2020 was no different to us on St.Maarten, a 37 sq mile island nation in the Caribbean with the country still recovering from the catastrophic Cat 5 hurricane Irma which devastated the island in Sep 2017, The pandemic definitely was a big blow to the economy which heavily relied on tourism.
When the lockdown came, we realized that we were not online !! with not many options to order food for delivery, most essential businesses were not online, and every one was trying to adapt with receiving their orders via WhatsApp. At first this lead to a flood of orders which were not being executed properly.
I had the opportunity to volunteer with some food distribution drives, and quickly realized that finding addresses is a big problem as most road signs / name signs and house number were missing due to the hurricane in 2017.
This lead to an idea of providing location based delivery service which would help drivers locate the customers via maps, with the concept of not limiting ourselves to food delivery but become a multi business service provider ORDERS.SX was born, took us 6 months to go from concept to a working app. It was a huge learning curve, from launching the app on both android and apple a website and the required backend.
We signed up our first business in OCT 2020 when we first launched we were only an online platform and expected the businesses to handle the actual physical delivery of the goods, thru a third party, but soon learned that there is a huge demand for the logistics, with a lot of close acquaintances who lost jobs due to the pandemic, finding the delivery partners was actually a very rewarding experience. With all the business alreadt sufferingin, we decided to offer our service FREE of charge to them till Dec 31 2020.
We won the Global Entrepreneurship Week, pitch competition for St.Maarten that helped boost our confidence and made many connections with international speakers & entrepreneurs,
We have just dipped our toes and now gaining traction in this space, more people now recognize the the service we provide and definitely 2021 is going to be amazing.