# S01E05 · Transcript — Sunill Kumaar Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 5, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Sunill Kumaar, founder of NeighbourDrop, a community delivery marketplace. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/sunill-kumaar-neighbourdrop). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Sunill's. ## Sociology, the army, and "not a typical path" **Gokul** Sociology is a really interesting degree to start with. Growing up, how did you even land there? **Sunill** I loved the social side of life and wanted to learn more — it wasn't obvious yet exactly what I wanted to do, so I picked something that genuinely interested me and read a lot around it. **Gokul** What did your family think? **Sunill** My dad was in the army; I have one sister. Nothing about the choice was family-driven — growing up, the expectation was medicine or engineering, the typical household path. This was purely an interest pick, not a career calculation. **Gokul** More a pursuit of knowledge, then? **Sunill** Yes. **Gokul** NeighbourDrop's whole thesis is basically applied sociology — making human movement visible. Is that connection intentional, or a coincidence? **Sunill** Honestly, a coincidence. My career went into product management and marketing in telecom and IT software, then I was CEO of a software company — nothing that traces back to sociology directly. **Gokul** Did sociology teach you anything about how groups behave that you use today? **Sunill** I think we've moved past theory into practice — you talk to customers early instead of assuming. We always brought in early users, took their feedback, and iterated. That's exactly what shaped the NeighbourDrop product. **Gokul** Did an MBA change how you saw the business side of things? **Sunill** Not really. What actually changes you is talking to people and working through real interactions, not the degree itself. I've met plenty of people building real things with no degree at all. In the AI era, that matters even less — it's about what you're passionate about. ## Ten years scaling a software company across 25 countries **Gokul** Tell me about the first company you really scaled — you were there around ten years. **Sunill** Starting from scratch, you wear every hat: product, program management, talking to customers — not just "CEO stuff." It taught me to keep costs controlled and expand slowly into new geographies instead of spreading thin across many at once. **Gokul** You operated in 25 different countries at one point. How does managing that many geographies shape your decision-making? **Sunill** One market at a time. We'd pick the best-performing market, establish local support and a local organization there, get it working, and only then use that as proof to open the next market — instead of pushing into many countries in parallel. **Gokul** Someone who worked for you said you quadrupled revenue and called you "superhuman." What kind of leader were you trying to be? **Sunill** Servant leadership over authoritarian. I try to understand people, give them flexibility, and let them fail early — because failing early is how people correct course and grow. If people are afraid, they won't try anything new, so removing that fear is the job. ## Leading without authority at Bell **Gokul** How did that leadership style translate to Bell — a massive corporation where you don't have the same authority? **Sunill** It's a different kind of management. You often don't have direct authority over the people whose cooperation you need for product and program work. You have two choices: complain to their boss, or build the relationship and collaborate. I always chose collaboration, and it's what made people willing to actually support me. ## Quitting last December, and the studio behind NeighbourDrop **Gokul** Last December you quit to work on NeighbourDrop full time. Is Future Nexus Lab the holding company behind it? **Sunill** Yes — Future Nexus Lab existed before NeighbourDrop did. The idea, with some of my co-founders, was to run it like a studio: support other founders who had ideas but no technical team to build for them. NeighbourDrop came out of that studio. We built a prototype on weekends, got it in front of about 200 pilot users, and once that traction was real, we made it our full focus. **Gokul** Was quitting an easy decision, at this stage in your career? **Sunill** Yes and no. Leaving an established role for something from scratch always carries a fear of failure. But I look at failure as something you learn from either way. Experience isn't really the deciding factor anymore — I've met people in their sixties doing their first startup and fundraising. If you don't have savings behind you, the fear is real, but my family supported the decision, and the numbers have grown well since. ## COVID groceries, and "moment as supply" **Gokul** Did you sketch out what NeighbourDrop would actually look like, or how did the idea start? **Sunill** It started during COVID. People I barely knew would call and offer to drop off groceries because I couldn't leave the house under the restrictions at the time. After COVID, I kept using apps like Uber Eats and Instacart, and noticed the pricing was all over the place — an $8 or $10 sandwich turning into $25 with fees, different prices showing up on different phones. I started wondering why it had to be that expensive, given someone still just has to travel out, pick the item up, and bring it back. Then I looked outside and noticed most cars on the road have one person in them — a lot of movement already happening in the city that nobody was organizing. So I interviewed about 200 people across the US and Canada and asked what their biggest pain point was. The two answers that kept coming back were rising costs and a missing sense of community connection. When I described the idea, all 200 said some version of "why hasn't someone built this?" So we built a prototype to test it. The product hasn't changed much since — post a trip, post a request, match them — but the thesis has sharpened. Early on we framed it around community; today it's really about the idea that a moment, a trip someone's already making, is supply. ## The first 200 users, and what nobody designed for **Gokul** Who were your first users, and how did you find them? **Sunill** Not commercial — pilot users through personal connections, friends in the US and Canada, people I knew through Bell and other companies. My co-founders found theirs the same way. Once we started posting videos on community pages, people started asking real questions, like when Android was coming, since we only had iOS at first. Most of the early users came from downtown Toronto through those videos. **Gokul** You've written that nobody asked for coordination — it just started happening. In dense neighborhoods, people began doing things you never designed for. What's that story? **Sunill** Outside of Instagram or DoorDash, there's already a lot of coordination happening informally within condos and small communities — WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, Instagram DMs. There was no single platform for people to coordinate and trust each other seamlessly, so we built one simple app with no separate driver and requester roles. One app — today you're requesting, tomorrow you might be the one helping me, because you happen to be heading to Costco anyway. ## Why NeighbourDrop isn't competing with DoorDash or Instacart **Gokul** You've said you're not really competing with Instacart, DoorDash, or Uber Eats — more with the default state of not knowing what's available in your community. Why frame it that way? **Sunill** Because the supply already exists. Millions of people are traveling through a city who aren't couriers or drivers — they're just heading somewhere anyway. Most delivery platforms have become expensive enough that people hesitate to even open the app; they'd rather just walk to the store themselves. Their thesis is completely different from ours: they dispatch someone specifically when you order something, and they have store tie-ups. We have neither. If you're heading somewhere and I'm in your community, within a few hundred meters, I can ask you to grab something instead of creating a whole new trip and adding to city congestion. **Gokul** That sounds like the Airbnb playbook — showcasing existing supply instead of building new capacity. **Sunill** Exactly. Airbnb looked at all the spare bedrooms already out there and found a way to put them to use, rather than building hotels. We're doing the same thing with a moment, with a trip that's already happening, instead of putting more cars and drivers on the road. **Gokul** Is it hard to explain a genuinely new category like this to people? **Sunill** To end users, it's actually easy. The moment someone sees a neighbor helping a neighbor, they get it, because a lot of communities have lost that connection and people can feel what's missing. Plenty of our users have said they made real friends through the app — people who turn out to live in the same building. It's harder to explain to the courier side, guys already working through Uber who want to know how much they can earn, but for the everyday user, the idea is instantly relatable. ## Building the marketplace, and how payment works **Gokul** How hard has this been on the software side — tracking movement, matching people? **Sunill** It's a marketplace: you list, someone searches, and it matches instantly. Post a trip to Costco and people within 100 meters get notified first, then it widens to 500 meters, then up to 1,000 if there's no match. There's real backend AI and matching algorithms behind it. A lot of it was genuinely unclear at the start — we don't know the exact cost of what someone's buying, so we estimate and pre-authorize, and we're not connected to any store's inventory. That made the early build harder, but user feedback has shaped what we actually need to show people now. **Gokul** How does the payment side work — say I'm picking something up for you from Costco? **Sunill** Your card gets pre-authorized. I buy it with my own card or cash, hand it over, and once you confirm you've received it, I can withdraw the amount I spent plus my helper fee straight to my bank account. ## The metrics that matter **Gokul** How many users do you have, and what's the number you actually care about? **Sunill** We're at about 30,000 users, but the metric we chase is transacting users — how many people are actually posting trips or requests, and what percentage of those get fulfilled. We're at an 83% fulfillment rate, which is a strong number for a startup our size. About 60% of users come back and reuse the app, and around 70% act as both a requester and a helper — today you're helping me on a Walmart run, tomorrow I'm picking something up for you. One platform, used both ways. ## Trust, verification, and sharing addresses **Gokul** You're asking people to share addresses and personal information — how do you handle trust in a system that's basically favor-based? **Sunill** It starts with a phone number and an OTP — we don't allow sign-ups through email. Then we ask for a home address and run a geolocation check against it. ID verification is optional, and about 35% of users have done it voluntarily. As a requester you add a credit card; as a helper you add a bank account — both act as another layer of validation. Before a match, you can see how far apart you actually live, often 300 or 400 meters, which builds real confidence that this isn't someone coming from 20 miles away. Once a match is accepted, both sides can see each other's address, which is different from a courier platform, where the courier sees your address but you never see his. It's fair, because you've both agreed to the exchange, and knowing roughly where someone lives — 200 meters away — builds trust rather than eroding it. **Gokul** What about safety after that point, once someone knows where you live? **Sunill** Any violation, we act on it. We're a facilitator, but we hold phone verification, proximity data, and credit card information on file, and we can share that with authorities if needed. Mostly this works because trust is being built at the community level, using something close to a one-kilometer geofence. People can also see a user's rating and whether their profile is verified before deciding whether to accept a match, and plenty of people simply decline unverified profiles. **Gokul** Do people trust an unfamiliar neighbor more than a total stranger? **Sunill** Definitely. The moment someone sees "this person is 200 meters away," that alone gives more confidence than not knowing who's coming at all. The only real backstop otherwise is being able to call and report if something goes wrong, and that's part of how community trust gets built. ## The two dollar minimum, and letting users set the price **Gokul** How do you think about adding money into what's essentially a favor economy between neighbors? **Sunill** Until recently it was strictly one-to-one — one request, one helper. Now if I'm heading to Costco, I can accept requests from five different people at once, and even at $2 or $3 each, that adds up enough to offset a real chunk of my own grocery bill, especially since I'm not traveling far out of my way. **Gokul** So is earning even the real incentive, or is it more that people expect the favor to come back around? **Sunill** Looking at the numbers, people are paying more than they need to. We set the helper fee at a $2 minimum, but on average, across about 12,900 transactions, people are paying $6.70 — some paying $15 or $20 on a $20 grocery run. When I asked users why, they said this is their community, so they don't mind paying, and they like that we're not the ones telling them how much to pay. **Gokul** Is that more like a tip, then? **Sunill** We don't frame it as a tip — we call it a helper fee, with a $2 floor. It's a slider people can push up to $20, and most land around $10 to $15. We deliberately don't control that number; we let the requester and helper settle on what feels fair. ## Revenue: from zero take rate to eight percent **Gokul** Where does NeighbourDrop's own revenue come from? **Sunill** We started at a zero percent take rate — no platform fee at all for the first few months. Then we moved to a flat $1, and once we saw real money flowing to helpers, we set a target of 8 to 12%. We're at 8% today, working toward 12%. We only started actually monetizing in July — since then we've earned around $11,000 against roughly $350,000 in GMV. ## A delivery economy that's breaking, and what's next **Gokul** Gas prices, driver economics — a lot of the delivery model feels like it's breaking down for the people actually doing the work. What do you think gives first? **Sunill** Drivers and couriers don't keep the full amount — platforms take a real cut, and restaurants tied to these platforms lose something like 30% as well, from what I hear directly from restaurant owners. People driving for these platforms want more income, but the cut keeps them from actually earning it, so they're looking for alternatives. Picture someone living in a building in Mississauga who's already seeing deliveries happen around them — eventually, instead of driving across the city, they can fulfill requests on foot within their own building or a short walk, as a part-time thing, without stepping far from home. It's not just "moment" either — tomorrow it could be time. We're already getting requests from people who say, "I'm a plumber, I drive ten kilometers from home for work, add my service to your platform so I can serve my own neighborhood within a kilometer instead." Tutoring, house cleaning — the same logic applies. This can eventually become something like a mix of TaskRabbit and everything else, because moment and time both end up on the platform. And even with drones or robotic taxis coming, there's always a last mile — those systems can't walk into someone's actual unit — so that need doesn't go away. ## Raising a pre-seed when every dollar goes to AI **Gokul** You're raising a pre-seed right now. What's been the hardest question investors have asked you? **Sunill** Early on it was simply, "is this really going to work?" Once they see the numbers, they want more — more traction, which is a strange ask at the pre-seed stage. We're bootstrapped and already showing 30,000 users and regular transactions, but I understand the real hesitation: most capital right now is going to AI. Nobody knows exactly what AI does to consumer platforms and businesses in the next two to five years, but there are still real believers in consumer business — one investor has already committed, and a few others are still in conversation. **Gokul** Is there a question you wish people would ask instead? **Sunill** Something like, "how do we make this 100x or 200x in the next few months," because someone has to believe first. Nobody believed in Uber or Airbnb either; they collected 70 or 80 rejections before someone said, "let me bet on you." The one real shift in the last year or two is that AI is absorbing almost all of that capital — even a thin AI wrapper gets attention that a consumer marketplace doesn't right now. ## Founder University, co-founders, and five years out **Gokul** Did Founder University sharpen anything for you? **Sunill** It's been great — Jason's team runs a strong program, good coaching, a lot of pitch practice condensed into two minutes. I still talk to people from that cohort — we trade notes on fundraising, share investor lists, and make introductions for each other. It's a real community. **Gokul** How did you meet your co-founders? **Sunill** Through common connections during my time at Bell — one introduced over coffee through a friend, another through a different friend. We stayed loosely in touch until the NeighbourDrop idea came together, and everyone believed in it enough to say, "let's build it." **Gokul** If everything works out, what does NeighbourDrop look like in five years? **Sunill** If the pre-seed goes well and we grow city by city, cluster by cluster, it becomes a genuinely new coordination layer for how people get things done — millions of users relying on and transacting through it instead of the traditional platforms that cost them far more. **Gokul** Are your users mostly in Toronto right now? **Sunill** Mostly the GTA — downtown, Scarborough, a few other pockets — though people across Canada and some in the US have downloaded it through word of mouth. They just don't have enough density around them yet to really transact, since I haven't actively promoted in cities like Calgary or Winnipeg. They're waiting for a proper launch there. **Gokul** How do autonomous vehicles or drones fit into this coordination layer — do they just become couriers on your app? **Sunill** There's always still a last mile. You might take a robotic taxi to Walmart or the airport tomorrow, and if I can coordinate with you and ride along, we split the cost. Drone delivery has its own limits — a drone can't fly into every unit in a building, so someone still has to carry it that final stretch, especially when you're not even home. People stepping outside for things isn't going to stop either, the same way e-commerce never stopped people from going to a mall to window-shop. That's really the whole bet behind our business model. ## The best neighbor story, and the secret goal **Gokul** Do you have a favorite "neighbor helping neighbor" story? **Sunill** One edge case stands out. Someone in our community was driving to Niagara, and another neighbor asked them to pick up a specific candy from a specific store there that wasn't available anywhere else. The person picked it up and delivered it the next day. You can't ask Uber Eats to do that — nobody's going to take that request. And it's not really an edge case for long; people already ask friends and family to bring something back from a trip to India or the Middle East. It's the same instinct, just without a platform behind it yet. **Gokul** Last question — I don't think anyone building something is really doing it for the money. What's the goal underneath all of this for you? **Sunill** Make the world a better place. That's the real goal — rebuild the community connection we've lost, help people save money, and let them earn something in the process. If this becomes part of everyone's everyday life, without me having to remind anyone to use it, that's what success looks like to me. **Gokul** That makes sense. Well, that's everything — thanks so much for coming on. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/sunill-kumaar-neighbourdrop) · [[podcast|All episodes]]