If you live in an apartment building, chances are you know the pain of your delivery driver being unable to find your unit. You may have even had a package stolen because the driver couldn’t get into the building, instead leaving it on the front step.
These are the issues that have gone largely unaddressed by last-mile delivery and mapping companies like Google Maps. Akash Agarwal, founder and chief business officer of delivery startup Beans.ai, calls it “the last 100 feet problem.”
“[Google and Apple] Maps were never made for deliveries or logistics,” Agarwal told Modern Shipper. “Drivers are using Maps very heavily because there’s no other alternative, but they don’t contain the last-hundred-feet data to be able to successfully deliver. And especially for residences, that’s the biggest gap that we realized maps don’t understand.”
At Beans.ai, Agarwal is building a mapping and last-mile solution for hard-to-reach places like apartments, condominiums, hospitals and nursing homes, which combined make up around 30% of all U.S. residences.
The startup maps secondary locations within those primary locations to give drivers and couriers a turn-by-turn guide to navigate parking garages, apartment complexes, hallways and more.
“Which building do you have to go to? Where’s the entrance? How do you park? Where do you park? Where can you park legally? What’s the access code to the entrance? Are you allowed to take an elevator, or is there a self-service elevator?” asked Agarwal, posing questions from the perspective of a driver.
“What’s the delivery policy? Are you even allowed to go upstairs, or do you have to leave the package in a package room or with the doorman? And if you are allowed to go upstairs, how many floors up are you going?”
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All drivers want that secondary location data, but there’s a reason it can’t be found on Apple or Google Maps: People don’t want their exact addresses broadcast to everyone using those platforms. That’s an issue given that most buildings don’t have standard naming and numbering conventions, which can lead to increased delivery times as drivers try to find their way.
“The cities don’t have it. The governments don’t have it. Building departments don’t have it — even the fire departments don’t have it,” Agarwal said. “There’s no legal binding on a building like an apartment complex to share the location of all the units inside.”
But with Beans.ai, the data isn’t shared outside of the verified drivers using its app or the companies, such as Uber Eats and Instacart, that partner with it. That has given the startup plenty of leeway to collect data that would otherwise be private.
“People are more than willing to share this data with us versus others,” Agarwal said. “And because we’re not taking any resident’s name, we don’t know who lives at the property. We’re just purely collecting directions to get to the property and sharing it in a very safe manner to authenticated orders.”
Agarwal and his co-founder, Nitin Gupta, know the pain of failed deliveries firsthand, both as consumers and couriers. The two men both drove — and still do occasionally — for DoorDash and Uber Eats. Eventually, they learned that delivering to places like apartments hurt how much money they could make because of how much time it took.
“So, I have no idea that the delivery I just accepted is actually going to take me 12 more minutes after Maps says I’ve arrived. And that hits my bottom line as a driver,” Agarwal said.
To boot, on the other side of the transaction, longer deliveries result in frustrated customers, which can come back to bite the companies those drivers work for. There’s also the issue of platforms like DoorDash not always knowing where their drivers are due to unexpectedly long trips.
Watch: Success in last mile delivery happens in the final 100 feet
In short, not having data on the last 100 feet hurts everyone. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Through an integration with a company like Beans.ai, it can become available to a platform’s entire fleet at the tap of a button.
“We’ve built a complete routing app, which is used by companies like FedEx Ground and OnTrac, where if a driver is going to 200 stops, we will sequence all the 200 stops and show you the exact location for every single stop,” Agarwal said.
Even drivers whose platforms don’t have an integration with Beans.ai can use its location data. The company has a method to verify drivers and couriers from other companies, granting them access to its app.
And that data is valuable. According to Agarwal, drivers using the Beans.ai app have seen their failure rates reduced by nearly 75%.
“On the driver side, we’ve seen that the drivers now feel set up for success,” he said. “And through some of our customers, we’ve seen that the driver churn goes down by almost 15%.”
The company also saw an increase in net promoter scores, which measure the likelihood that a person will recommend a product or service, for customers living in hard-to-reach places because delivery ETAs were more accurate.
Agarwal and Beans.ai still have a few tricks up their sleeve. The startup recently launched a 3D mapping and indoor navigation solution that can provide drivers with a digitized map of apartment buildings and other complexes. Uber Eats drivers, for example, would be able to receive hallway-by-hallway directions once they’re inside a building.
That could be a game-changing, time-saving prospect for the thousands of drivers pulling their hair out trying to find Unit 348-C in Building F on the northwest side of an apartment complex. Instead, all you have to do is pull out your phone and let advanced mapping do the rest.
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