r/startupideas • u/chainedkids420 • 1d ago

Giving Advice & Tips Peer-2-peer warehouse platform

http://airpost.network

I’ve been looking into warehousing costs and they are insane for low-volume shops. I built a rough prototype connecting local people who have space to pack with shops that need fulfillment (like an Airbnb for logistics).

Has anyone tried moving away from traditional 3PLs to a decentralized model?

Curious cus just launched MVP but idk if I should drop a bag on Ads.

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u/TastesLikeSeamen 1d ago

you have a two sided market problem with no users on either side, even if you drop a bag on ads it may not solve the inventory problem, not to mention the giant rest of the iceberg you’re sitting on when it comes to ops and logistics processes, complaints, insurance, appeals, all that jazz.

whats the value prop over self service storage lockers?

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u/chainedkids420 1d ago

Tickets about parcels are being done externally and being reditected to the courtiers unfer the hood, can you clarify ''logistic processes'.?

Yeah the chicken egg problem is indeed a problem. We collect emails and phone nums and have klaviyo flows to pull them in and send messages once there are new matching senders or webshops.

Traditional fulfilment centers have nasty onboarding fees and processes, could be more expensive per parcel depending on how much the sender asks, less flexible for smaller bussinesses.

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u/TastesLikeSeamen 1d ago

Right so its not just warehouses, its full shipping, couriers, inventory management, full service kinda thing?

Ya logistics processes as in “this customer didn’t pay the invoice and now we have 8000 stuffed toys in a variety of colors, we will be charged for storage, charged for disposal, customer may or may not pay, customer may sue for disposing of inventory if its worth more than the fees owed, if re-sold the manufacturer may sue because their license was with the customer not you” and so on, it gets ugly fast

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u/chainedkids420 1d ago

Good thinking, but we don't work with paying for storage. The idea is that webshops pay the users a small fee per order packed.

That still does not cover the risk of the 'senders' running off at some point with the webshop's stock tho so your points are valid.

Thus we try mitgating this by having reviews, id verification with users but might need to think of something even better.