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I've been working on a fully electric last-mile delivery company: https://hudsonshipping.co https://hudsonshipping.co Beyond the landing page (built with Astro

by ajd555 1y ago

I've been working on a fully electric last-mile delivery company: https://hudsonshipping.co https://hudsonshipping.co Beyond the landing page (built with Astro), I've been building all of the route optimization, the delivery and warehouse management systems. A combination of go and java has allowed me to write a few microservices in the past 6 months to handle all of my logistical processes, and I'm just testing the mobile app in the field as we speak! I hope to make some of the code open-source one day!

chrisgd 1y ago
Sounds really great. Good luck
- ajd555 1y ago
  Thank you, appreciate it!
ag_rin 1y ago
This is a super cool intersection of real world problems and software. How hard has it been to get customers? I assume trust is a big hurdle here. How are you approaching this problem?
- ajd555 1y ago
  Thank you! You've definitely identified the trickiest part, especially when you come in with a track record of, well...0 deliveries (I was in working in tech teams before this). Luckily, there are quite a few freight brokers in the NYC metro area, and they are willing to give you a trial period. Another way to approach is to work with smaller companies and offer discounts during the startup phase. (We're starting deliveries in August)
iamnotmeet 1y ago
This is interesting! Have you considered leveraging Google OR Tools[1] for route optimization? At a previous hyper-local eCommerce startup I worked for, we used it to solve similar problems. Although the setup and integration is not super easy, but the results far outweighed the effort. 1 - https://github.com/google/or-tools https://github.com/google/or-tools
- ajd555 1y ago
  I have considered it! I've opted for a more specialized optimization library that deals specifically in the Traveling Salesman Problem (https://github.com/graphhopper/jsprit https://github.com/graphhopper/jsprit). I will revisit this though, might come in handy pretty soon - thank you!

by ajd555 1y ago

chrisgd 1y ago

Sounds really great. Good luck

ajd555 1y ago
Thank you, appreciate it!

ag_rin 1y ago

This is a super cool intersection of real world problems and software. How hard has it been to get customers? I assume trust is a big hurdle here. How are you approaching this problem?

ajd555 1y ago
Thank you! You've definitely identified the trickiest part, especially when you come in with a track record of, well...0 deliveries (I was in working in tech teams before this). Luckily, there are quite a few freight brokers in the NYC metro area, and they are willing to give you a trial period. Another way to approach is to work with smaller companies and offer discounts during the startup phase. (We're starting deliveries in August)

iamnotmeet 1y ago

This is interesting! Have you considered leveraging Google OR Tools[1] for route optimization? At a previous hyper-local eCommerce startup I worked for, we used it to solve similar problems. Although the setup and integration is not super easy, but the results far outweighed the effort. 1 - https://github.com/google/or-tools https://github.com/google/or-tools

ajd555 1y ago
I have considered it! I've opted for a more specialized optimization library that deals specifically in the Traveling Salesman Problem (https://github.com/graphhopper/jsprit https://github.com/graphhopper/jsprit). I will revisit this though, might come in handy pretty soon - thank you!