You're probably also incurring a lot of liability just by contracting the individual shipper to take an action on your behalf. Say your person is dropping a package that's just off their route to wherever they're going. They pull off the freeway, and BAM get hit by a semi. Congratulations, you're going to be the recipient of a huge lawsuit.
Easy to dismiss that as, "Well how often does that happen?" Accidents happen, on average, one per every thousand driven hours. So if you've got a thousand en route today that are taking more than an hour, you get to have this problem once a day, on average (v weak extrapolation, I know).
Some things can't be done as a lean startup. Some things cost major money before their first day (e.g. airlines, long-haul data services, auto manufacturing). You managed to pick a non-lean industry.
I'm also wondering about liability, though not quite in that way.
First, what If something happens to the package that I'm carrying? I'm not going to carry something if I'm going to be liable if I break it, that risk won't be worth the gain.
Second, are the people carrying stuff for you going to be classified as employees? I don't know much about tax stuff but if you run the risk of the IRS classifying all these people as your employees, you might be running into a lot of administrative and liability problems.
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Hate to be another naysayer, but...
You're probably also incurring a lot of liability just by contracting the individual shipper to take an action on your behalf. Say your person is dropping a package that's just off their route to wherever they're going. They pull off the freeway, and BAM get hit by a semi. Congratulations, you're going to be the recipient of a huge lawsuit.
Easy to dismiss that as, "Well how often does that happen?" Accidents happen, on average, one per every thousand driven hours. So if you've got a thousand en route today that are taking more than an hour, you get to have this problem once a day, on average (v weak extrapolation, I know).
Some things can't be done as a lean startup. Some things cost major money before their first day (e.g. airlines, long-haul data services, auto manufacturing). You managed to pick a non-lean industry.
I'm also wondering about liability, though not quite in that way.
First, what If something happens to the package that I'm carrying? I'm not going to carry something if I'm going to be liable if I break it, that risk won't be worth the gain.
Second, are the people carrying stuff for you going to be classified as employees? I don't know much about tax stuff but if you run the risk of the IRS classifying all these people as your employees, you might be running into a lot of administrative and liability problems.