Connecting your shop
VodaBook is a water delivery platform built in Pakistan, for the shops that deliver the water and the homes and offices that depend on them.
Most water shops run on paper. A name, a date, a number of bottles, a total worked out at the end of the month. It works — right up until the book gets wet, a page goes missing, or a customer remembers the month differently to the person who wrote it down.
VodaBook keeps the same record digitally and gives both sides a copy of it. Nothing about how a shop works has to change: you still walk the round, you still drop the bottles, you still collect the empties. What changes is that the writing down stops being a thing that can be lost, soaked, or argued with.
Every decision in the product comes back to one of these. They are the reasons it looks the way it does.
A shop runs the round through streets with no signal and reaches a connection back at home. Software that can only draw a screen after a request returns is blank for most of the working day. VodaBook opens on what the phone already knows, and sends what was recorded the moment there is signal.
A delivery only counts when the shop and the customer agree it happened. Every delivery a shop records reaches its customer as a receipt, so the end of the month is never one person’s word against another’s.
Plenty of customers do not have a smartphone, and never will. Receipts and month-end bills go by SMS to their Pakistani mobile number - a basic phone is enough, no app needed - so a shop never has to run two systems for two kinds of customer.
A customer account and a supplier account both cost nothing to create. A shop should be able to try this on a Tuesday round without a conversation about price first.
One app, two ways in. You choose which one you are when you sign up — and both accounts are free to create.
Find who delivers to your street, and keep your own copy of the record.
Run the whole business from a phone — not a register that can go missing.
We build software for businesses that run on paper and phone calls. We take the view that the measure of it is whether it still works on a weak connection, on an ordinary handset, in the middle of a working day — tecizeverything.com
It is the most useful thing anybody sends us, and it is how most of what is in VodaBook today got there.
