which is you've got stuff as a retailer going from your DC to your store and items put up on the shelf. Somebody orders it online, and that same person goes and pulls it off the shelf and then takes it to the back, and a roadie driver would go and deliver it.

And that's fine for stuff that is right there, plentiful in the store. But most of these folks have $100 million, $200 million DCs nearby. So what we've developed is Rode XD, which is a crosstalk product that allows major retailers to take...

and their online orders as late as they want at night and just get us a tractor trailer full by 6 a.m. Yeah. And we'll have them delivered that very next day. Oh, really? And in some cases, they can hold deliveries till noon and bring it and we'll have them delivered the same day. Oh, interesting. It just depends...

you know, what the retailer is and what the need is for speed there. Interesting. So you have your own crosstalk facility to enable it? We do. We have... We started it in 2023. Okay. We will have 18 up by the end of Q1. We're almost there. We'll have 50 up by the end of the year. Oh, wow. And we'll cover 60% of the U.S. population by the end of this year. So we're moving pretty fast. Yeah, definitely. Very interesting. That's super interesting because I think that, you know, there's... I mean, there's a lot of...

that have tried to tackle same day and next day. But I think leveraging those individual drivers like you do, I think that gives a lot of opportunity to really solve that and figure that out. It's often the drivers like it too, that they want to drive a little more. We can get things within 100 miles of a crosstalk. So where I'm originally from in Atlanta, you can go...

You can go pretty far north and pretty far south of taking the airport as a marker, and

and get a lot of things delivered the next day that otherwise might have taken a whole lot longer right and skip steps i mean the whole supply chain is a chain because there's links in it and you're taking out that link of having to get it forwarded closer to the customer at the store if you can actually get them all on a on a truck and yeah and deliver them the next day so customer gets speed the retailer gets it much more efficiently and much more cost effective and from it's

somebody that's delivering, you get a lot more density and routes to be able to do it with more items. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I know myself, like I've,

I've leveraged roadie. I said I've driven roadie before, but I've also leveraged it from the perspective of a fulfillment center and, you know, having like this, you know, late order or something comes in, needs to get out, same day has to get it to the sortation center, like, you know, call up a roadie and, you know, they're there fairly quickly to be able to take a few boxes or more over. And it's been really, really helpful in accomplishing that at some level.

some late nights in the fulfillment centers. I always say when we're trying to get some things out on time and, you know, some last minute things or important orders that come through to be able to accomplish that. But you're also focusing on some of the big and bulky delivery as well. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, the cross dock is built for big and bulky. I mean, it's something that, you know, we've done surveys and it's something that retailers...

Don't offer a ton of options on delivery, even though customers want it. It's harder to go through the standard package networks because the belts really aren't built for stuff that's, we'll do 200 pounds or more. And there's damage if you have it touching a lot of places. So much like I'm describing, you can go from these, the actual DCs of the retailers and bring larger items, get it there and get it delivered much faster, much less touches and

not having to go on equipment that it's not made for. Right. And customers are happy because they're getting it a lot sooner. So there's a ton of benefits to it. And it's something that's been pretty difficult for the traditional carriers to deliver and pretty expensive as well. Yeah. So we're sort of pulling back the veil on that and,

make pretty clean and easy pricing to get that stuff delivered. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm curious, I mean, like what kind of worker do you see that's usually like jumping on the platform as a driver, leveraging it as, you know, kind of a gig work? That's usually what it is, is folks that are doing gig work. I mean, there's people that do it a lot that might have or rent a panel van or a box truck doing these larger items. But all in all, I mean, since we started, it's been...

People are either going that way or doing it when they want to do it. And that sort of remains the same today. I mean, people do pop in and out of the network and they do it, you know, depending on the time of year, depending on, you know, kids leave college and go back into school. So there's towns where suddenly you have more or less drivers. But it's good. It helps get more drivers in the population.

We probably have more drivers than most, and we're okay with episodic use. It's harder on roadie because you've got to onboard them, and there's a cost of doing that with more drivers. But it provides an amazing amount of scale when you need it.

You literally have the delivery church built for Easter Sunday because you can scale up when you have these massive events. Think about a big snowstorm in the Northeast. You get Snowmageddon, and all of a sudden there's 800 bags at Orlando Airport. We've seen this happen. The traditional models, you know, you've got four vans that come in and go north, south, and east, west until three or four days later maybe you get your stuff back. Here it's more like ants to an anthill. Everybody knows that there's a lot of gigs there, and it helps clear the load without...

the airlines or retailers having to have their own pretty high cost fixed assets to solve those problems for exceptions. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's great to hear. And, you know, I think that flexibility too, I think is a great thing. And, you know, I'm curious in that regard, you know, as you're tackling crosstalk and you're looking at big and bulky as well. I mean, you're essentially, you know, kind of tackling a lot of that last mile delivery, right? Which has been such a

Such a hot topic for a few years now, right, in the space. But, you know, from your perspective, I mean, what does the future of delivery look like to you? I mean, it looks like you want to be able to get your big screen TV the same way you get your

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think you're going to see the number of SKUs that are available for it explode. Historically, it's more been smaller items. That's what's so cool about Rode XD and the big and bulky items within it is you can get anything. You can get barbecue grills and big screen TVs the same way you get an iPhone charger cable. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think that it is like an interesting...

thing because I think the traditional way that shipping has happened and all that stuff, the standardization and the systems that have been put in place makes it challenging to do some of those things. And I think working with different drivers and different types of vehicles and

you know, just having, you know, these one or two deliveries that they're going to focus on and do allows that flexibility to have those things happen. And I'm curious there, I mean, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the idea of delivery in rural areas, right, where...

Traditionally, because population density is low, making those economies of scale doesn't necessarily make sense for some of the bigger carriers to service, right? So how does something like Rhody kind of help with...

service those customers a little better and maybe give them some better shipping levels. Well, two things. It is a little more expensive for traditional carriers to do it, but the roadie network takes people in your own community. Yeah. Now, if you're in your tractor supply near your house in New Jersey, I mean, there's people that work there. There's people that shop there. They're the same people that are drivers. Yeah.

And more and more, you get these sort of microgroups of drivers that have an affinity near stores, near CVSs, near whoever, and wind up delivering for these brands. One thing also is getting further up in the supply chain where, you know, when these orders are coming in electronically and you have the option, it could be at a store, it could be in the D.C., you know what the range is that you can deliver from anywhere.

the roadie XD Crosstock and any of the cities we're in, you can judge where you're putting inventories. You're not going to send something to the store that you don't need to. You're leaving the store stock for people that are walking in and using your DCs probably in the most efficient manner you possibly can. Interesting, yeah. I think you do hit on with the rural. I think that's something else you get. I mean, rural is going to more and more start getting...

the same level of service that yeah big city gets definitely definitely and i think it'll be interesting to see how that continues to evolve as well and very interested to see how the you know cross doc continues well i mean with you know 18 finishing and q1 here then 50 by the end of the year i mean it sounds like you guys are really making a push towards that so to be able to do that and facilitate a lot of that that kind of same day delivery and you know making that happen and

So if we look at the future, obviously the future has 50 crosstalks in it, right? But beyond that, what does the future of Rody look like? I mean, pretty fast from starting with our first crosstalk last year, setting up the whole network to get to 50 by the end of this year. But if we're at 60% of the population by next year, I expect to be in the high 90s by the next year. Yeah. And getting lots of big and bulky products from brands, you know, running through that, getting to folks...

way faster and way easier too. I mean, you ever order a coffee table or something and you get a call from somebody you don't know and they're like, yeah, it'll be there in seven days. What time? I don't know. Between the convenient hours of 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. Yeah. Will you give us a call ahead? No, not necessarily. So it's sort of standardizing that with

and visibility tools that make it easier on the retailer, make it easier on the end customer, and make it easier on the driver where everybody knows where everybody is at the same time. Interesting, interesting, yeah. Yeah, I think that, you know, the more that tech comes into play, like even the consumer, I mean, we're joking about it here because it's such a

standard thing, right? But it's such a thing that everybody's like, why is it like this? Right? Like, you know, why we have all this technology and you know, why can't we get better visibility? Why can't somebody let me know a little more exactly like when it's going to deliver. Right. And I think it's not easy, but it's not that hard. I mean, you should be able to track the stuff coming to you the same way you track a pizza and Domino's coming to you. Oh yeah. And that's the level of, of ease that we're, we're trying to make it for everybody. Interesting. Interesting. And,

And I have to ask you, too. I mean, we're here at Manifest, right? And we're on the last day here at Manifest. So, you know, aside from the future of last mile delivery, which we've talked about here, what else is catching your attention from a technology perspective in logistics?

It's interesting that if you look at the name badges, as I know you have here, it seems like a solid third of them have tacked AI onto whatever their company name is. Everything is .ai here. I think it's going to be interesting to see how much of it is hype and what shakes out to be really meaningful. We're seeing great gains in our customer support channel.

Just because we have a data set, we know what's happened before and how we can get people's service much more quickly and they don't have to talk to a human being. But they're not irritated about it either because they've been hitting seven and then nine and running around. So we've seen a lot of gains from it. It's a bit of a puzzle to listen to all the different tech here and figure out, okay, is that really solving a problem or is it just shiny right now?

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I like that. Definitely. And I think it, you know, there's certainly a lot of great technology that we see here and I think that's a great way to look at it. Right. Like what, what is truly solving a problem and what is something that's like very cool, you know, but is it going to continue to solve a problem and be practical for the longterm? Right. I kind of like going around and being like, how would you explain what you're doing to your mom? Yeah. And, and, and if you can't get somewhere close to that, then

Then they might need to iterate a little bit more on what the product or the product market fit is. That's good. A mom test. A mom test. There you go. Absolutely. So very great to talk to you, Mark, here and catch up and learn about Rody and kind of the journey and what you guys are working on with the Crosstalk and Big & Bulky. I think, you know, great service that you're rolling out there and going to help a lot of people to get that better delivery experience that we talked about here. So if people are interested in

learning more about roadie or connecting what's the best way to do that i mean you can just go to roadie.com to learn more if you're a sender and take you through a journey to get get in touch with us and figure out what's best for you if you're a driver just go to roadie driver on whatever phone you use google play or the app store and you got to work on your son that get back into the into the groove we need to get him back as a driver yeah yeah yeah you hear that you hear that gavin

He doesn't watch my stuff. Mine don't either. We'll see. A couple of years, he'll have his license, so maybe he'll be doing some driving himself. I don't know. We'll see. We'll get him a roadie hat and shirt to get him started. Okay. All right. That sounds good. That sounds good. Definitely. So definitely check out the website at thenewwearhouse.com as well as in the show notes here. So, Mark, thank you once again for joining me here. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it, Kevin.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes. And for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.