Shutl

I know we are already well into 2011… but as Guy will attest I am very bad at finishing blog posts!

Here are the highlights of our first full year, in chronological order: *

1. Steven Kemp joins the launch crew as Head of Service

I was really thrilled that Steven was willing to brave working with me again for 3 key reasons:

• As eCourier.co.uk’s “Head of Happiness”, Steven has managed just about every operational and customer challenge courier companies can face. This unflappable man manages the service provided by our carriers to shoppers.
• Before getting diverted by couriers, Steven built B2C call centres for some of UK’s best known brands. Since our couriers are not used to interacting with consumers, our call centre manage shopper relationships day to day ensuring Shutl exceeds expectations 24/7.
• Steven is a 5^th Dan blackbelt with .XLS. Seriously you should see what he has done with our internal reports. Ninja.

I would not be so impertinent as to disclose Steven’s age – let’s just say that he is as close as we get to having day-to-day adult supervision! Not that you would know it from his photo.

2. Completed integration with our first carriers

We are incredibly grateful for all the support that Excel, eCourier.co.uk & Lewis Day, our first carriers, have given us over our first year. Before we began integration we spent a lot of time with them ensuring that the proposition we were planning to take to market would be viable. We owe them and their couriers a great deal; they have provided our shoppers with a fantastic quality of service even at the height of snowmageddon.

3. First retailer live and delivery complete

Our first client was Start London, arguably East London’s premier fashion boutique. We developed a very basic module for the OS Commerce which our friends at The Technical People then implemented. Start will always be close to our hearts… not just because they are our neighbours!

4. Implement our first in-store proposition

Laithwaites, the UK’s leading direct wine merchant, were the first retailer to launch our in-store Point Of Sale (POS) delivery service. The solution allows staff at flagship store, ‘The Arch‘, at Vinopolis in Borough Market, to offer their off-line customers Shutl delivery.

We see this development as a massive opportunity to expand our delivery model into traditional retail. The service has been particularly handy for those buying cases of wine without their own transportation (it is London afterall) and also for anyone leaving birthday presents to the last minute!

5. 1^st Argos delivery!

Probably the highlight of our year was the launch of our service with the UK’s largest multi-channel retailer. When we began working with Argos we were little more than a business plan and a few lines of code! We are very grateful for the chance they took with us and the support they have given us over the year. Argos have been offering our service for free on orders over £50 and customers are loving it.

6. Completing follow-on round of investment from existing shareholders

Once we were live with Argos we raised £400k from our existing shareholders. All start-ups are reliant on the faith of their investors until they are profitable. We are very grateful for the fantastic support that all our shareholders have provided, particularly as it took a little longer than we expected to get up and running…

7. Barend & Steve join our Board!

In recognition of their growing contribution to Shutl, Steve Romney, Shutl’s CTO and Barend Van Den Brande, Managing Partner of Hummingbird Ventures were both appointed to Shutl’s Board of Directors.

Steve has been responsible for the successful launch and continued development of Shutl’s technology platform.

Barend brings a wealth of experience growing enterprise software businesses…. and a pot of cash. The pot of cash does not attend board meetings.

8. Building our on-shore development team

While we continue to work with Veriqual, an off-shore development firm based in Pakistan, we intend to build our in-house capability alongside to help us speed though our development roadmap. We have lots of cool stuff we want to bring to market.

With this in mind, David Batey joined us from Accenture in October. Our new lead developer was very excited because rather than spending his time on boring SAP integrations now he gets to mess around with elastic cloud computing & beat Guy up (on the squash court). He also gets the company of Crawford Wynnes. Crawford joined Shutl straight out of uni as our development intern… however he impressed us so much he became our full-time junior developer. Crawford provides us with no end of entertainment as he recovers from a recent tonsillectomy (and has been prescribed some pretty strong drugs).

9. Awards

As the year came to a close we were really honoured to win best Angel/VC backed business at the 2010 Startups Awards organised by Startups.co.uk. This was a great win for us since at the time of entering we had only been live a few short months with very little to show…

Over the course of the year we also won:

• A Bully award at the inaugural White Bull Pathways to Exit conference- a fantastic event that I heavily endorse and not just because of the award.
• The Innovate!2010 London Pitch Slam with Skimlinks
• The Shell Live Wire Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 for London
• 2 trophies from the European Tech Tour for being one of the top TMT start-ups in UK & Europe

10. Integration with ROCS & ACI courier despatch software

ROCS & ACI are two of the UK’s most popular courier management software packages used by UK same-day courier firms. Both these firms have now implemented integrations with Shutl’s APIs. The result is that it is now super easy for any courier company on these platforms to start working with Shutl. This is key for us because as we are offered by more retailers and serve more of the country we are going to need a lot of couriers.

*we reserve the right to publish another post of low-points at some point in the not-too-distant future when we are fantastically successful.