An old friend of mine from college, Riel, reached out some time in April to talk about this startup he cofounded.

The startup was AndyanAgad.com, a remittance-in-kind company for over 12 million Filipinos who live overseas. Instead of offering services like money transfer and sending mobile airtime (load), AndyanAgad provided a way for Filipinos to send groceries to their families in the Philippines. The company partnered with Robinson’s Supermarket with 60 branches all over the Philippines. All you have to do is choose from over 15 thoughtfully curated grocery packs, select your Robinson’s branch then AndyanAgad notifies you as soon as its ready for pickup. It’s that simple.

Ditching the logistics aspect meant saving on handling costs and actually offering a product that they can easily pick up in a few hours. It’s an arbitrage play so there was no inventory to manage.

With less than a year of operations, the AndyanAgad founders  got a couple of people to sign-up and buy packages from the site. The plan was to get a consultant (that would be me) to help out with their acquisition strategy.

I immediately liked their business model. So what was originally a plan to make me a consultant ended up with me becoming AndyanAgad’s latest cofounder/investor. The prospect of being part of a post-validation startup was just too hard to resist.

At a professional level, this is going to be a great vehicle for me to learn and practice growth and conversion optimization. We (notice that I’m now using “we”) have spent the last 9 weeks reengineering the site with this in mind.

We just went live with the newest iteration of the site, a far cry from what it was before. We’ve armed ourselves with the right tools (proper project management software, Mailchimp,etc) , have a pretty good acquisition framework (content marketing + good ol’ PPC) and a great platform (Woocommerce was a good fit for this project) that would allow us to introduce improvements in coming months.

I’m very excited to be part of this project. More to come from my end as well.

You can check it out here.