April 18, 2025 • 58 mins
Join Gordon and Ger and they take flight with Bobby Healy of Manna Air Delivery, the Irish drone delivery company that's posing a serious threat to Amazon's dominance of the ecommerce space. Has the saviour of independent retailers literally been heaven sent?
Drones promise much. Delivery within minutes from local retailers that bypasses clogged roads and is kinder on the environment. But will it catch on in the West? Will people complain? (Yes, they will.) Will regulators want a say? (Of course, they will. But that turns out to be a good thing.)
And the biggest question of all: can a small Irish start-up beat the likes of Amazon and Google at the drone delivery game? Be shocked. Be amazed. Because you may not have heard of Manna Air Delivery, but with 200,000 delivery flights already flown, they aren't the underdogs in this fight. Amazon is.
Find out how skydelivery could revolutionise your retail business in this special episode, recorded live at StudioForty9's Excellence in Ecommerce conference earlier this month.
Warning: this episode contains pirates.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, recorded live at StudioForty9's Excellence in Ecommerce conference in Dublin earlier this month, Ger encourages audience participation...
(00:21):
If you feel the need to use expletives, make sure they're loud enough that they can be picked up by the mics at the end of the room.
Our guest puts the case for drone delivery...
The robot doesn't steal things.
Robot doesn't eat some of your chips either.
You know, so robot doesn't judge you as well for the sick shit you're getting delivered.
Gordon is intrigued...
A, what's the catch?
(00:41):
And more importantly, B, how do I get involved?
And the pirates are back...
We've seen the pirate ships on the horizon.
They're going to land soon.
We better be ready.
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(01:06):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
So I hope lunch went well.
Thanks again to Paper Planes.
I suppose without further ado, we'll get into the live podcast we're recording here.
If you feel the need to use expletives, make sure they're loud enough that they can be picked up by the mics at the end of the room.
(01:30):
Today, we're live on stage at the StudioForty9 annual Excellence in Ecommerce Conference, and we're joined by someone who's not just disrupting the future of retail logistics, he's literally flying over it.
Bobby Healy is the founder and CEO of Manna, the Irish drone delivery company that's turning science fiction into same-day delivery.
(01:51):
If you think drone delivery is still years away, think again.
Bobby and his team have already completed over 140,000 flights in the Irish skies, bringing everything from takeaway pizza to paracetamol straight to people's doors in under three minutes.
No traffic, no emissions, no delays, delivery precisely delivered.
Manna have recently partnered with ecommerce merchant Gym+Coffee to deliver products in areas in Dublin, and I've also been reliably informed that Manna will be in the skies in the People's Republic down in Cork very shortly.
(02:22):
Bobby, it's great to have you here with us today, and you're very welcome.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So, Bobby, I suppose just to get the show on the road, your story obviously doesn't start with drones.
You've previously worked in gaming, gaming software, airline tech, and in particular car rental, where you scaled CarTrawler into a global giant.
I suppose one of my questions to start with is what hooked you on drone delivery?
(02:46):
Why drone delivery?
After all that.
Way more craic.
Craic is always an important one.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a techie.
I enjoy, I mean, I really love building tech, building teams around tech, and I mean, it's a great passion.
It's been since, I've been 13 years old, writing code.
So definitely, it was going to be a lot of fun, firstly.
(03:08):
But also, it was also going to be, if it's successful, which is highly unlikely, but if it is successful, it'd be enormous.
It'd be the biggest fucking business we ever saw in Europe, for sure.
What's the feel of the opportunity there?
It's trillions.
It's last mile, right?
So it's not drone delivery.
It's last-mile commerce on everywhere in the suburban planet.
(03:31):
So the prize is enormous.
If you can make it as ubiquitous and as easy as just picking up a phone and using it,
then you enable retailers, the very people in this room, to turn physical business
that requires footfall and roads into a digital business that's purely about,
you know, relevant product, targeted advertising,
(03:54):
commercial relationships with loyal, brand-loyal customers,
but turning those businesses into completely digital businesses.
Because we can put an aircraft on your roof, and that aircraft can do eight deliveries an hour, which is more than a lot of businesses need.
And out of Blanchardstown now, we've got capacity for about 1,000 deliveries a day, three-minute flights, two minutes 40 seconds outbound flight.
(04:17):
So if you think about that as just a unit of work, if you could move everything from A to B reliably and at near zero marginal cost, what does that do to retail?
Well, the answer is it lets retail push the Amazon tide back.
And it allows micro-distribution, micro-presence, prevail against the giants of logistics, the Amazons of this world.
(04:43):
I think everybody in the room will be delighted to hear about Amazon getting pushback, to be honest.
Could you explain a little bit to us how the delivery process works so that we can all imagine it?
Yep.
So today you get our app.
We can also get Just Eat and DoorDash Fold, a bunch of aggregators, right?
(05:05):
So we're built in, but the experience is, you open the app just to get your hamburger or whatever it is.
And if we know that you're within reach, if the restaurant is within reach of your house, we'll offer you drone delivery.
In the Manna app, obviously everything is within reach because you only show your vendors that can reach you.
And from that point on, you put in your Eircode, that registers your destination.
(05:29):
And that's it.
It just looks like a normal shopping basket.
You buy everything.
We're checking the weight and volume, for obvious reasons, but we let you order 4kg now, that's plenty - the 99 percentile of food is 1.9kg.
And that's it.
We get a notification when the cargo has arrived.
You get a notification when the aircraft's taken off.
(05:50):
You see the aircraft telemetry, meaning you see the aircraft as it travels across the map.
And you get a notification when the product lands in your back garden.
Brilliant.
So you get to watch as it arrives.
From a retailer's perspective, how does that work?
Do you have to be, like, next door to the retailer?
Does the retailer get product to you?
How does that work?
(06:11):
Yeah, it depends on the perishability of the product, funnily.
So if I were to pick Offbeat Donuts, I don't know if there's an Offbeat person here in the room?
Is there?
Stick up your hand.
Great donuts.
But they stock us, right?
So at all of our bases, anywhere we go in Ireland, even Cork, we would expect to have Offbeat Donuts at our base.
So that when the customer orders Offbeat Donuts off our menu or we cross-sell those donuts, it's instant pick for us, right?
(06:36):
So there's no time.
So Offbeat have nothing to do there really, other than get the product to us.
And that gets harder and harder as we distribute more and more.
But still, that's what we call the semi-perishable stuff, the stuff that can live for a day at our base.
If I look at Gym+Coffee that are in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, about 200m from our base, which is just at our limit that we'd be willing to go and collect the product.
(07:01):
But that's a high-value product, a very important product.
So therefore, the collector interface works where we have collectors and they walk into all the various different stores, pick up the product and then bring it back.
And we'll walk up to four minutes.
Okay, so you'd send someone to go and get it, grab it, run it back to base, throw it in a plane... probably not throw it.
(07:24):
Yeah, we jam it in, we kick it in, whatever.
Take real good care of the product, right?
Yeah.
Actually, we learned with Gym+Coffee packaging-wise that with the fleece expands, of course it does.
And the first delivery we tried to do with Gym+Coffee, it didn't come out of the aircraft.
But we got them right after that.
But it's a good example of a product that, you know, we map onto the physical presence of that retailer initially.
(07:50):
So we collect.
But later on, there's no reason why we shouldn't be flying off the roof of their storage area, wherever that is, and serving the whole city.
It's like, we're going to be covering 420,000 Eircodes by the end of the year in Dublin.
And we can reach them all from anywhere in Dublin.
So you're going to be looking at a 10- to 15-minute average delivery time anywhere in Dublin by the end of the year.
(08:14):
That's fantastic.
Is this available anywhere else in Europe?
Or is Ireland the first for this?
Ireland is the best.
What, just standard Ireland?
We do more flights a week than Amazon have ever done with their drone delivery programme.
We're in Finland as well, and we have a small base in Texas, but Finland, Nordics, so Sweden and Finland, we'll expand a lot towards the end of the year.
(08:40):
But Dublin is the worldwide epicentre.
Blanchardstown Shopping Centre is the worldwide epicentre of drone delivery.
That's going to change.
Google have a great drone delivery programme in Texas, right beside us, actually.
And probably Googlers are, I would say, slightly in the lead right now in terms of volume, but we would expect to overtake them.
If we're successful in the Dublin rollout this year, then we'll be significantly larger than Google's drone delivery programme.
(09:07):
How do you see the future for Manna in terms of would retailers and people who need your sort of delivery basically rent those solutions and have their own drones flying off their own roofs?
And is that kind of the future that you see it for?
It won't be, for the short term,
it wouldn't be like that because we're a regulated entity.
(09:28):
We essentially have an airline, a cargo airline license.
And there's a lot of overhead comes with that.
A lot of training and process and governance comes with...
It's a very unusual type of tech business in that not half, but not far off half our resources just goes into process and training and safety and documentation.
Now that scales nicely as we add 1,000 aircraft.
(09:49):
It's the same kind of overhead, but a retailer, even a national retailer in the country wouldn't need or want to do that.
So we would do it for them.
So we would just put a presence at your warehouse or on your roof.
Like, we flew off the roof of Tesco.
We can put aircraft anywhere.
We just need flat space.
And we just need a kind of level of volume to make that work.
(10:12):
And at the other end of things, do you see a future where people in their standard domestic houses would have the equivalent of future post boxes that are able to accept those deliveries?
You know, like you see in the United States, an enormous amount of porch piracy, you know, people aren't able to...
That's because the Amazon guy can't go into the back garden.
We do.
(10:33):
So if your back garden, if you have 2m, well, 3m diameter on a windy day, we need 3m diameter, flat space,
back garden's the best.
Trampolines is a great place to deliver.
We do loads of trampoline delivery.
Can't deliver trampolines, but we can deliver onto trampolines.
So you need to use flat space.
So back garden, if you have a viable back garden, we don't let you deliver to your front garden.
(10:55):
Because front gardens, the cars come and go, people come and go, and we don't deliver onto people either.
So people don't actually need to be there to accept the delivery?
No, they shouldn't be there.
If they're under the aircraft, we won't deliver.
So when I use the Manna app, I can indicate exactly where I want the product to be delivered.
Is that how it works?
Yeah.
(11:16):
The first time you give us your Eircode, we'll send you two pins in your back garden or maybe your front garden, and you have to accept one of those pins.
And that pin is where you're getting your product delivered forever.
Tell us about the competition.
So who is the competition?
Obviously, you mentioned Amazon and Google.
Google and Amazon, for those in the room that haven't heard of them, they're big US tech companies with unlimited balance sheets.
(11:38):
Big in Ireland?
Yeah, I mean, Amazon, we know they're here now out at Baldonnell Airport.
Funnily, the dumbest place in the world to put a fulfillment centre because you can't fly drones out of it because of the runway.
But that's it.
Amazon and Google.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, I joked earlier on, like we're going to be bigger than Google and stuff.
(11:58):
We probably by volume, we will be at the end of the year, depending on what they do.
But today at this state, the industry doesn't care about volume.
It cares about safe volume.
It's easy to go super-fast in this industry and land on everyone's head.
It's not so easy to go incredibly safe.
So we're very cautious.
You have to be cautious until... we've done 200,000 flights.
(12:19):
You really want to be doing about 10 million flights before you can say we're successful, I think.
And for us, that's probably two years away for us, maybe three.
I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time in Shenzhen recently.
Their set up seems to be a little different to yours in that...
Meituan?
Yeah.
Like, on the side of a shopping centre, just a couple of lads and a tent.
(12:40):
And they're, like, flying off these drones and they were maybe going, they had four landing spots and they were maybe going once every kind of two minutes and dropping off to a drop-off point.
And then a [inaudible] carries it the rest of the way.
They do their pick-up,
so it's kind of, like, last-mile and a bit.
And one of the things that struck me was whilst the area was cordoned off, it wasn't particularly strongly cordoned off.
(13:05):
And I didn't think there was as much emphasis on safety and regulation with them that we would potentially encounter here in Ireland.
Now, I could be wrong, but you've mentioned regulation briefly there.
Like, how do you ensure that delivery is safe?
Yeah.
Well, so Meituan have a drone delivery programme that are doing about 400,000 deliveries a year.
(13:30):
And it's with kiosks that receive an end, right?
So the drone for those that haven't seen lands on top of the kiosk and picks up the product.
And then it lands in another kiosk somewhere and drops off the product onto the kiosk.
You put in your code, it comes out.
That's not a commercially viable business anywhere in the world outside of China, because most other places in the world don't have, you know, the labour costs at such a low price point that Meituan have.
(13:56):
And also for vertical delivery, delivery into apartments that last, you know, 100m or, the last 20 floors as we call it, is done robotically now,
a lot of times in China, you just give it to the robot and it brings it up the lift.
So they've kind of gone, they're forced to go a different way because of the urban density.
Whereas 70 per cent of Europe is, population density, less than 10,000 people per square kilometre.
(14:21):
And it's really difficult to make delivery work because of demand density and supply density and the cost of labour.
So, and that applies across Europe.
And so the European regulations for drone delivery you know, ironically, you know, Europe usually shoots itself in the foot with regulations by just holding things back and destroying capital value.
(14:41):
But in the case of drone delivery, because you have the existing users of the airspace, you know, called Ryanair and everybody else, you need rules to separate the airspace and to organise that.
So you can't get going until you have regulations or rules.
And so Europe has done a great job at that.
And we have really, really strong, but very, very clear regulations around it.
(15:04):
So very scalable.
And in Ireland then, we have the additional kind of Goldilocks factor that we have a regulator here that's hugely responsive to industry.
They don't make it easy, not at all.
Like it's not, you don't come to Ireland to get an easy pass or regulation, but you can come to Ireland to get an environment where the regulator is working with you just as hard as you're working to get regulated.
(15:27):
And so you have this very unusual dynamic of a regulator that generally gets in the way of things, but actually is working their asses off to be, to make Ireland the best place in the world to do drone delivery.
And we're a beneficiary of that.
So a regulator is an enabler is...
Yeah, I know.
That wouldn't be the first time...
I never thought I would have been saying that because I'm kind of hacking at them the whole time on Twitter about, you know, particularly on the AI thing, which is just like such a shot in the foot.
(15:58):
But in case of aviation, you have to have regulation.
And so the Chinese are ahead in passenger drones, autonomous drones, EHang just released theirs.
And same with Meituan because they're willing to say, you know what, let's just give everyone a chance.
Let's go and learn as we go and retrofit better regulations later on.
(16:19):
The United States is lost, running around in circles with the FAA, 35,000 employees to EASA, European regulators' 800 employees.
And it should be the number one country in the world for drone delivery, but it's not.
And it's not because they're a bunch of idiots.
They're not.
There are a bunch of really incredible engineers over in our competitors over there.
(16:41):
They're just held back by a lack of clear regulation.
Boring subject.
Boring subject, but necessary subject for...
Yeah, it's a very unusual part of our business because it also means that there won't be many more competitors, right?
If we can survive and raise enough capital, we're venture backed.
We will be the winner.
And there's not really going to be anyone else coming after us because it takes, like we raised €65 million so far and we're six years old and we're smart and we're not a bunch of idiots.
(17:08):
It takes a long time to get in the air and to get going here.
So it's a 10-year path to reasonable revenue.
And it's probably a couple of hundred million dollars at least to be viable in this space.
So it's not the, it's thin air and I don't expect, particularly because we're so far ahead, I don't expect many venture capitalists to back competitors to us.
(17:33):
Yeah.
Decent barriers for entry.
Reasonable, yeah.
It's interesting that you mentioned that.
I was curious, you know, obviously you're in this space.
It seems to us, or it seems to me certainly, that drone delivery is coming.
It's going to be here and I have no difficulty accepting the premise.
Do you ever hear the counter-argument?
I mean, are there people out there who think this is not going to happen at all and what's their reasoning for it?
(17:55):
Oh, they're all over LinkedIn.
Lots of, it's fashionable...
It's been fashionable to be cynical about drone delivery because, you know, generally it's like, it's a good voice to have.
It's an interesting subject.
So you may as well talk about it.
So you choose a side, right?
And generally it's been, no, nobody needs this.
Nobody wants this.
(18:15):
Or the economics don't work, right?
It's too expensive, won't work.
And I understand those people, they're kind of, that's what people do on social.
It's been like 99 per centof people don't believe it's possible, or don't believe the economics, or don't believe there's a product market need or whatever.
And some of them are a bit airy and they say, I can grow my own onions.
(18:35):
I don't need them delivered.
But most of them just can't understand how it would work, either from a tech or an economical point of view.
But because I am a tech guy, that part of the equation is easy for me to assess.
It's very obvious that technically and physically, like the physics work really well.
And then if you look inside what's going on with our aircraft, the economics work really well.
(18:59):
The depreciation on the aircraft is tiny because it's 75,000 flight lifetime.
The battery energy use is like nothing, it's 5 cents of electricity we use per flight.
The depreciation then on consumables like motors, batteries, props, things like that is relatively small.
So if you stack all the costs on top of each other, you end up with something 10 times more productive per person hour than road-based delivery is.
(19:28):
For point-to-point deliveries, it's very important to note that it only works for point-to-point deliveries, meaning you don't send one drone out with 15 parcels.
That's never going to be a thing.
It's always going to be point-to-point.
But if you look at Gym+Coffee, let's say we fly off their store or wherever their warehouse is, let's say it's Glasnevin for shits and grins because that's where our headquarters are.
(19:51):
We could stock their entire inventory and deliver it in 10 to 15 minutes all the way down to Greystones.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It would change the things like 3PL, for example, in where it is typically or quite often still, like, one single item going out on a regular basis from a warehouse, from one place.
And are you seeing any interest from companies such as DPD and An Post and those sorts of companies?
(20:17):
Do they see this as a threat or a particular potential add-on?
This isn't a threat to anyone.
This is a threat to just one person, that's the guy on the motorbike or the car flying around suburban roads.
It's an opportunity for everybody else.
It's a low-cost, scalable way to move goods around.
Both DPD and An Post have advantages over us in that they send a guy out in a van and that guy has a algorithm and it's a good algorithm.
(20:42):
And so that business model already works, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
But if I give you an example, one of our hospitals in Dublin here spends €16 million a year in taxis of samples going from the hospital out to the lab.
We could do that with our eyes closed.
We could literally replace that instantly with a much more efficient service for a fraction of the cost.
(21:04):
And if you look at DPD's business or An Post's business, there's a subset of their business that's really high-value, high-priority goods centrally that we would just absolutely kill it with that.
So we could cover the metro area of Dublin, fly right through the city centre from one side to the other across the bay at 85km per hour as the crow flies, with no traffic lights.
(21:27):
And we could do that at high volume.
So those guys will start to...
I mean, An Post were trying out drone delivery 10 years ago.
So their eyes are wide open,
they're 100 per cent looking at us.
And we're speaking to them all the time.
They've been out at our base.
It's a matter of finding out when's the right time to apply this to their business as just an extension of their existing business for certain types of product.
(21:52):
And I think now we're kind of at the stage where we're ready and willing to take that on.
This isn't an advertisement if there's an An Post person...
it's going to happen because it's just so much better than the alternative, but only for some relevant part of their business.
But we're really looking forward to covering city centre in high-speed delivery, maybe outbound rather than inbound.
(22:18):
And I think it's just going to be crazy good.
It sounds brilliant.
From a consumer perspective, is there any negativity there?
Are there any kind of complaints about drone services?
What's going on in that kind of area?
No, like, I mean, people complained about the car.
(22:38):
They complained about the internet.
They're still complaining about mobile phones.
So this isn't to disparage those people that complain, right?
There's a certain number of people that they're just not comfortable with change.
They choose not to embrace the crazy new tech.
And I completely understand those people.
And they're in every community.
I always tell my team when we get a complaint, we get one to two complaints a month in Dublin 15 out of 150,000 people.
(23:04):
But at the start, when we switched that on, the people complaining went absolutely crazy.
And we got about 60 complaints in the first few weeks.
And we take them very seriously.
And the way we kind of approach it is, look, they don't have enough information on their side to understand what's happening.
And it's difficult to get the information because you don't know who the people are until you actually fly over their heads.
(23:28):
And then they let you know, right?
So I remember, when you kicked the football into the garden in a house and you're playing football outside your house in the Seventies or the Eighties, I'm that old.
Some of them didn't give back the football.
It's them.
Louise, do you know where she is?
Louise is a great keeper of footballs.
Maybe she has some of mine.
(23:50):
So we used to just rob their orchard in payment.
But so they're there.
And it's a very important part of this.
It's a very unique part of this industry in that we're flying over 2-300 houses with every flight.
It's very, like, if you're not happy with it, you're going to be seeing it.
Now, that doesn't translate to too much because in the end we're flying in that 40 square kilometers of space with eight aircraft.
(24:14):
You don't see them that often.
You'd be lucky to see one twice a day kind of thing.
But you'd still see it.
And if it angers you, it's going to keep angering you and that's going to grow, right?
So we have to be hugely considerate of that and usually respectful of it.
Even though they're a minority, like we've delivered today to 42 per cent of Dublin 15.
This is a very popular service and probably 15, roughly 15 per cent of orders every day are new customers we haven't seen before.
(24:42):
And the repeat rates are very strong as well.
So it's growing and it's going to keep on growing.
So those people are going to be seeing more and more flights.
But do I think it'll be a barrier to scale?
No, I don't.
Because in the end, the complaints peter out and people just accept and
once we give them all the information, they actually, I mean, without doing numbers or naming names, over 20 per cent of our complaints are regular users of our service.
(25:10):
Okay, interesting.
What sort of stuff do they complain about?
Because it's the old man complaining and it's the children using the service.
Ah, but you're soon going to be at the point where if you've delivered to 42%, you're adding loads of new customers, more people will have used the service than not use the service.
So what's the complaint about?
(25:31):
Well, you still have to, I mean, just because you could have, you could have nine out of 10 of your neighbours, nine out of 10 houses together use the service regularly.
And the one guy in the middle is having to experience that.
Just because all his neighbours are using it.
So I understand that.
Just, like we can't steamroll those people,
we have to try and make them happy, try and get them on board because their neighbours love it.
(25:55):
That doesn't mean that they have to love it either.
So it's just because of the physical nature of it, right?
That causes the problem.
The last-mile delivery space, I mean, is something that's very, of great interest to people in the room here today, it's something that they obsess over.
It's expensive for retail to supply, basically, in some cases, subsidised shipping costs because they nearly have to in order to offer free delivery or free returns or ensure that the shipping cost is coming in at a certain level.
(26:28):
And yes, they hand over their goods and their service for somebody else to complete.
And if that person fires the goods over the garden wall or leaves it on top of the bin that gets collected that day, it is the merchant that gets into difficulty for it.
So I suppose just in terms of potential and, like, whether or not it will drive down costs or anything like that in terms of last-mile delivery, how do you see, you know, the drone deliveries disrupting the retail last-mile delivery shipping space?
(26:57):
Yeah, I think if your goods are, suit drone delivery, then I think it's going to be far lower cost for you as a retailer than any other way of getting the goods to houses.
And I think it's a far safer way as well.
I mean, like I said, most of our deliveries, nearly all of our deliveries are the back gardens, not front gardens.
So fraud can't be a thing.
(27:19):
So like everything is scanned at our base before it's weighed and scanned.
So we know the weight.
So you've got that comparison.
But like I said, the robot doesn't steal things.
Robot doesn't need some of your chips either.
You know, so robot doesn't judge you as well for the sick shit you're getting delivered.
It's just very private and it's very secure.
So, and we will get, like our cost is, our cost is about on a par, a little bit cheaper now than the cost of road-based delivery to work.
(27:46):
But over time and with more scale, we'll get that cost down exceptionally low.
And so the marginal cost for us will be almost inconsequential.
And then it just becomes a commercial relationship between us and the retailer.
I can, I kind of feel... like, we have a room full of retailers,
and you're saying, yeah, your last mile...
They're wondering what the commission is?
(28:08):
So last-mile delivery, it's going to get there.
It's going to get there on time.
It's guaranteed to go to the right place.
The robot isn't going to fiddle with it.
It's like, it's all good.
What's the catch?
A, what's the catch?
And more importantly, B, how do I get involved?
The catch is that it's hard to map us onto retailers that either don't have enough volume because we can't afford to put the aircraft at your base, or you've got a perishable product that you don't want it stored at our base, right?
(28:36):
So there's, we'll get there.
But for now, somebody has to bring the product to us.
And so depending on your volume, we can do that.
Depending on your location, it may just suit that we work with your location anyway.
But in a more medium term, I think two years onwards, we can pick the product up at the retailer.
(28:58):
So we hover and there's a device there like a kiosk, and we pick it up from the kiosk.
So the retailer has nothing to do.
They just have the kiosk outside their store and we pick it up and move it on.
But we're not ready to do that yet.
So the best way to just even assess if it's relevant to you is give us a call, you know, find us on LinkedIn, give us a shout.
I mean, we're very keen.
(29:18):
Like we're talking to a lot of retailers now where we're, I won't say we're squeezing in, but we're making it work just because we want to.
We want to really show the relevance of this, not necessarily to be commercially sensational.
I mean, Gym+Coffee are not doing a ton of volume, but it's the start of something.
And so we want to have those conversations.
We're working with Eason.
Eason's a good example.
(29:39):
I think there's someone from Eason's here.
I go, I got to the tour of the Eason shop on O'Connell Street there before I got in here.
That's a great, that's a great example of a brand that deserves to win in the Irish market and will be threatened by Amazon, I think.
And I think that we together could really absolutely kill Amazon at this logistics game.
(30:01):
So I want to do that for everybody in the room.
That's magnificent.
Yeah.
Stepping slightly away from the actual, the detail of the business itself in some ways, I was really interested to hear more in terms of your history and your approach to projects.
I heard you talk about how, you know, this project was a decade project.
This other project, the one that we're currently talking about is a two-decade project.
(30:23):
And, as I understand it, is a really considered way.
I mean, obviously you've, you've been in business a long time.
You've had and exited successfully from a number of different businesses.
I want to just touch about, on your kind of attitude to business and how you approach a business.
No, I think you choose your project wisely.
And that's why I talk in decades, not in years, because you don't have many decades in you.
(30:45):
And yet every proper business anyway is going to be a decade.
And CarTrawler was 15 years, running CarTrawler.
Before that my other business, Eland, I was 12 years running that before the exit.
And a couple of other businesses before that.
And, and I'm six years into Manna now.
It's like six years, it feels like five minutes.
It's at least another, ah, it's at least another 10 years, I think to get a reasonable result.
(31:11):
So that's like, that's three businesses that are 40 years.
Yeah.
Right?
So you, therefore, I think, like I said, it becomes a very human thing then because you're bringing your family along for the journey as well.
It's like, okay, here's this gigantic, big existential risk to my health and our livelihood that I'm about to take on.
What do you think?
It's just fine.
It's going to be 15 years.
(31:31):
I'll be back in 15 years.
And it's seven days a week.
And it's every minute you have and all your focus and energy is going into it.
So you better choose wisely.
And so it sounds like I haven't because it's drone delivery?
But, but I've thought about it a lot.
I spent a year researching this before I actually decided to do it.
(31:53):
And what were you doing during that year?
Like you were...
Dossing?
I was on, so CarTrawler I, you know, was in an executive position for 15 years.
And then I was on the board for six years, and bored on the board.
Incredibly boring business, but a very good one.
But I'm a tech, sorry, to be fair, it's an exciting business financially, but a technically very boring business.
(32:18):
Very, very scaled-up business, globally...
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And all, like it was a horse that kept on winning, right?
And so someone said to me a long time, you know, ago, so when should I get off this horse?
And I said, like, golden rule, if you've got a winning horse, you ride it until it's dead.
So I kind of did.
And I actually started up a competitor now to that business as well.
(32:41):
Me and my co-founder did.
So I think.
I was probably six years looking for another business to build and then investing in a bunch of small businesses, like angel investing in a bunch of tech kind of businesses.
And then I wanted to really dive right in and build a team again, build an engine.
(33:03):
And then Covid came in and well, Covid was slightly after, slightly before Covid came in, I had kind of zoned in on Manna and I was probably working for a year researching it for myself, just studying things, meeting people, meeting regulators, learning what the skill set is, the technical skills that is to build an aircraft, an autonomous aircraft, because I am a software guy.
(33:29):
And so I was very sure about, you know, the research part of it.
And then I spent another year while I was still on the board of CarTrawler building a team out in Wales, actually, a mechanical electrical team.
So we built Proof of Concept.
So probably a year and a half before I actually said, right, this is my gig now, this is what I'm doing.
(33:49):
And that was a kind of year research, six months of farting around with the tech before I made the jump.
Yeah, well, I think it's fascinating.
Like, the other thing that I find perversely fascinating, I'm not sure why, but it's the fact that this is such an innovative, kind of nearly science fiction-type, global-level business in some ways.
(34:10):
But it's entirely based around a hyper-local thing where you're delivering the very, very last mile directly to the person, into their hands.
I'm not sure why I find that so fascinating.
But it shouldn't surprise you.
You're right.
It's, like, it's a global business, hyper-local, like 3km, 4km-radius kind of footprint.
And even in Dublin 15, we have three separate landing zones, Coolmine, Blanchardstown and Junction 6, because you need to be right beside the product.
(34:38):
So it's going to be hyper local.
But I know that's a kind of unusual facet.
But if you just look at the size of the prize, I mean, it's moving everything.
It's everything that retails locally, which is everything, right?
Amazon is the anomaly, right?
That's the anomaly where fucking everything is centralised on the side of the city.
You have a million and a half SKUs out there and they've all the power.
(35:01):
And retailers and online brands have absolutely no power, you know?
So actually, we're just fixing that.
And you have to do that with physical presence.
Out of curiosity, because I suppose everybody in the room is interested.
How do you see Amazon's entry into Ireland?
What do you think that will mean for retail in the future?
(35:22):
It's been very annoying having to use Amazon.co.uk.
I use it.
So probably not about me.
It's more about the behaviour, normal behaviour of, I would say, the different generations.
And the new generation, if we don't do anything about it, are going to be all Amazon users.
So we have time.
So that's... the way I feel about it is we've seen the pirate ships on the horizon.
(35:48):
They're going to land soon.
We better be ready.
And so that actually translates to logistics.
Because presence and brand is easy.
And actually, I think Irish businesses will have an advantage there because they're just local anyway.
They have the physical presence.
Everyone's seen them in the shopping mall or whatever.
So I think that part should be resilient.
(36:09):
But I think the margin erosion comes when people like the Amazon drug and competitors go all online and do it all through Amazon.
So there's a gigantic threat, for sure.
But the only advantage that Amazon has over everyone in this room is scale.
And that scale translates, obviously, in marketing advantage, right, online, digital, all that stuff and tech.
(36:34):
But the bigger one, like 30 per cent of the cost of ecommerce is logistics.
And that goes away now.
Yeah, we had a guest on the podcast late last year.
And what he spoke about, he was from the US and he spoke about the Amazon moat, which was Amazon Prime in the United States.
And this is basically this.
It is the logistics.
It's the certainty around the logistics.
(36:56):
The fact that you know that you're going to get it, you know that you're going to be able to return it.
It's that aspect of, nearly the trust factor, you know, in the way that PayPal used to be at one stage as well.
So it's kind of interesting, like, when you're looking at how to, let's say, disrupt Amazon, then the logistics, the fast delivery and all of that is definitely going to be part of it.
Yeah, I think that the Prime thing is behaviour.
(37:19):
And it may or may not, but probably does translate in Ireland.
So they're bundling, they're bundling movie subscriptions, they're bundling everything, right?
So there's a lot of value in Prime.
And again, I would say like there's still, but there's still Skybox users out there, right.
But they're all going to go away.
And ultimately that model will prevail.
So how does a very fragmented set of retailers in this room, you know, coalesce somehow and gain all the same advantages that Amazon has?
(37:47):
That's going to be hard, but they're the big advantages.
They are local, they are known mostly.
So it's there, but you know, yeah, I mean, the best way to beat Amazon is not participate when they come here and fix everything before they really throttle up.
Yeah, whenever I'm asked about how to compete with Amazon, the answer is never build something bigger because you can't out-Amazon Amazon, but build something better.
(38:13):
And we've been talking about that this morning around customer experiences, browse experiences.
And now of course, delivery experiences, and you don't have to be bigger to be better is kind of the message that I think we need.
Well, Amazon aren't going to be doing a 10-minute product anywhere in Dublin anytime soon.
Yeah, it's definitely coming.
People are used to it in the UK and we would expect that to be, to arrive here, but we can still build better.
(38:41):
Yeah.
We don't have to build bigger.
Bobby, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thanks a million for joining us today.
We really appreciate it.
I wish you the best of luck.
I think this is a fascinating journey.
I'm really, really looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
(39:05):
So Gordon, it's been a week actually to the day since we sat in the Laughter Lounge in Dublin, and spoke with Bobby Healy about Manna.
It was a fascinating conversation.
I am definitely guilty of having used the word fascinating so many times, my description of it, but also in what I thought about it.
(39:27):
I feel like drone delivery has to be a thing for the future.
Since I got home, I noticed in a recent article in The Guardian that the company has been referred to as an Amazon Slayer, which is possibly, maybe, you know, a little bit of an exaggeration.
Who knows?
(39:48):
But, you know, it's definitely the case where Bobby Healy and the company, Manna, are one of the few, let's say, tech businesses out there, which you feel like they could genuinely put up the fight to Amazon, certainly in localities like Ireland.
How did you find it?
What did you think of the conversation?
(40:09):
Brilliant overall proposition, and it was actually a lot more layered than I thought it was going to be.
I guess I didn't really understand it properly until we spoke to him.
I think the standout for me, apart from being an Amazon slayer, was really how focused this could be on the individual retailer and plays into the importance of the store quite a bit.
(40:31):
I found that particularly interesting.
Loads of other use cases.
The other big one that jumped out was this point-to-point use case they'd got for the HSE doing test deliveries, and this staggering amount of money that's being spent on taxis in the Dublin area.
As I walked out, I was just like, the savings that could be made there and the improvement in just general service, if anyone from the HSE is listening, give Bobby a call.
(41:03):
I just thought that one was brilliant.
And then the third thing that I really noticed was just around the room.
Obviously, our podcasts are brilliantly engaging, but when we've done them in front of an audience in the past, I've never seen everybody in the audience just sit forward
with 'there's something for me in this proposition' that I might have seen before, and I thought that was really interesting.
(41:30):
I think definitely I sensed people leaning forward when we were talking about things like how it might address the difficulties of last mile for retailers.
You know, retailers often live and die by an offering or a service that they don't have a lot of control over.
So the last mile, the courier who delivers the goods to your customer, in some ways can determine the customer experience in a very negative way occasionally, and in a way that you've had little to no control or influence over.
(42:06):
So, in this case, because the drone delivery is, you know, it would be fast, it would be, it's over a short distance, obviously.
I mean, it doesn't suit all use cases, but over a short distance, between two points for a, let's say, a single product delivery, it would make it cheap, it would make it sustainable, it would make it scalable from a retailer's point of view, and it would give them some level of control over that last contact that you have or that last piece of the jigsaw that you would have with your customer.
(42:40):
So, I think it's quite interesting from that point of view, you know.
Loads to unpack.
Yeah, a lot to unpack there.
The number one query into every retailer's customer service or customer support team is always, WISMO, where's my order?
So, to be able to have a solution for that, utilising store inventory on a local level is really, really interesting.
(43:06):
And if there was enough of these things flying around, retailers don't need to necessarily have a dedicated Manna point.
So, that's a brilliant lift away from one of the big problems that retailers face.
It's very novel, also.
Very novel, and I know that a lot of people see it as science fiction, but I really think, let's say, for example, I think the area that they service the most at the moment is Dublin 15, the Blanchardstown area.
(43:35):
You could easily see it make a lot of sense that there's a point, a Manna point, in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, for argument's sake, where multiple retailers would have access to that and can deliver to the locality directly from their store in a very speedy fashion.
You know, you can see that sort of thing working.
It doesn't, it's not, you know, it's not like, it's not like you really have to imagine, you know, imagine some kind of magic dust that's going to be sprinkled on the whole process for it to work.
(44:04):
You can see how the whole thing would tie step-by-step.
And I think, in fact, you know, in the last couple of weeks, they announced that they were delivering tracksuits and so on for Gym+Coffee.
So there is a retail use case in operation in the Dublin region.
And I think, you know, it is novel at the moment, but it really does feel like this is something that, if it could be made to work, and I think it can be made to work, that it could really be beneficial for everybody involved, and from the customer.
(44:37):
Funny when, when you talk to people, though - sorry, Ger - when you talk to people about it and say, oh, yeah, we're interviewing a guy who, who does drones, most people's initial reaction is this is gimmick.
And it was only when I think we sat down and spoke to him and he explained how the process works, how the process is scalable, that actually this is, we're not in gimmick territory here.
(45:05):
We're in really deliverable, scalable proposition territory.
And that is what I thought was most exciting about it.
Like, in fairness, you know, Bobby himself is a, he's a tech guy.
He's an engineer.
He is straight... as, as soon as there was a gap, he was straight into discussion of unit economics, the cost of the drones, the cost of service, the cost per, per flight, you know, so there was, there was a lot of information or a lot of...
(45:35):
He wasn't shy about getting into the numbers, you know, in terms of...
And it stacks.
That was the whole point of that was that it stacks.
As soon as there's like enough volume and volume can be created by one or multiple retailers.
It works really well for food because you've got locality, high frequency, high density.
(45:57):
But really, if, if you have, if you have these on shopping centres or you've got a retailer that's doing enough, then, then, then the unit economics actually work for this really, really well.
And that was something that I thought was particularly exciting.
It reminds me of the, something slightly, well, a slightly different angle, but, and a different sector...
(46:22):
But the, the Rocker, I think it was called, offering where you, where they took over a unit, a small unit with a small footprint in a shopping centre.
And they sold cars.
And the way that you buy the cars in shopping centres is you, you, you have the little swatches of the paint on the wall, so you can see what colour the car will be.
(46:44):
You choose from various interiors.
You can, you can use a tablet to do a bit of a customisation of your car.
And then importantly, you're buying the car on finance, so you're paying, like, €150 a month for the car.
And they, they moved, they moved the whole, let's say the, the focus of the industry, in some ways, from glass palaces on the outskirts of huge cities into shopping centres right in the middle of where everybody is.
(47:11):
And offered something that basically in the, in the minds of the consumer is similar to the decision over, let's say, buying a jacket or buying like a, a slightly more expensive pair of jeans.
So, you know, it was, it was like, not a super-expensive decision.
I'm going to spend €150 a month.
Everything that was there in front of me.
Most people really don't care about the exact specifications of the car.
(47:35):
They want a red one.
They want a black one.
They want the interior.
They want, like, a Bluetooth or whatever the case may be.
So, it kind of addressed what was most people's, you know, approach to thinking about how they would like to buy cars.
Addressed that.
And then even added in services so that when you, if you want to get the car serviced, you can go to the shopping centre where you bought it and park it up.
(47:59):
Somebody will take it away, service it while you're doing your shopping, and then you come back, and you load in your shopping and off you go again.
You know, it's, it's, it's that different.
You're twisting the prism.
You're looking at the problem from a different angle and you're adding in technology, you know, and you're coming, you're coming out the other end with a proposition that actually works and makes an awful lot of sense.
(48:22):
I think that's, that's interesting because I guess what that explains there is you can actually shift the perception of an industry or the way things are done.
And one of the things I've noticed the last couple of times I've been to China, we visited multiple shopping centres because, you know I love a shopping centre, and in every single one of them now that, that we visited and probably Opera Hills was the best example of this,
(48:52):
there were at least 10 car showrooms as you walk in.
Inside the shopping centre?
Yeah.
And the place that you now go to buy a new car is the shopping centre.
And if you had said that to somebody 10 years ago, that where would you go and look for a new car?
It wouldn't be inside a shopping centre.
(49:14):
So that shows that you can actually shift an entire, an entire market.
Now, as much as it pains me, Tesla were largely the, the pioneer of, of that in a lot of places, but, but everybody else has followed suit.
What's interesting though is, is that that can shift and, and in a similar way, you could, this could be a paradigm shift.
(49:37):
Right.
It's a really big one for delivery.
It's just that we're not used to seeing it that much.
And then in other places, like we talked about China there with him, that there is a model there and people are used to seeing drones.
So it's quite normal to have food delivered by a drone.
Also really, like the population density and, and all that kind of stuff.
(49:58):
But, but just really interesting.
And then the other bit from that was, was how he referenced regulators and how regulators are working with him.
Yeah.
I didn't get that since he was a massive fan, but he said...
Regulation has an advantage.
Yeah.
You'd wonder, you know, how much of it you have to say, you know, when you work with the regulators and rely on you...
(50:22):
I love the regulators.
He did sound genuine.
I'll put it, I'll put it, I'll put it that way.
And, you know, in the, in the kind of environment that you're in, like there's nothing worse than vague regulations.
I mean, it's a disaster.
You know, you spend a fortune trying to understand what you're supposed to do, potentially get it wrong, get into difficulty because you've gotten it wrong, with all the best will in the world.
(50:45):
And God knows we see an awful lot of that nowadays with various different things in compliance and so on.
So like a regulator that you can work with, that you, that will explain or try to work on your behalf, or not work on your behalf, but, but help you to understand what they're trying to do,
in that particular area where you've got these large machines flying overhead, over like densely populated cities, the regulation is going to be critical.
(51:09):
And you've obviously, you're in flight paths potentially, or you're, you're, you know, there's, there's, there's other people sharing the, the airspace with you.
It's going to be really important.
And how brilliant that Ireland is in the lead with that.
That's, that, that's fantastic that they were actually at the forefront of it, given some of, even some of the challenges that are happening with capacity at Dublin Airport and some of the mean things that our largest domestic carrier says about the regulators on a frequent basis.
(51:44):
We shall mention no names, but that's, that, that, that was brilliant that you're able to work through that to actually make something quite innovative and really quite brilliant to happen.
Yeah, I think, I think I, I would imagine though Ireland, you know, we're a bit of a Goldilocks country in terms of being just about right for a lot of things that you might want to do in tech.
(52:08):
I think Bobby spoke previously about the difficulty of getting, let's say, capital here.
But outside of that, you know, the ability to work with the likes of Enterprise Ireland, with the, with the regulators, the access to, to talent, the ability to introduce something on a small scale and see if you can scale it up or grow it or whatever.
And do your test bed, test market, test piece and so on.
(52:30):
Ireland is great for that.
I mean, could you imagine, like, if you're trying to do this in LA, for example, immediately you'd have to contend with, like, police helicopters, you know?
You'd have to contend with all the news helicopters.
They love a news outpost being LA, don't they?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So like, I mean, whatever about other environmental considerations, you know, there is, there is, there's, it'd be interesting to see.
(52:51):
I mean, that's, that's obviously like there will be more and more use of the skies in the future.
So what that might look like is another question.
I also like the, the overall kind of attitude.
I love the attitude to building businesses.
You know, this idea of the, this is a decade-long business, you know, or this is a two decade-long, this is a 20-year business.
So when you think about it like that, you're, you're kind of think of your lifespan and say, well, if I'm into building businesses, a lot of people might be, you know, when you're looking at building a business, you say to yourself, okay, well, you know, you often kind of go, well, look, I'll start it up, it's very easy to start up a business in Ireland.
(53:25):
Start up the business, see how you get on with it, give it a couple of years, a month or, you know, sorry, give it a couple of years, see, see where you get to.
But his approach is to say, right, well, am I willing to put a decade of my life into this business?
And the Manna business, he calls a 20-year business.
So am I willing to put two decades of my life?
So that'll basically take him to close to the end of his working life, presumably, or maybe, you know, maybe he wants to live and work until he's 100.
(53:54):
But, you know, it's a, very serious investment and it's a great way of thinking.
I found it fascinating.
I'd love to hear more about it.
I mean, we didn't have time to get into a lot more detail on that sort of thing, but I thought it was really interesting.
The other part that kind of underlies that, let's say, overarching dedication to long-term time investment was the comment about, well, we've only done 200,000 deliveries.
(54:18):
It'll take 10 million deliveries to prove this out.
You know, I don't know how long it'll take them to get to the 10 million delivery part and they've been at it six years.
I'm sure that, you know, they'll speed up over time and all the rest of it, but it's interesting that it's really being thought about.
You know, it's like, how many deliveries do I have to make before this is actually definitely feasible, that I've tested the human economics of this, that I know for a fact what the costs are going to be, like how the humans have to be involved, and that I've tested different, let's say, different scenarios and all the rest of it.
(54:49):
So we've thought about all of this.
You haven't just done a couple of pilot, forgive the pun, test cases, and then said, yeah, great, okay, let's sell the business, you know.
You're trying to build up true, true value in the business by the nature of this, the scale of the work that you have done and the scale of the experience and that you have been at by the time you've completed those 10 million flights.
(55:12):
So it'd be very, very hard for anybody to catch up with them, I would say, by the time that they get to that.
There's certainly a market there for that volume.
Maybe not in Ireland, but if you think about the number of deliveries that are being done a day in the UK or the number of Amazon deliveries alone that are done in the US, there's volume there to prove the business case.
(55:33):
And I just think it's wonderfully exciting to be on the forefront and to see how that, and really to try and get an understanding and grab that understanding of how the proposition works.
And a number of pennies dropped for me there, and I'm sure it did for a lot of the other people that were listening in the audience.
It was certainly, to use your word, fascinating, but it feels very achievable.
(56:01):
And I really, really hope that they continue to scale and do this.
I would love to see Manna drones flying over Kilkenny.
In fact, I would love the idea of being able to get a delivery right now.
Coffee?
Anything.
Can you recommend something?
I just want to see.
(56:21):
Yeah, 100 per cent.
I thought it was an inspirational, in a quiet way, but an inspirational chat that we had.
And he did, the point was raised about pushing back at Amazon during the chat.
And like, truly, it seemed like that there was something there.
You know, it seemed like, okay, actually, there is something in here.
Potentially, there is a pushback that we can do.
(56:43):
You know, we are, the retail in Ireland, it is going to be a challenge.
I know, obviously, give them their due, Amazon are trying to offer to open up retail and open up, especially the ability to sell for DTC merchants and so on.
So we can't completely bash the whole proposition.
People in Ireland want it and so on, and we've got to move with the times.
But at the same time, from a retailer's perspective, you know, you would want to be in far more control of your own supply chain, et cetera.
(57:08):
And this, well, the chain of supply to the customer, but this potentially might give it to you.
So it was a really, really interesting, fascinating talk.
I thought it was inspirational.
And it was great to get him on.
So that's it, Gordon.
Done so.
Fantastic.
Okay, well...
Nothing more to say, so...
Thanks, Gordon.
And thanks to our producer, as usual, Roger Overall in this case. No Elaine this time around.
(57:33):
All sound, as you can hear, was done by us.
Which is why it'll probably be terrible.
Cheers Ger,
I'll see you soon.
Well, see you soon.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous, with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, recorded live at StudioForty9's Excellence in Ecommerce conference in Dublin earlier this month, Ger encourages audience participation...
(00:21):
If you feel the need to use expletives, make sure they're loud enough that they can be picked up by the mics at the end of the room.
Our guest puts the case for drone delivery...
The robot doesn't steal things.
Robot doesn't eat some of your chips either.
You know, so robot doesn't judge you as well for the sick shit you're getting delivered.
Gordon is intrigued...
A, what's the catch?
(00:41):
And more importantly, B, how do I get involved?
And the pirates are back...
We've seen the pirate ships on the horizon.
They're going to land soon.
We better be ready.
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(01:06):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
So I hope lunch went well.
Thanks again to Paper Planes.
I suppose without further ado, we'll get into the live podcast we're recording here.
If you feel the need to use expletives, make sure they're loud enough that they can be picked up by the mics at the end of the room.
(01:30):
Today, we're live on stage at the StudioForty9 annual Excellence in Ecommerce Conference, and we're joined by someone who's not just disrupting the future of retail logistics, he's literally flying over it.
Bobby Healy is the founder and CEO of Manna, the Irish drone delivery company that's turning science fiction into same-day delivery.
(01:51):
If you think drone delivery is still years away, think again.
Bobby and his team have already completed over 140,000 flights in the Irish skies, bringing everything from takeaway pizza to paracetamol straight to people's doors in under three minutes.
No traffic, no emissions, no delays, delivery precisely delivered.
Manna have recently partnered with ecommerce merchant Gym+Coffee to deliver products in areas in Dublin, and I've also been reliably informed that Manna will be in the skies in the People's Republic down in Cork very shortly.
(02:22):
Bobby, it's great to have you here with us today, and you're very welcome.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So, Bobby, I suppose just to get the show on the road, your story obviously doesn't start with drones.
You've previously worked in gaming, gaming software, airline tech, and in particular car rental, where you scaled CarTrawler into a global giant.
I suppose one of my questions to start with is what hooked you on drone delivery?
(02:46):
Why drone delivery?
After all that.
Way more craic.
Craic is always an important one.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a techie.
I enjoy, I mean, I really love building tech, building teams around tech, and I mean, it's a great passion.
It's been since, I've been 13 years old, writing code.
So definitely, it was going to be a lot of fun, firstly.
(03:08):
But also, it was also going to be, if it's successful, which is highly unlikely, but if it is successful, it'd be enormous.
It'd be the biggest fucking business we ever saw in Europe, for sure.
What's the feel of the opportunity there?
It's trillions.
It's last mile, right?
So it's not drone delivery.
It's last-mile commerce on everywhere in the suburban planet.
(03:31):
So the prize is enormous.
If you can make it as ubiquitous and as easy as just picking up a phone and using it,
then you enable retailers, the very people in this room, to turn physical business
that requires footfall and roads into a digital business that's purely about,
you know, relevant product, targeted advertising,
(03:54):
commercial relationships with loyal, brand-loyal customers,
but turning those businesses into completely digital businesses.
Because we can put an aircraft on your roof, and that aircraft can do eight deliveries an hour, which is more than a lot of businesses need.
And out of Blanchardstown now, we've got capacity for about 1,000 deliveries a day, three-minute flights, two minutes 40 seconds outbound flight.
(04:17):
So if you think about that as just a unit of work, if you could move everything from A to B reliably and at near zero marginal cost, what does that do to retail?
Well, the answer is it lets retail push the Amazon tide back.
And it allows micro-distribution, micro-presence, prevail against the giants of logistics, the Amazons of this world.
(04:43):
I think everybody in the room will be delighted to hear about Amazon getting pushback, to be honest.
Could you explain a little bit to us how the delivery process works so that we can all imagine it?
Yep.
So today you get our app.
We can also get Just Eat and DoorDash Fold, a bunch of aggregators, right?
(05:05):
So we're built in, but the experience is, you open the app just to get your hamburger or whatever it is.
And if we know that you're within reach, if the restaurant is within reach of your house, we'll offer you drone delivery.
In the Manna app, obviously everything is within reach because you only show your vendors that can reach you.
And from that point on, you put in your Eircode, that registers your destination.
(05:29):
And that's it.
It just looks like a normal shopping basket.
You buy everything.
We're checking the weight and volume, for obvious reasons, but we let you order 4kg now, that's plenty - the 99 percentile of food is 1.9kg.
And that's it.
We get a notification when the cargo has arrived.
You get a notification when the aircraft's taken off.
(05:50):
You see the aircraft telemetry, meaning you see the aircraft as it travels across the map.
And you get a notification when the product lands in your back garden.
Brilliant.
So you get to watch as it arrives.
From a retailer's perspective, how does that work?
Do you have to be, like, next door to the retailer?
Does the retailer get product to you?
How does that work?
(06:11):
Yeah, it depends on the perishability of the product, funnily.
So if I were to pick Offbeat Donuts, I don't know if there's an Offbeat person here in the room?
Is there?
Stick up your hand.
Great donuts.
But they stock us, right?
So at all of our bases, anywhere we go in Ireland, even Cork, we would expect to have Offbeat Donuts at our base.
So that when the customer orders Offbeat Donuts off our menu or we cross-sell those donuts, it's instant pick for us, right?
(06:36):
So there's no time.
So Offbeat have nothing to do there really, other than get the product to us.
And that gets harder and harder as we distribute more and more.
But still, that's what we call the semi-perishable stuff, the stuff that can live for a day at our base.
If I look at Gym+Coffee that are in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, about 200m from our base, which is just at our limit that we'd be willing to go and collect the product.
(07:01):
But that's a high-value product, a very important product.
So therefore, the collector interface works where we have collectors and they walk into all the various different stores, pick up the product and then bring it back.
And we'll walk up to four minutes.
Okay, so you'd send someone to go and get it, grab it, run it back to base, throw it in a plane... probably not throw it.
(07:24):
Yeah, we jam it in, we kick it in, whatever.
Take real good care of the product, right?
Yeah.
Actually, we learned with Gym+Coffee packaging-wise that with the fleece expands, of course it does.
And the first delivery we tried to do with Gym+Coffee, it didn't come out of the aircraft.
But we got them right after that.
But it's a good example of a product that, you know, we map onto the physical presence of that retailer initially.
(07:50):
So we collect.
But later on, there's no reason why we shouldn't be flying off the roof of their storage area, wherever that is, and serving the whole city.
It's like, we're going to be covering 420,000 Eircodes by the end of the year in Dublin.
And we can reach them all from anywhere in Dublin.
So you're going to be looking at a 10- to 15-minute average delivery time anywhere in Dublin by the end of the year.
(08:14):
That's fantastic.
Is this available anywhere else in Europe?
Or is Ireland the first for this?
Ireland is the best.
What, just standard Ireland?
We do more flights a week than Amazon have ever done with their drone delivery programme.
We're in Finland as well, and we have a small base in Texas, but Finland, Nordics, so Sweden and Finland, we'll expand a lot towards the end of the year.
(08:40):
But Dublin is the worldwide epicentre.
Blanchardstown Shopping Centre is the worldwide epicentre of drone delivery.
That's going to change.
Google have a great drone delivery programme in Texas, right beside us, actually.
And probably Googlers are, I would say, slightly in the lead right now in terms of volume, but we would expect to overtake them.
If we're successful in the Dublin rollout this year, then we'll be significantly larger than Google's drone delivery programme.
(09:07):
How do you see the future for Manna in terms of would retailers and people who need your sort of delivery basically rent those solutions and have their own drones flying off their own roofs?
And is that kind of the future that you see it for?
It won't be, for the short term,
it wouldn't be like that because we're a regulated entity.
(09:28):
We essentially have an airline, a cargo airline license.
And there's a lot of overhead comes with that.
A lot of training and process and governance comes with...
It's a very unusual type of tech business in that not half, but not far off half our resources just goes into process and training and safety and documentation.
Now that scales nicely as we add 1,000 aircraft.
(09:49):
It's the same kind of overhead, but a retailer, even a national retailer in the country wouldn't need or want to do that.
So we would do it for them.
So we would just put a presence at your warehouse or on your roof.
Like, we flew off the roof of Tesco.
We can put aircraft anywhere.
We just need flat space.
And we just need a kind of level of volume to make that work.
(10:12):
And at the other end of things, do you see a future where people in their standard domestic houses would have the equivalent of future post boxes that are able to accept those deliveries?
You know, like you see in the United States, an enormous amount of porch piracy, you know, people aren't able to...
That's because the Amazon guy can't go into the back garden.
We do.
(10:33):
So if your back garden, if you have 2m, well, 3m diameter on a windy day, we need 3m diameter, flat space,
back garden's the best.
Trampolines is a great place to deliver.
We do loads of trampoline delivery.
Can't deliver trampolines, but we can deliver onto trampolines.
So you need to use flat space.
So back garden, if you have a viable back garden, we don't let you deliver to your front garden.
(10:55):
Because front gardens, the cars come and go, people come and go, and we don't deliver onto people either.
So people don't actually need to be there to accept the delivery?
No, they shouldn't be there.
If they're under the aircraft, we won't deliver.
So when I use the Manna app, I can indicate exactly where I want the product to be delivered.
Is that how it works?
Yeah.
(11:16):
The first time you give us your Eircode, we'll send you two pins in your back garden or maybe your front garden, and you have to accept one of those pins.
And that pin is where you're getting your product delivered forever.
Tell us about the competition.
So who is the competition?
Obviously, you mentioned Amazon and Google.
Google and Amazon, for those in the room that haven't heard of them, they're big US tech companies with unlimited balance sheets.
(11:38):
Big in Ireland?
Yeah, I mean, Amazon, we know they're here now out at Baldonnell Airport.
Funnily, the dumbest place in the world to put a fulfillment centre because you can't fly drones out of it because of the runway.
But that's it.
Amazon and Google.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, I joked earlier on, like we're going to be bigger than Google and stuff.
(11:58):
We probably by volume, we will be at the end of the year, depending on what they do.
But today at this state, the industry doesn't care about volume.
It cares about safe volume.
It's easy to go super-fast in this industry and land on everyone's head.
It's not so easy to go incredibly safe.
So we're very cautious.
You have to be cautious until... we've done 200,000 flights.
(12:19):
You really want to be doing about 10 million flights before you can say we're successful, I think.
And for us, that's probably two years away for us, maybe three.
I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time in Shenzhen recently.
Their set up seems to be a little different to yours in that...
Meituan?
Yeah.
Like, on the side of a shopping centre, just a couple of lads and a tent.
(12:40):
And they're, like, flying off these drones and they were maybe going, they had four landing spots and they were maybe going once every kind of two minutes and dropping off to a drop-off point.
And then a [inaudible] carries it the rest of the way.
They do their pick-up,
so it's kind of, like, last-mile and a bit.
And one of the things that struck me was whilst the area was cordoned off, it wasn't particularly strongly cordoned off.
(13:05):
And I didn't think there was as much emphasis on safety and regulation with them that we would potentially encounter here in Ireland.
Now, I could be wrong, but you've mentioned regulation briefly there.
Like, how do you ensure that delivery is safe?
Yeah.
Well, so Meituan have a drone delivery programme that are doing about 400,000 deliveries a year.
(13:30):
And it's with kiosks that receive an end, right?
So the drone for those that haven't seen lands on top of the kiosk and picks up the product.
And then it lands in another kiosk somewhere and drops off the product onto the kiosk.
You put in your code, it comes out.
That's not a commercially viable business anywhere in the world outside of China, because most other places in the world don't have, you know, the labour costs at such a low price point that Meituan have.
(13:56):
And also for vertical delivery, delivery into apartments that last, you know, 100m or, the last 20 floors as we call it, is done robotically now,
a lot of times in China, you just give it to the robot and it brings it up the lift.
So they've kind of gone, they're forced to go a different way because of the urban density.
Whereas 70 per cent of Europe is, population density, less than 10,000 people per square kilometre.
(14:21):
And it's really difficult to make delivery work because of demand density and supply density and the cost of labour.
So, and that applies across Europe.
And so the European regulations for drone delivery you know, ironically, you know, Europe usually shoots itself in the foot with regulations by just holding things back and destroying capital value.
(14:41):
But in the case of drone delivery, because you have the existing users of the airspace, you know, called Ryanair and everybody else, you need rules to separate the airspace and to organise that.
So you can't get going until you have regulations or rules.
And so Europe has done a great job at that.
And we have really, really strong, but very, very clear regulations around it.
(15:04):
So very scalable.
And in Ireland then, we have the additional kind of Goldilocks factor that we have a regulator here that's hugely responsive to industry.
They don't make it easy, not at all.
Like it's not, you don't come to Ireland to get an easy pass or regulation, but you can come to Ireland to get an environment where the regulator is working with you just as hard as you're working to get regulated.
(15:27):
And so you have this very unusual dynamic of a regulator that generally gets in the way of things, but actually is working their asses off to be, to make Ireland the best place in the world to do drone delivery.
And we're a beneficiary of that.
So a regulator is an enabler is...
Yeah, I know.
That wouldn't be the first time...
I never thought I would have been saying that because I'm kind of hacking at them the whole time on Twitter about, you know, particularly on the AI thing, which is just like such a shot in the foot.
(15:58):
But in case of aviation, you have to have regulation.
And so the Chinese are ahead in passenger drones, autonomous drones, EHang just released theirs.
And same with Meituan because they're willing to say, you know what, let's just give everyone a chance.
Let's go and learn as we go and retrofit better regulations later on.
(16:19):
The United States is lost, running around in circles with the FAA, 35,000 employees to EASA, European regulators' 800 employees.
And it should be the number one country in the world for drone delivery, but it's not.
And it's not because they're a bunch of idiots.
They're not.
There are a bunch of really incredible engineers over in our competitors over there.
(16:41):
They're just held back by a lack of clear regulation.
Boring subject.
Boring subject, but necessary subject for...
Yeah, it's a very unusual part of our business because it also means that there won't be many more competitors, right?
If we can survive and raise enough capital, we're venture backed.
We will be the winner.
And there's not really going to be anyone else coming after us because it takes, like we raised €65 million so far and we're six years old and we're smart and we're not a bunch of idiots.
(17:08):
It takes a long time to get in the air and to get going here.
So it's a 10-year path to reasonable revenue.
And it's probably a couple of hundred million dollars at least to be viable in this space.
So it's not the, it's thin air and I don't expect, particularly because we're so far ahead, I don't expect many venture capitalists to back competitors to us.
(17:33):
Yeah.
Decent barriers for entry.
Reasonable, yeah.
It's interesting that you mentioned that.
I was curious, you know, obviously you're in this space.
It seems to us, or it seems to me certainly, that drone delivery is coming.
It's going to be here and I have no difficulty accepting the premise.
Do you ever hear the counter-argument?
I mean, are there people out there who think this is not going to happen at all and what's their reasoning for it?
(17:55):
Oh, they're all over LinkedIn.
Lots of, it's fashionable...
It's been fashionable to be cynical about drone delivery because, you know, generally it's like, it's a good voice to have.
It's an interesting subject.
So you may as well talk about it.
So you choose a side, right?
And generally it's been, no, nobody needs this.
Nobody wants this.
(18:15):
Or the economics don't work, right?
It's too expensive, won't work.
And I understand those people, they're kind of, that's what people do on social.
It's been like 99 per centof people don't believe it's possible, or don't believe the economics, or don't believe there's a product market need or whatever.
And some of them are a bit airy and they say, I can grow my own onions.
(18:35):
I don't need them delivered.
But most of them just can't understand how it would work, either from a tech or an economical point of view.
But because I am a tech guy, that part of the equation is easy for me to assess.
It's very obvious that technically and physically, like the physics work really well.
And then if you look inside what's going on with our aircraft, the economics work really well.
(18:59):
The depreciation on the aircraft is tiny because it's 75,000 flight lifetime.
The battery energy use is like nothing, it's 5 cents of electricity we use per flight.
The depreciation then on consumables like motors, batteries, props, things like that is relatively small.
So if you stack all the costs on top of each other, you end up with something 10 times more productive per person hour than road-based delivery is.
(19:28):
For point-to-point deliveries, it's very important to note that it only works for point-to-point deliveries, meaning you don't send one drone out with 15 parcels.
That's never going to be a thing.
It's always going to be point-to-point.
But if you look at Gym+Coffee, let's say we fly off their store or wherever their warehouse is, let's say it's Glasnevin for shits and grins because that's where our headquarters are.
(19:51):
We could stock their entire inventory and deliver it in 10 to 15 minutes all the way down to Greystones.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It would change the things like 3PL, for example, in where it is typically or quite often still, like, one single item going out on a regular basis from a warehouse, from one place.
And are you seeing any interest from companies such as DPD and An Post and those sorts of companies?
(20:17):
Do they see this as a threat or a particular potential add-on?
This isn't a threat to anyone.
This is a threat to just one person, that's the guy on the motorbike or the car flying around suburban roads.
It's an opportunity for everybody else.
It's a low-cost, scalable way to move goods around.
Both DPD and An Post have advantages over us in that they send a guy out in a van and that guy has a algorithm and it's a good algorithm.
(20:42):
And so that business model already works, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
But if I give you an example, one of our hospitals in Dublin here spends €16 million a year in taxis of samples going from the hospital out to the lab.
We could do that with our eyes closed.
We could literally replace that instantly with a much more efficient service for a fraction of the cost.
(21:04):
And if you look at DPD's business or An Post's business, there's a subset of their business that's really high-value, high-priority goods centrally that we would just absolutely kill it with that.
So we could cover the metro area of Dublin, fly right through the city centre from one side to the other across the bay at 85km per hour as the crow flies, with no traffic lights.
(21:27):
And we could do that at high volume.
So those guys will start to...
I mean, An Post were trying out drone delivery 10 years ago.
So their eyes are wide open,
they're 100 per cent looking at us.
And we're speaking to them all the time.
They've been out at our base.
It's a matter of finding out when's the right time to apply this to their business as just an extension of their existing business for certain types of product.
(21:52):
And I think now we're kind of at the stage where we're ready and willing to take that on.
This isn't an advertisement if there's an An Post person...
it's going to happen because it's just so much better than the alternative, but only for some relevant part of their business.
But we're really looking forward to covering city centre in high-speed delivery, maybe outbound rather than inbound.
(22:18):
And I think it's just going to be crazy good.
It sounds brilliant.
From a consumer perspective, is there any negativity there?
Are there any kind of complaints about drone services?
What's going on in that kind of area?
No, like, I mean, people complained about the car.
(22:38):
They complained about the internet.
They're still complaining about mobile phones.
So this isn't to disparage those people that complain, right?
There's a certain number of people that they're just not comfortable with change.
They choose not to embrace the crazy new tech.
And I completely understand those people.
And they're in every community.
I always tell my team when we get a complaint, we get one to two complaints a month in Dublin 15 out of 150,000 people.
(23:04):
But at the start, when we switched that on, the people complaining went absolutely crazy.
And we got about 60 complaints in the first few weeks.
And we take them very seriously.
And the way we kind of approach it is, look, they don't have enough information on their side to understand what's happening.
And it's difficult to get the information because you don't know who the people are until you actually fly over their heads.
(23:28):
And then they let you know, right?
So I remember, when you kicked the football into the garden in a house and you're playing football outside your house in the Seventies or the Eighties, I'm that old.
Some of them didn't give back the football.
It's them.
Louise, do you know where she is?
Louise is a great keeper of footballs.
Maybe she has some of mine.
(23:50):
So we used to just rob their orchard in payment.
But so they're there.
And it's a very important part of this.
It's a very unique part of this industry in that we're flying over 2-300 houses with every flight.
It's very, like, if you're not happy with it, you're going to be seeing it.
Now, that doesn't translate to too much because in the end we're flying in that 40 square kilometers of space with eight aircraft.
(24:14):
You don't see them that often.
You'd be lucky to see one twice a day kind of thing.
But you'd still see it.
And if it angers you, it's going to keep angering you and that's going to grow, right?
So we have to be hugely considerate of that and usually respectful of it.
Even though they're a minority, like we've delivered today to 42 per cent of Dublin 15.
This is a very popular service and probably 15, roughly 15 per cent of orders every day are new customers we haven't seen before.
(24:42):
And the repeat rates are very strong as well.
So it's growing and it's going to keep on growing.
So those people are going to be seeing more and more flights.
But do I think it'll be a barrier to scale?
No, I don't.
Because in the end, the complaints peter out and people just accept and
once we give them all the information, they actually, I mean, without doing numbers or naming names, over 20 per cent of our complaints are regular users of our service.
(25:10):
Okay, interesting.
What sort of stuff do they complain about?
Because it's the old man complaining and it's the children using the service.
Ah, but you're soon going to be at the point where if you've delivered to 42%, you're adding loads of new customers, more people will have used the service than not use the service.
So what's the complaint about?
(25:31):
Well, you still have to, I mean, just because you could have, you could have nine out of 10 of your neighbours, nine out of 10 houses together use the service regularly.
And the one guy in the middle is having to experience that.
Just because all his neighbours are using it.
So I understand that.
Just, like we can't steamroll those people,
we have to try and make them happy, try and get them on board because their neighbours love it.
(25:55):
That doesn't mean that they have to love it either.
So it's just because of the physical nature of it, right?
That causes the problem.
The last-mile delivery space, I mean, is something that's very, of great interest to people in the room here today, it's something that they obsess over.
It's expensive for retail to supply, basically, in some cases, subsidised shipping costs because they nearly have to in order to offer free delivery or free returns or ensure that the shipping cost is coming in at a certain level.
(26:28):
And yes, they hand over their goods and their service for somebody else to complete.
And if that person fires the goods over the garden wall or leaves it on top of the bin that gets collected that day, it is the merchant that gets into difficulty for it.
So I suppose just in terms of potential and, like, whether or not it will drive down costs or anything like that in terms of last-mile delivery, how do you see, you know, the drone deliveries disrupting the retail last-mile delivery shipping space?
(26:57):
Yeah, I think if your goods are, suit drone delivery, then I think it's going to be far lower cost for you as a retailer than any other way of getting the goods to houses.
And I think it's a far safer way as well.
I mean, like I said, most of our deliveries, nearly all of our deliveries are the back gardens, not front gardens.
So fraud can't be a thing.
(27:19):
So like everything is scanned at our base before it's weighed and scanned.
So we know the weight.
So you've got that comparison.
But like I said, the robot doesn't steal things.
Robot doesn't need some of your chips either.
You know, so robot doesn't judge you as well for the sick shit you're getting delivered.
It's just very private and it's very secure.
So, and we will get, like our cost is, our cost is about on a par, a little bit cheaper now than the cost of road-based delivery to work.
(27:46):
But over time and with more scale, we'll get that cost down exceptionally low.
And so the marginal cost for us will be almost inconsequential.
And then it just becomes a commercial relationship between us and the retailer.
I can, I kind of feel... like, we have a room full of retailers,
and you're saying, yeah, your last mile...
They're wondering what the commission is?
(28:08):
So last-mile delivery, it's going to get there.
It's going to get there on time.
It's guaranteed to go to the right place.
The robot isn't going to fiddle with it.
It's like, it's all good.
What's the catch?
A, what's the catch?
And more importantly, B, how do I get involved?
The catch is that it's hard to map us onto retailers that either don't have enough volume because we can't afford to put the aircraft at your base, or you've got a perishable product that you don't want it stored at our base, right?
(28:36):
So there's, we'll get there.
But for now, somebody has to bring the product to us.
And so depending on your volume, we can do that.
Depending on your location, it may just suit that we work with your location anyway.
But in a more medium term, I think two years onwards, we can pick the product up at the retailer.
(28:58):
So we hover and there's a device there like a kiosk, and we pick it up from the kiosk.
So the retailer has nothing to do.
They just have the kiosk outside their store and we pick it up and move it on.
But we're not ready to do that yet.
So the best way to just even assess if it's relevant to you is give us a call, you know, find us on LinkedIn, give us a shout.
I mean, we're very keen.
(29:18):
Like we're talking to a lot of retailers now where we're, I won't say we're squeezing in, but we're making it work just because we want to.
We want to really show the relevance of this, not necessarily to be commercially sensational.
I mean, Gym+Coffee are not doing a ton of volume, but it's the start of something.
And so we want to have those conversations.
We're working with Eason.
Eason's a good example.
(29:39):
I think there's someone from Eason's here.
I go, I got to the tour of the Eason shop on O'Connell Street there before I got in here.
That's a great, that's a great example of a brand that deserves to win in the Irish market and will be threatened by Amazon, I think.
And I think that we together could really absolutely kill Amazon at this logistics game.
(30:01):
So I want to do that for everybody in the room.
That's magnificent.
Yeah.
Stepping slightly away from the actual, the detail of the business itself in some ways, I was really interested to hear more in terms of your history and your approach to projects.
I heard you talk about how, you know, this project was a decade project.
This other project, the one that we're currently talking about is a two-decade project.
(30:23):
And, as I understand it, is a really considered way.
I mean, obviously you've, you've been in business a long time.
You've had and exited successfully from a number of different businesses.
I want to just touch about, on your kind of attitude to business and how you approach a business.
No, I think you choose your project wisely.
And that's why I talk in decades, not in years, because you don't have many decades in you.
(30:45):
And yet every proper business anyway is going to be a decade.
And CarTrawler was 15 years, running CarTrawler.
Before that my other business, Eland, I was 12 years running that before the exit.
And a couple of other businesses before that.
And, and I'm six years into Manna now.
It's like six years, it feels like five minutes.
It's at least another, ah, it's at least another 10 years, I think to get a reasonable result.
(31:11):
So that's like, that's three businesses that are 40 years.
Yeah.
Right?
So you, therefore, I think, like I said, it becomes a very human thing then because you're bringing your family along for the journey as well.
It's like, okay, here's this gigantic, big existential risk to my health and our livelihood that I'm about to take on.
What do you think?
It's just fine.
It's going to be 15 years.
(31:31):
I'll be back in 15 years.
And it's seven days a week.
And it's every minute you have and all your focus and energy is going into it.
So you better choose wisely.
And so it sounds like I haven't because it's drone delivery?
But, but I've thought about it a lot.
I spent a year researching this before I actually decided to do it.
(31:53):
And what were you doing during that year?
Like you were...
Dossing?
I was on, so CarTrawler I, you know, was in an executive position for 15 years.
And then I was on the board for six years, and bored on the board.
Incredibly boring business, but a very good one.
But I'm a tech, sorry, to be fair, it's an exciting business financially, but a technically very boring business.
(32:18):
Very, very scaled-up business, globally...
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And all, like it was a horse that kept on winning, right?
And so someone said to me a long time, you know, ago, so when should I get off this horse?
And I said, like, golden rule, if you've got a winning horse, you ride it until it's dead.
So I kind of did.
And I actually started up a competitor now to that business as well.
(32:41):
Me and my co-founder did.
So I think.
I was probably six years looking for another business to build and then investing in a bunch of small businesses, like angel investing in a bunch of tech kind of businesses.
And then I wanted to really dive right in and build a team again, build an engine.
(33:03):
And then Covid came in and well, Covid was slightly after, slightly before Covid came in, I had kind of zoned in on Manna and I was probably working for a year researching it for myself, just studying things, meeting people, meeting regulators, learning what the skill set is, the technical skills that is to build an aircraft, an autonomous aircraft, because I am a software guy.
(33:29):
And so I was very sure about, you know, the research part of it.
And then I spent another year while I was still on the board of CarTrawler building a team out in Wales, actually, a mechanical electrical team.
So we built Proof of Concept.
So probably a year and a half before I actually said, right, this is my gig now, this is what I'm doing.
(33:49):
And that was a kind of year research, six months of farting around with the tech before I made the jump.
Yeah, well, I think it's fascinating.
Like, the other thing that I find perversely fascinating, I'm not sure why, but it's the fact that this is such an innovative, kind of nearly science fiction-type, global-level business in some ways.
(34:10):
But it's entirely based around a hyper-local thing where you're delivering the very, very last mile directly to the person, into their hands.
I'm not sure why I find that so fascinating.
But it shouldn't surprise you.
You're right.
It's, like, it's a global business, hyper-local, like 3km, 4km-radius kind of footprint.
And even in Dublin 15, we have three separate landing zones, Coolmine, Blanchardstown and Junction 6, because you need to be right beside the product.
(34:38):
So it's going to be hyper local.
But I know that's a kind of unusual facet.
But if you just look at the size of the prize, I mean, it's moving everything.
It's everything that retails locally, which is everything, right?
Amazon is the anomaly, right?
That's the anomaly where fucking everything is centralised on the side of the city.
You have a million and a half SKUs out there and they've all the power.
(35:01):
And retailers and online brands have absolutely no power, you know?
So actually, we're just fixing that.
And you have to do that with physical presence.
Out of curiosity, because I suppose everybody in the room is interested.
How do you see Amazon's entry into Ireland?
What do you think that will mean for retail in the future?
(35:22):
It's been very annoying having to use Amazon.co.uk.
I use it.
So probably not about me.
It's more about the behaviour, normal behaviour of, I would say, the different generations.
And the new generation, if we don't do anything about it, are going to be all Amazon users.
So we have time.
So that's... the way I feel about it is we've seen the pirate ships on the horizon.
(35:48):
They're going to land soon.
We better be ready.
And so that actually translates to logistics.
Because presence and brand is easy.
And actually, I think Irish businesses will have an advantage there because they're just local anyway.
They have the physical presence.
Everyone's seen them in the shopping mall or whatever.
So I think that part should be resilient.
(36:09):
But I think the margin erosion comes when people like the Amazon drug and competitors go all online and do it all through Amazon.
So there's a gigantic threat, for sure.
But the only advantage that Amazon has over everyone in this room is scale.
And that scale translates, obviously, in marketing advantage, right, online, digital, all that stuff and tech.
(36:34):
But the bigger one, like 30 per cent of the cost of ecommerce is logistics.
And that goes away now.
Yeah, we had a guest on the podcast late last year.
And what he spoke about, he was from the US and he spoke about the Amazon moat, which was Amazon Prime in the United States.
And this is basically this.
It is the logistics.
It's the certainty around the logistics.
(36:56):
The fact that you know that you're going to get it, you know that you're going to be able to return it.
It's that aspect of, nearly the trust factor, you know, in the way that PayPal used to be at one stage as well.
So it's kind of interesting, like, when you're looking at how to, let's say, disrupt Amazon, then the logistics, the fast delivery and all of that is definitely going to be part of it.
Yeah, I think that the Prime thing is behaviour.
(37:19):
And it may or may not, but probably does translate in Ireland.
So they're bundling, they're bundling movie subscriptions, they're bundling everything, right?
So there's a lot of value in Prime.
And again, I would say like there's still, but there's still Skybox users out there, right.
But they're all going to go away.
And ultimately that model will prevail.
So how does a very fragmented set of retailers in this room, you know, coalesce somehow and gain all the same advantages that Amazon has?
(37:47):
That's going to be hard, but they're the big advantages.
They are local, they are known mostly.
So it's there, but you know, yeah, I mean, the best way to beat Amazon is not participate when they come here and fix everything before they really throttle up.
Yeah, whenever I'm asked about how to compete with Amazon, the answer is never build something bigger because you can't out-Amazon Amazon, but build something better.
(38:13):
And we've been talking about that this morning around customer experiences, browse experiences.
And now of course, delivery experiences, and you don't have to be bigger to be better is kind of the message that I think we need.
Well, Amazon aren't going to be doing a 10-minute product anywhere in Dublin anytime soon.
Yeah, it's definitely coming.
People are used to it in the UK and we would expect that to be, to arrive here, but we can still build better.
(38:41):
Yeah.
We don't have to build bigger.
Bobby, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thanks a million for joining us today.
We really appreciate it.
I wish you the best of luck.
I think this is a fascinating journey.
I'm really, really looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
(39:05):
So Gordon, it's been a week actually to the day since we sat in the Laughter Lounge in Dublin, and spoke with Bobby Healy about Manna.
It was a fascinating conversation.
I am definitely guilty of having used the word fascinating so many times, my description of it, but also in what I thought about it.
(39:27):
I feel like drone delivery has to be a thing for the future.
Since I got home, I noticed in a recent article in The Guardian that the company has been referred to as an Amazon Slayer, which is possibly, maybe, you know, a little bit of an exaggeration.
Who knows?
(39:48):
But, you know, it's definitely the case where Bobby Healy and the company, Manna, are one of the few, let's say, tech businesses out there, which you feel like they could genuinely put up the fight to Amazon, certainly in localities like Ireland.
How did you find it?
What did you think of the conversation?
(40:09):
Brilliant overall proposition, and it was actually a lot more layered than I thought it was going to be.
I guess I didn't really understand it properly until we spoke to him.
I think the standout for me, apart from being an Amazon slayer, was really how focused this could be on the individual retailer and plays into the importance of the store quite a bit.
(40:31):
I found that particularly interesting.
Loads of other use cases.
The other big one that jumped out was this point-to-point use case they'd got for the HSE doing test deliveries, and this staggering amount of money that's being spent on taxis in the Dublin area.
As I walked out, I was just like, the savings that could be made there and the improvement in just general service, if anyone from the HSE is listening, give Bobby a call.
(41:03):
I just thought that one was brilliant.
And then the third thing that I really noticed was just around the room.
Obviously, our podcasts are brilliantly engaging, but when we've done them in front of an audience in the past, I've never seen everybody in the audience just sit forward
with 'there's something for me in this proposition' that I might have seen before, and I thought that was really interesting.
(41:30):
I think definitely I sensed people leaning forward when we were talking about things like how it might address the difficulties of last mile for retailers.
You know, retailers often live and die by an offering or a service that they don't have a lot of control over.
So the last mile, the courier who delivers the goods to your customer, in some ways can determine the customer experience in a very negative way occasionally, and in a way that you've had little to no control or influence over.
(42:06):
So, in this case, because the drone delivery is, you know, it would be fast, it would be, it's over a short distance, obviously.
I mean, it doesn't suit all use cases, but over a short distance, between two points for a, let's say, a single product delivery, it would make it cheap, it would make it sustainable, it would make it scalable from a retailer's point of view, and it would give them some level of control over that last contact that you have or that last piece of the jigsaw that you would have with your customer.
(42:40):
So, I think it's quite interesting from that point of view, you know.
Loads to unpack.
Yeah, a lot to unpack there.
The number one query into every retailer's customer service or customer support team is always, WISMO, where's my order?
So, to be able to have a solution for that, utilising store inventory on a local level is really, really interesting.
(43:06):
And if there was enough of these things flying around, retailers don't need to necessarily have a dedicated Manna point.
So, that's a brilliant lift away from one of the big problems that retailers face.
It's very novel, also.
Very novel, and I know that a lot of people see it as science fiction, but I really think, let's say, for example, I think the area that they service the most at the moment is Dublin 15, the Blanchardstown area.
(43:35):
You could easily see it make a lot of sense that there's a point, a Manna point, in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, for argument's sake, where multiple retailers would have access to that and can deliver to the locality directly from their store in a very speedy fashion.
You know, you can see that sort of thing working.
It doesn't, it's not, you know, it's not like, it's not like you really have to imagine, you know, imagine some kind of magic dust that's going to be sprinkled on the whole process for it to work.
(44:04):
You can see how the whole thing would tie step-by-step.
And I think, in fact, you know, in the last couple of weeks, they announced that they were delivering tracksuits and so on for Gym+Coffee.
So there is a retail use case in operation in the Dublin region.
And I think, you know, it is novel at the moment, but it really does feel like this is something that, if it could be made to work, and I think it can be made to work, that it could really be beneficial for everybody involved, and from the customer.
(44:37):
Funny when, when you talk to people, though - sorry, Ger - when you talk to people about it and say, oh, yeah, we're interviewing a guy who, who does drones, most people's initial reaction is this is gimmick.
And it was only when I think we sat down and spoke to him and he explained how the process works, how the process is scalable, that actually this is, we're not in gimmick territory here.
(45:05):
We're in really deliverable, scalable proposition territory.
And that is what I thought was most exciting about it.
Like, in fairness, you know, Bobby himself is a, he's a tech guy.
He's an engineer.
He is straight... as, as soon as there was a gap, he was straight into discussion of unit economics, the cost of the drones, the cost of service, the cost per, per flight, you know, so there was, there was a lot of information or a lot of...
(45:35):
He wasn't shy about getting into the numbers, you know, in terms of...
And it stacks.
That was the whole point of that was that it stacks.
As soon as there's like enough volume and volume can be created by one or multiple retailers.
It works really well for food because you've got locality, high frequency, high density.
(45:57):
But really, if, if you have, if you have these on shopping centres or you've got a retailer that's doing enough, then, then, then the unit economics actually work for this really, really well.
And that was something that I thought was particularly exciting.
It reminds me of the, something slightly, well, a slightly different angle, but, and a different sector...
(46:22):
But the, the Rocker, I think it was called, offering where you, where they took over a unit, a small unit with a small footprint in a shopping centre.
And they sold cars.
And the way that you buy the cars in shopping centres is you, you, you have the little swatches of the paint on the wall, so you can see what colour the car will be.
(46:44):
You choose from various interiors.
You can, you can use a tablet to do a bit of a customisation of your car.
And then importantly, you're buying the car on finance, so you're paying, like, €150 a month for the car.
And they, they moved, they moved the whole, let's say the, the focus of the industry, in some ways, from glass palaces on the outskirts of huge cities into shopping centres right in the middle of where everybody is.
(47:11):
And offered something that basically in the, in the minds of the consumer is similar to the decision over, let's say, buying a jacket or buying like a, a slightly more expensive pair of jeans.
So, you know, it was, it was like, not a super-expensive decision.
I'm going to spend €150 a month.
Everything that was there in front of me.
Most people really don't care about the exact specifications of the car.
(47:35):
They want a red one.
They want a black one.
They want the interior.
They want, like, a Bluetooth or whatever the case may be.
So, it kind of addressed what was most people's, you know, approach to thinking about how they would like to buy cars.
Addressed that.
And then even added in services so that when you, if you want to get the car serviced, you can go to the shopping centre where you bought it and park it up.
(47:59):
Somebody will take it away, service it while you're doing your shopping, and then you come back, and you load in your shopping and off you go again.
You know, it's, it's, it's that different.
You're twisting the prism.
You're looking at the problem from a different angle and you're adding in technology, you know, and you're coming, you're coming out the other end with a proposition that actually works and makes an awful lot of sense.
(48:22):
I think that's, that's interesting because I guess what that explains there is you can actually shift the perception of an industry or the way things are done.
And one of the things I've noticed the last couple of times I've been to China, we visited multiple shopping centres because, you know I love a shopping centre, and in every single one of them now that, that we visited and probably Opera Hills was the best example of this,
(48:52):
there were at least 10 car showrooms as you walk in.
Inside the shopping centre?
Yeah.
And the place that you now go to buy a new car is the shopping centre.
And if you had said that to somebody 10 years ago, that where would you go and look for a new car?
It wouldn't be inside a shopping centre.
(49:14):
So that shows that you can actually shift an entire, an entire market.
Now, as much as it pains me, Tesla were largely the, the pioneer of, of that in a lot of places, but, but everybody else has followed suit.
What's interesting though is, is that that can shift and, and in a similar way, you could, this could be a paradigm shift.
(49:37):
Right.
It's a really big one for delivery.
It's just that we're not used to seeing it that much.
And then in other places, like we talked about China there with him, that there is a model there and people are used to seeing drones.
So it's quite normal to have food delivered by a drone.
Also really, like the population density and, and all that kind of stuff.
(49:58):
But, but just really interesting.
And then the other bit from that was, was how he referenced regulators and how regulators are working with him.
Yeah.
I didn't get that since he was a massive fan, but he said...
Regulation has an advantage.
Yeah.
You'd wonder, you know, how much of it you have to say, you know, when you work with the regulators and rely on you...
(50:22):
I love the regulators.
He did sound genuine.
I'll put it, I'll put it, I'll put it that way.
And, you know, in the, in the kind of environment that you're in, like there's nothing worse than vague regulations.
I mean, it's a disaster.
You know, you spend a fortune trying to understand what you're supposed to do, potentially get it wrong, get into difficulty because you've gotten it wrong, with all the best will in the world.
(50:45):
And God knows we see an awful lot of that nowadays with various different things in compliance and so on.
So like a regulator that you can work with, that you, that will explain or try to work on your behalf, or not work on your behalf, but, but help you to understand what they're trying to do,
in that particular area where you've got these large machines flying overhead, over like densely populated cities, the regulation is going to be critical.
(51:09):
And you've obviously, you're in flight paths potentially, or you're, you're, you know, there's, there's, there's other people sharing the, the airspace with you.
It's going to be really important.
And how brilliant that Ireland is in the lead with that.
That's, that, that's fantastic that they were actually at the forefront of it, given some of, even some of the challenges that are happening with capacity at Dublin Airport and some of the mean things that our largest domestic carrier says about the regulators on a frequent basis.
(51:44):
We shall mention no names, but that's, that, that, that was brilliant that you're able to work through that to actually make something quite innovative and really quite brilliant to happen.
Yeah, I think, I think I, I would imagine though Ireland, you know, we're a bit of a Goldilocks country in terms of being just about right for a lot of things that you might want to do in tech.
(52:08):
I think Bobby spoke previously about the difficulty of getting, let's say, capital here.
But outside of that, you know, the ability to work with the likes of Enterprise Ireland, with the, with the regulators, the access to, to talent, the ability to introduce something on a small scale and see if you can scale it up or grow it or whatever.
And do your test bed, test market, test piece and so on.
(52:30):
Ireland is great for that.
I mean, could you imagine, like, if you're trying to do this in LA, for example, immediately you'd have to contend with, like, police helicopters, you know?
You'd have to contend with all the news helicopters.
They love a news outpost being LA, don't they?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So like, I mean, whatever about other environmental considerations, you know, there is, there is, there's, it'd be interesting to see.
(52:51):
I mean, that's, that's obviously like there will be more and more use of the skies in the future.
So what that might look like is another question.
I also like the, the overall kind of attitude.
I love the attitude to building businesses.
You know, this idea of the, this is a decade-long business, you know, or this is a two decade-long, this is a 20-year business.
So when you think about it like that, you're, you're kind of think of your lifespan and say, well, if I'm into building businesses, a lot of people might be, you know, when you're looking at building a business, you say to yourself, okay, well, you know, you often kind of go, well, look, I'll start it up, it's very easy to start up a business in Ireland.
(53:25):
Start up the business, see how you get on with it, give it a couple of years, a month or, you know, sorry, give it a couple of years, see, see where you get to.
But his approach is to say, right, well, am I willing to put a decade of my life into this business?
And the Manna business, he calls a 20-year business.
So am I willing to put two decades of my life?
So that'll basically take him to close to the end of his working life, presumably, or maybe, you know, maybe he wants to live and work until he's 100.
(53:54):
But, you know, it's a, very serious investment and it's a great way of thinking.
I found it fascinating.
I'd love to hear more about it.
I mean, we didn't have time to get into a lot more detail on that sort of thing, but I thought it was really interesting.
The other part that kind of underlies that, let's say, overarching dedication to long-term time investment was the comment about, well, we've only done 200,000 deliveries.
(54:18):
It'll take 10 million deliveries to prove this out.
You know, I don't know how long it'll take them to get to the 10 million delivery part and they've been at it six years.
I'm sure that, you know, they'll speed up over time and all the rest of it, but it's interesting that it's really being thought about.
You know, it's like, how many deliveries do I have to make before this is actually definitely feasible, that I've tested the human economics of this, that I know for a fact what the costs are going to be, like how the humans have to be involved, and that I've tested different, let's say, different scenarios and all the rest of it.
(54:49):
So we've thought about all of this.
You haven't just done a couple of pilot, forgive the pun, test cases, and then said, yeah, great, okay, let's sell the business, you know.
You're trying to build up true, true value in the business by the nature of this, the scale of the work that you have done and the scale of the experience and that you have been at by the time you've completed those 10 million flights.
(55:12):
So it'd be very, very hard for anybody to catch up with them, I would say, by the time that they get to that.
There's certainly a market there for that volume.
Maybe not in Ireland, but if you think about the number of deliveries that are being done a day in the UK or the number of Amazon deliveries alone that are done in the US, there's volume there to prove the business case.
(55:33):
And I just think it's wonderfully exciting to be on the forefront and to see how that, and really to try and get an understanding and grab that understanding of how the proposition works.
And a number of pennies dropped for me there, and I'm sure it did for a lot of the other people that were listening in the audience.
It was certainly, to use your word, fascinating, but it feels very achievable.
(56:01):
And I really, really hope that they continue to scale and do this.
I would love to see Manna drones flying over Kilkenny.
In fact, I would love the idea of being able to get a delivery right now.
Coffee?
Anything.
Can you recommend something?
I just want to see.
(56:21):
Yeah, 100 per cent.
I thought it was an inspirational, in a quiet way, but an inspirational chat that we had.
And he did, the point was raised about pushing back at Amazon during the chat.
And like, truly, it seemed like that there was something there.
You know, it seemed like, okay, actually, there is something in here.
Potentially, there is a pushback that we can do.
(56:43):
You know, we are, the retail in Ireland, it is going to be a challenge.
I know, obviously, give them their due, Amazon are trying to offer to open up retail and open up, especially the ability to sell for DTC merchants and so on.
So we can't completely bash the whole proposition.
People in Ireland want it and so on, and we've got to move with the times.
But at the same time, from a retailer's perspective, you know, you would want to be in far more control of your own supply chain, et cetera.
(57:08):
And this, well, the chain of supply to the customer, but this potentially might give it to you.
So it was a really, really interesting, fascinating talk.
I thought it was inspirational.
And it was great to get him on.
So that's it, Gordon.
Done so.
Fantastic.
Okay, well...
Nothing more to say, so...
Thanks, Gordon.
And thanks to our producer, as usual, Roger Overall in this case. No Elaine this time around.
(57:33):
All sound, as you can hear, was done by us.
Which is why it'll probably be terrible.
Cheers Ger,
I'll see you soon.
Well, see you soon.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous, with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
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