 This is sharp storefront conjure has created fully automated stores on wheels. Using the conjure app, you can hail a store in a matter of minutes. The autonomous vehicles show up. The doors automatically slide open and you can choose the products you want. Using the RFID tags, your account is then automatically built only for the items you selected. You don't have to talk to the driver and all the options are truly at your fingertips. In this episode, we talked with Ali Ahmed, the co-founder of conjure, about how they broke the internet at CES in 2018, why they decided to launch specifically with ice cream, and the implications of store-hailing for industries outside of ice cream, including grocery stores, markets, and alcohol. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Ali from conjure. Thanks for coming on. For people who don't know, what does your company do? Thanks Diego. It's great to be here. conjure is an app where you can tap one button and hail a shop on wheels to come to you. So you don't have to create a basket. You don't have to wait for a delivery person to go pick up the order. The shop comes to you, so you can shop for ice cream, snacks, and food on the go right at your doorstep in as little as two minutes. So what I love about the idea is that it makes a lot of sense in my head. So instead of the whole Uber Eats model where it's like you just order a very specific item, you're giving the person, the consumer an ability to order from their favorite shop. So whether I love, let's say Pink Dot in LA or some ice cream shop, I know you guys are launching with ice cream. They can go ahead and basically pick their flavor from the cart, right? Absolutely. For you, when you first thought of the idea, what was the problem that you saw? What was the thing? And I say this in a way of like, maybe you personally were like, okay, I want this flavor, but this shop doesn't have it. And now I have to accept it. What was the problem you saw that you wanted to fix? So the problem actually stemmed from my experience in on-demand delivery. And I'll go a little bit further back. So my co-founder, Imad, we're three co-founders, Imad, Tigran and myself, Imad and I used to work in about 12 years ago in the ice cream and food business. And he had this idea back then. So 12, 13 years ago, he came up with a concept of being able to hail a shop on demand. And this is before smartphones. So his idea was to pick up a rotary dial phone and say, bring the shop to me and then hang up. Like an ice cream truck. Ice cream truck, but on-demand. Got it. And then his vision expanded to all sorts of retail categories, grocery and others. And it was just too early, right? So we parked that idea. This is before Uber? Do you mean like when you say too early? I'm talking about 2005. Okay. So way before. Way before. This is just, I think before the App Store even came about. Yeah, the App to trade. App Store was like 2008, 2007, 2008. And so what we did is we parked that idea. And I worked a group on for a while, the tech startup. And then I started a number of businesses. So I then started an on-demand delivery company in London. And at the time, this is 2015. So you moved to London? I was actually in London. I graduated. I had an MBA and then I did another master's from Lancaster. And then I started my first company in Lancaster, moved to London and then worked a group on in London and then decided to start, you know, my own business. So this is like 2008 group on? 2010, 2011, correct. And it was my city deal and it just got acquired by Groupon. And it was exciting to see, you know, the pace of activity at that time with Groupon. You know, it hasn't fared too well now, but at the time it was one of the fastest growing businesses. Well, they got lucky because they had the recession. The recession hit at the right time and every one was looking for a deal and everyone had a Groupon type company. I remember Brad Feld had like Feld's deals. I think he also invested in Groupon, oddly enough. But anyway. Okay. So you're there. It's 2010, 2011. And then I started a startup doing, you know, video messaging and we worked with Sony Music. But then in 2015 I started Dispatch, which at the time became the fastest growing on-demand delivery startup in the UK. And the idea was unique. It was different to your typical Uber Eats and DoorDash and Deliveroo in the UK in that you could request anything by sending a text message and we would find it, buy it and deliver within the hour. Anything. Anything. More than a million pounds worth of requests in the first 20 days of Dispatch. Wow. What was the thing that we're mostly requested? I'm just curious. So Furniture was one of the biggest categories and we kind of dug deep and found out Ikea would take a week and charge 40 pounds delivery fee. So we decided that we can charge the same and have it to you in two hours. And you just go pick it up yourself. And we would have a network of drivers. We had about a thousand in our network. But Furniture was one big category, but then a lot of it. We did everything but food. And so at times we were getting orders for 10 HTC vibes for an event. We would get orders for Argos as a big retailer in the UK and so we would get typical Argos orders where people just didn't want to book it and then have to go pick it up. That's their model. So they would just use us to do it. Okay. So you're familiar with the space. Very familiar. Very familiar. I spent a lot of time trying to make on-demand delivery work. What happened with Dispatch? Costs were too high. The labor? The labor costs are too high. You have a driver and in our case you also had what we call an operator that would have to find the product. They would have to check availability at the stores, check multiple stores and then make sure that they route the driver to that location to pick up. And we were ending up charging 11, 12 pounds on average, which is about $16, $17 I guess. Delivery fee. People were paying it but at the same time it just couldn't scale. So I moved to the US in 2017. Did the company shut down or did you sell it? Yeah. I mean, I guess it's still active so I had a little bit of exit with my investors and I moved to the US. And it wasn't a huge success to be completely honest. It didn't really, that model didn't work. But as soon as I got to the US I got back in touch with the Mod, my co-founder and told them about my experiences and on-demand delivery, the challenges I faced and he harkened back to that idea that he had about 13 years ago. And he said that by delivering the store instead of goods, we can create a model that will always be faster, cheaper and more convenient and more profitable than delivery. Is the idea there, if you bring them the store, the sort of the price per ticket, the average ticket goes up higher? Is that the idea? That is one of the ideas. Absolutely. That people will spend a little bit more in theory. But more critical is the reason why on-demand delivery doesn't work is because of the order pickup. So if you think about it, with certain services like Amazon and others, you have batching, which is an important concept in delivery to reduce your costs of labor. But with on-demand delivery, there's no batching. You have to go pick up every single order and then deliver it. Or you batch once, essentially. Basically, you're batching once. But by getting rid of the order process and not just the order process of creating the basket, but also the order pickup, our model has all the inventory inside roving vans. But if there's a roving van outside you right now, you tap a button, 30 seconds will be there. Just like an Uber. Might take five, six minutes. Like an Uber as well sometimes. But that's the idea. It's more akin to ride-hailing than to delivery. And it sounds like you started with Ice Cream just because you had sort of a product expert in that world and Ice Cream seemed to make the most sense. Absolutely. With my background, on-demand delivery, Imad's in Ice Cream. And Tigran, who's our third co-founder, and he found out about us, his background is in robotics and automation. We're the ideal team for Conjure. And then who did you launch with? So you're in LA, of all the Ice Cream shops, you pitched them. Which one was like, oh, I get it, I want a partner. So it'd be helpful to tell you a little bit about the history, right? So Imad and I decided to go all-in. Early 2018 we went to CES. We worked with this expert in the motorcycle industry. And he created a prototype, a three-foot-long prototype of a self-driving grocery store. And we christened at Fuji and we took it to CES. And we painted this future vision of stores that you can hail to come to on-demand that are fully automated. And it kind of blew up when we went viral. The concept of self-driving store was unheard of. And Tigran found out about us from some of the coverage after the show. And his background, he's been working for seven years. He built autonomous forklifts and warehouses and self-driving vehicles. And so it was opportune time to bring him on board. Neither Imad or I are very technical. And so Tigran joined at the right time. And so the long play of this is these are autonomous vehicles, autonomous stores. Absolutely. That is still our vision. But what we've done is we were called Robomart. And we actually built a full-sized, fully autonomous store on wheels. There's no driver. There's no place for a human to be in. There's no steering wheel. It's a fully autonomous vehicle. But we built that to showcase the vision, right? And what we've actually done is put drivers behind the wheel, but tinted the windows and the windshield. So you never see the driver. You never get in touch with the driver. It's a fully automated experience for the shopper. And that's going to be the same exact experience when we have fully self-driving vehicles in the fleet. And is it hard from a scanning perspective to know what people take? No. We actually have built our own proprietary system. We use off-the-shelf RFID parts. But the software is what we've built. And we track every product. So for example, if you want to grab this water bottle, as soon as you take it out, we know it's no longer the store. You put it right back. We know that as well. But from the time the door opens to the time the door closes is your shopping engagement when the door closes and the shop leaves. So you say it's an RFID tag? Correct. Okay, got it. We know then that it's no longer in. And that's your basket. So whatever you've taken out is what you get charged for. CVS does that a little bit now. They do RFID tags on like deodorants because I guess those get stolen a lot. It's kind of weird to see what products they put it on. They do it at clothing stores as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which makes more sense. It was just weird when I literally bought deodorant the other day and I was like, what the fuck? There's an RFID tag on this. This is the weirdest thing. That's interesting. And so the big vision here is autonomous sort of markets. And then why the decision, again, to just to go back to the ice cream. Why the ice cream first? Ice cream is the ideal category for what we're doing, right? Unpack that. Unpack that first. A lot of people don't realize the average American eats 20 pounds of ice cream a year. And three out of four have it more than once a week. It is one of the most consumed, it is probably the most consumed dessert in the U.S. and probably globally. That's my wife would agree with you. It's crazy. And the biggest challenge with ice cream is that it melts. If you go to the store and pick it up, it's probably a 15, 20 minute round trip. The moment it hits your basket, the shot clock starts. It's getting softer as it goes. Getting softer sometimes. Okay. So the way you guys look at it is what's the problem? The problem or the food with the highest problem is something that is melt ultimately. Absolutely. And then something that gets consumed at a rather high rate. At a very high rate. And then the intersection of that is ice cream. The intersection is ice cream. The critical problem is time, right? We're saving people time by bringing the store to them. But with ice cream, there's that additional problem of the fact that it melts. You won't believe how many times we've not only heard from people but experienced ourselves that if you order ice cream for delivery, they will sometimes leave it at your doorstep. Yeah. Not even ring the doorbell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just curious as to what about hot products? Is that harder to do than refrigeration in one of the vehicles or is that just something where you guys were like, look, we know ice cream. I'm going to start with ice cream and then hot products. Obviously, I have a similar friction point, but we'll just do that later. Exactly. Yes. We absolutely see ourselves getting into hot food as well. The way that we want to ramp up, we did our beta with snacks. And during the beta, we averaged nine minutes across all orders for almost 10 months. And so we really proved out the model works. We were doing on nine minutes that equates to about five orders per hour, which is more than twice as what delivery can ever average. And then in terms of like the revenue model, how do you guys, is just like a service fee that you're taking, a delivery fee? So we work directly with the CPG brand. So we get preferential pricing from them. Oh, because you're a store on wheels. Exactly. So you get the wholesale pricing. Absolutely. And, uh, and so we do have a markup on the goods, but even with our markups, it's still 20 to 30% cheaper than your regular 7-11 or convenient store. So it's almost a parody with, with supermarkets. And so how has it gone with the ice cream, the beta testing? So we did the beta with snacks and now we're about to launch ice cream. So we have not launched ice cream, but the response from the beta for snacks itself, we had 90% repeat usage. So somebody who used it once, they came back again and again. My brain, it just goes nuts when, when it's, that's why I enjoy talking to entrepreneurs. So I get ice cream because you guys know ice cream. But when you think about like, like, is there an Instacart play here where there's got to be so much data for all these grocery stores as to like what people are ordering, right? For delivery. And so then it's almost like, or even on the food side where a certain restaurant will have three bangers, those bangers are always available. And so is there a play here for you guys to sort of go, we can become the grocery store on wheels because we have the data maybe via a partnership or something like that. And then it sort of solves the last mile problem for the Instacarts of the world. Is there something there? There is, yeah. When you think about data, right? So the type of data we get, the granular data is unlike what retailers can get from anywhere else or brands can get from anywhere else, right? This is at point of consumption when someone's already decided to buy. So in the CPG world, this is called first moment of truth and second moment of truth and I think the third moment of truth as well. When you first decide you need something like you're out of toothpaste and then you decide which brand I want and then you're at the store and you see all the different options and then you make a decision. There's three separate occasions that you have to go through. We boil them down into one. And similarly when you think about every neighborhood that we serve, the kind of data that we get, we can help CPG brands and retailers tweak selection to understand what sells what in the best way. And really offer consumers the best assortment possible. I also think about it from a real estate perspective, right? And so if there's a certain zip code always ordering the same ice cream truck, then that gives me data to say I should be there as a brand, right? I should open up an ice cream shop or on the contrary of that to say, we're gonna test this market. Let me call conjure up. Let's do a test in a zip code I might not know anything about. And then just see, do some promotion, some marketing. And let's see if I have any attraction to that market, right? And so then it's almost like you're creating a retail shop on wheels, but without the upfront cost permitting. Absolutely, exactly. So I think, I actually think that, that's really interesting without the rent. But I mean, it's like, it's far cheaper. Exactly. Percentage is, you know, yeah. And so I think that's where my brain goes. It's interesting where you can almost do this like free beta testing. I'm just curious though too, when it came to the autonomous vehicle portion, obviously San Francisco has been testing this stuff forever. Did you guys try to do anything in San Francisco with the little model you made or? So yes, with our fully built prototypes. We actually, at the time, we did a partnership with Stop and Shop. They're one of the biggest supermarket chains on the East Coast. And we tried to run a pilot. Permissions are tough and getting regulatory approval is gonna take time. But what we realized is that we can put drivers in our vehicles, but still have that fully automated experience for consumers. And because of our model doing so many orders per hour, even with drivers, we're extremely profitable. So eventually the plan is to move to a fully automated model with self-driving vehicles. But we can afford to let that happen naturally as the market, as the technology matures, as the market and regulators approve it. Yeah. You know, we can afford to take that time. What about cannabis? So we've been approached by a lot of players for cannabis. It's one of the most popular categories. I guess it's tough because it's a cash business though, right? And so the transaction maybe gets a little difficult. There's a lot of other regulatory hurdles around cannabis and alcohol. Especially in California, there's a lot of rules. Might be something we look at down the line, or it might be something that we work with partners to offer them a platform for them to do it themselves. Yeah. All right, so people listening probably getting excited. They want to order ice cream, blah, blah, blah. How in relation to where you see your growth going? So here we are Q1 2023. What's on the roadmap for you? And so you're about to go ice cream. What can people expect in like Q3, Q4 of this year from you and your team? So we're going live. Our first pilot is going to be with Unilever, our partner. They're the biggest ice cream company in the world. They own Ben and Jerry's, TALENTI, Magnum, Good Humor. And so it'll stock their products at the start. Brand agnostic, or all the brands? So we will. So at the start, we're going to partner with them and have their brands, but they have a very full selection. I've got a lot. 35 SKUs across TALENTI is one of the most popular. And then our pilot with Mars will kick into effect. So we'll introduce Mars brands, Snickers, Twix, Dove Ice Cream. Candy truck. M&M sandwiches, absolutely. No, no, ice cream, within ice cream. Okay, okay, I got it, still ice cream. The M&M sandwiches, the Twix pints, and the Snickers bars. A lot of the impulse buys for ice cream. And then we also have a partnership with Cool House, the urgent company. So their products will then feature into our ice cream shops. And by Q3, Q4, we've already signed up a number of restaurant partners. So it's still early days. That's what I want on your list. Absolutely, absolutely. David Coe is a partner of ours. Q3, Q4. Little Fatty is going to be having their product inside our shops on wheels. I just thought of this idea. So imagine I'm throwing a party, right? And then it's maybe midnight, we all want some ice cream. I conjure, do I conjure? Just like a big ice cream truck. You tap one button, you get 35 SKUs, 70, 80 pints right in front of you. See, that's cool. In minutes. You could even do that for like weddings. You know what I mean? You know, like the late night crowd, they're always wanting something at the end of the night. That could be a massive opportunity. I just think about that because it's also cool. It's like, let me get my conjurer. In terms of fundraising for this, I'm assuming you've fundraised probably. When you speak to investors, do they get it? Is there something like, does it feel too soon? Because the autonomous portion, what is some of the feedback you've got just from people looking at your deck? We've been fortunate. We've raised from some really great investors. Hustle fund. The CES, I imagine, helped you tremendously. It did. We actually closed investors at that show in 2018. And so we've had a number of great, mostly pre-seed investors like Hustle Fund, Wasabi Ventures, Automation Fund here in LA, Julie and Sarkin. And recently on the East Coast in Baltimore, we have W Ventures that have invested. So we've been able to have some great pre-seed investors on board. And we're now kind of really focusing on launching. And we'll then start looking at raising additional funding when the time's right. Have you had any discussions with the Postmates, Uber Eats, Instacarts of the World just to gather interest to see? Because in some way you're kind of providing the future in some way. Or just a different experience, right? We have, yeah. It's tangential, but it's related. It is, yeah. And so some of them have approached us, right? So we've been very fortunate, I guess, with the uniqueness of the concept. We've been fortunate that a lot of partners and players have approached us. And so some of the players you mentioned have also approached us to kind of learn more about store hailing is what we call this concept. And how store hailing can fit in with their plans. Whether we would white label or platform or be, you know. And it might be something we explored down the line. But right now we want to give consumers the best possible experience. That means that we control the assortment, we work with brands directly. And eventually the plan is to then work with chefs, work with restaurant directors and be able to offer the best food, ice cream, snacks that you can get. Yeah. I wonder, again, there's so many ideas. So we had Let Us Grow on the podcast, Let Us Grow, you know, they make like. I know them, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I always think about like, there could be a, I mean, you could do a conjure vehicle, you know, people just drive around, you pick your herbs. I don't know, kind of interesting, maybe like a marketing play for them. We've been approached by companies like that at that space. So there's companies like farming, right? Exactly, indoor farming companies that have explored, putting on their units inside vehicles, inside our vans. Again, we're just scratching the surface of what's possible with store healing, but we want to be hyper focused, right? We don't want to get distracted in different directions. Eventually, by creating the platform for store healing, we can enable a lot of different use cases for being able to get anything in minutes. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Tell people where they can find you, where they can download your app and when, when they can get some ice cream. For sure. So, you can go to www.conjureinc.com, that's the website, and the app is live on the app store, but right now it's in limited testing. So hours are not, you know, we're really not live yet. What hours do you guys test? We do on the weekends. We do just a few hours on the weekends, but again, it's just testing right now, but very, very soon we'll be making an announcement that we're live. Oh, making an announcement. We would love for people in Hollywood and WeHo to try the service. Okay. I'll tell you, it's one thing. There's a bar next door and they're always asking me to open up the coffee shop to give them ice cream. Really? Yeah. And so it's an, but that, that's like a 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. So I don't know what, what are the hours people are getting ice cream? Once we go live, it'll be 4 p.m. to midnight. Okay. So that's the after dinner. And we'll tweak the hours. Again, every store might, every neighborhood might have their own hours and we can work with different partners to set their own hours as well. I really, really am excited about restaurants. I think restaurants on wheels, it goes back to the concept. If you've ever watched Fifth Element, the flying restaurant that docks at his, at his apartment and there's a chef cooking up, you know, obviously it'll be more automated than that. But, you know, that idea, do you think that's the future? That's even more interesting. Like the chef actually cooking it up. Again, we'll see how it kind of plays out, but the idea of stores coming to you is something that has been, you know, I'd say in science fiction and also in reality, you've seen the concept play out. And now it's just a matter of time. We're making a reality and we're not the only ones. There are other players that are focused on this roving shop model. So there's like Mancho on the East Coast that are doing pizzas. They're finishing them off. There's Stellar Pizza, which is sort of this robot that makes pizzas here in LA. There's Stellar Pizza and their model is not so much on demand. It just goes in parks at different locations. Yeah. But the concept of roving shops is now gaining traction. Sure. And we're sort of leading that, that industry wave. All right. Thanks for coming on the podcast, brother. Diego, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. 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