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This week's guest is Devan Hughes, the co-founder and CEO of Buymie-  a company on a mission is to bridge the gap between convenience and online shopping, allowing customers to order from their favourite local stores and have the goods hand-delivered to their door in as little as one hour. Personally, I love any product that reduces friction in my day to day life and Buymie certainly does this. 

This episode is a topical one as e-commerce has been one of the few industries to flourish during the pandemic rather than be stymied by it- with a 300% surge in the volume of online orders. Buymie has been no different and is on track to grow its revenue by 500% this year after recently announcing $9 million in fresh funding to expand into the UK. Buymie certainly has a bright future, but in this podcast we delve into its more humble beginnings.

Despite his recent success, Devan's path has been far from straightforward. Indeed, Devan had 5 epic failures before starting Buymie. Including everything from importing golf carts from Asia to starting, and quickly shutting down, a biometric payments company (aptly named “Paymie”).

But it was this meandering path and unique breadth of experience that allowed Devan to see what others couldn't and take an orthogonal approach when founding Buymie. Rather ingeniously, he applied the principles he picked up while working in the commodities industry to pioneer a new approach in grocery delivery- one where retailers shared common delivery infrastructure rather than each of them building out their own.

If nothing else, Devan is an amazing storyteller and this episode is a really entertaining one 😅 Here are some of my highlights from our wide-ranging discussion:

note: this was recorded on the 4th of March in front of a live audience, so beware of the subpar sound quality and the lack of Covid-19 references

On nature Vs nurture 💪

“I don't ascribe to the fact that entrepreneurs are born, do not ascribe to that at all. It’s about all your experiences and the experiences you place yourself in. If you place yourself in entrepreneurial environments, you will develop entrepreneurial skills, tendencies and capabilities for sure”

On focus 🎯

“What's the most important KPI for you today? Just focus on solving that in whatever way you can. And if you have to step on toes, if you have to piss people off to do it, just f*****g do it because you’ve nothing to lose.”

The sentence that changed Devan’s life 🤯

A young Devan and his business partner Garrett Flower (then part-time employees at the Hard Rock Café) somehow found themselves at lunch with high-flyers Diego Belmonte and Farzad Dibachi in a snazzy New Mexico restaurant discussing their plans to build a revolutionary LED company. Just as Devan was tucking into his first appetizer, Farzad said the following words, which stuck with Devan throughout the meal and, since then, have served as a reminder to always think big: “a hundred million dollars a year business doesn't excite me anymore.”

Devan reflects, “I remember our tiny little 21 year old of minds being just like sponges. I actually believe that those types of conversations that Diego exposed us to were quite formative because it set our expectations in terms of what we could achieve in our career. And I think that's one thing that Ireland has suffered from in the past is this ability to think big, to have a big grand ambition. We have Catholic shame galore, we tend to feel a bit of shame if we think too big and talk too big. And I think our experience with Diego and in the US that week probably just caught us at the right time. I think that shaped us considering the fact that myself and Garrett have kind of gone off and done very similar stuff.”

Devan’s ‘Innovation Days’ 📚

“I started taking my annual days off and I called innovation days. I remember everyone in the office would laugh at me. And so I would take a day off. I would sit at home and I would just read industry reports, any type of industry, any type of vertical. I would just read the reports. And I'm trying to understand, like, where are the pain points in the markets? … I was trying to understand different areas, different industries. Where’s the opportunity?”

Devan’s ‘earned secret’ 🗝

Great businesses are built on what Ben Horowitz describes as ‘earned secrets’- ie. something you’ve figured out that nobody else knows. Brian Chesky’s earned secret was that people would feel safe allowing total strangers to sleep on their couch, something that would’ve seemed crazy at the time. Devan’s earned secret came from his time in the commodities business. The Irish Times reports, “He says he stumbled upon the grocery e-commerce market. “It is worth €9 billion annually in Britain and Ireland alone,” he points out. “But the retailers involved make €300 million in losses every year because they are subsidising the delivery infrastructure. The distribution model they were using could never work. We have heat and power in our homes because the different services share the same infrastructure. There are nine grocery delivery distribution networks across Britain and Ireland all doing the same thing with a very costly duplication of infrastructure. The principles used for hundreds of years for the distribution of commodities were being ignored.” Buymie was founded with this thesis in mind- providing the much-needed shared infrastructure for retailers to deliver groceries without losing money- and is now well-positioned to be the number one intelligent grocery delivery solution in the UK.

Doing Things That Don’t Scale (Extreme Version) 🚗

One of the most widely invoked pieces of advice in the start-up world is to ‘do things that don’t scale’. Devan, more than anyone else I have ever come across, embodies this mantra. In the early days of Buymie, he juggled his role as CEO with being their most prolific delivery driver and customer service representative.

The most bizarre example of Devan’s relentless resourcefulness was when, to prove that users loved the Buymie platform itself and not just the retailers on it, he purchased and photographed every single item from a discount German retailer, airbrushed out their logo and uploaded each one to the app. He was left with a bath full of raw fish, ice and dairy products but, aside from that, the experiment was a success and his hypothesis was validated.

These are just a selection of the wild war stories that Devan shared with the DCU students when he came to visit us in March. Be sure to check out the full conversation here.

All the best!

Til’ next time,

Will

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