Portefy

We started experimenting with Google Ads campaigns. In the beginning, we didn't even have a tool to manage and monitor shipments in real time—we didn't even have an alert system. The only way to check was to manually review the database from time to time.

Just five days after launching our campaigns, we saw several new customer sign-ups, and I noticed a shipment in the database that had taken place the day before. I quickly checked on Stripe to confirm the payment, and indeed, it had been registered.

All of this ran on autopilot, almost without us even noticing. It was then that we realized we had found a business opportunity that met a real need.

In the following months, we increased our investment in ads and started working on SEO with articles like "Transport Your IKEA Furniture." In fact, we even managed to rank above IKEA with one of our articles—they eventually contacted us to take it down!

We continued refining our conversion funnels, running A/B tests to determine the best user experience and pricing strategy.

While our initial focus was on the B2C market, it soon became apparent that this need also extended to the B2B world—especially for generating daily routes for businesses like supermarkets, mobile repair shops, etc.

That's when we launched "Portefy Business." This was a WebApp built with ReactJS that allowed companies to create optimized transport routes. Just as in the B2C line, businesses could create "Drafts"—essentially, blueprints specifying the vehicle, waypoints, and route options, such as returning to the pickup point. Once created, these drafts could be used to request immediate shipments or bookings. We developed this concept because business routes tend to be recurrent, with companies frequently sending shipments to the same locations. The idea was to create the draft once, then simply use it for subsequent service requests (with the option to edit the drafts if needed).

Simultaneously, we developed another system to recruit carriers in several cities. Over the months, we expanded to more provinces in Spain. Thanks to this flow, expanding to other cities was relatively straightforward.

Our biggest challenge was the vicious cycle of not having enough carriers to meet the demand in certain geographic areas, while at times there wasn't enough customer demand to keep all our carriers "motivated" and committed. As a result, we ended up with a mix: some carriers were truly committed, while others used the platform merely as a way to earn occasional extra money.

To try and strike a balance and keep our best carriers motivated—and encourage the occasional ones to commit more—we introduced a rating system. The most active and reliable carriers received more shipment requests. In fact, when we secured agreements with companies that had significant demand, we created internal sub-fleets of our most professional carriers to ensure top-notch service. Meanwhile, other carriers initially received fewer requests, but if they consistently performed well without issues, they were gradually incorporated into our pool of trusted carriers.

It all sounds great when described in the third person, but in day-to-day operations, we encountered many issues due to the volume of daily shipments. Numerous incidents cost us clients who brought in significant monthly revenue. Sometimes these problems stemmed from carrier incompetence or mistakes, but mainly it was due to our inability to provide service during the critical hours required by businesses.

While the business model was solid, it ultimately failed because we couldn't create a balance that kept carriers motivated to accept every shipment on the platform while maintaining excellent service. Another issue was pricing. In logistics, shipping is usually the final step of delivering a product, and customers always expect it to be as cheap as possible—since, for the end customer, the product itself holds the real value, not the delivery. This concept worked better in the B2C realm, but in B2B, companies were constantly trying to cut costs and often couldn't pay what our service actually cost.

Some contracts involved lengthy negotiations because companies demanded prices that made it impossible for us to offer the level of service we provided. At those rates, carriers were simply not willing to show up.

Gradually, due to these two main issues, we lost several key clients. It became very difficult to secure new contracts at a reasonable price, and we eventually ran out of capital.

There came a point when we no longer had the funds to pay our team or cover general operational costs—and that's when the company ultimately closed its doors.