I’ve forgotten birthdays too. More than once or twice. My phone calendar reminds me in time, but between a meeting, a flight and ten messages, the notification gets lost. Then comes the moment everyone knows: it’s evening, it’s someone’s special day and you have nothing in hand. What do you do? A nice message, a promise that “the gift is on its way” and a faint sense of guilt.
This month we launched Joylo, an app for fast gift delivery. The ambition is easy to state and hard to pull off: to be the first quick-delivery app dedicated to gifts. I want to explain why we started it, what I think makes it different and, just as honestly, what could stop us from succeeding.
The problem: the gift arrives late, or not at all
If you think about it, people don’t buy gifts a month in advance. Most decide on the last day, sometimes in the last hour. Not for lack of affection, but because life is busy. And today’s solutions aren’t built for that person.
You order a gift online and wait a few days. For an anniversary tomorrow, that’s too late. Meanwhile, quick-commerce apps have taught big cities to expect groceries in minutes. You can get a carton of milk faster than a nicely wrapped book for your mother. That looked to me like an obvious gap: we have speed for everyday shopping, but not for the moments that matter.
Why arriving on time matters
A gift isn’t just an object. It’s a message: I thought of you. And that message has an expiry date. The same gift arriving three days late says something different from one that shows up on the right day. Sometimes it even says “I forgot, but I’m making up for it”.
What convinced me to build Joylo is exactly that emotional value of being on time. When someone gets a present on their actual birthday, they don’t think about logistics. They think about you. That’s what we want to make possible, including for those who remembered late.
A gift is not a bag of groceries
This is the part many people underestimate. It’s tempting to say: “Let’s take the quick-commerce model and put gifts on the shelf.” It doesn’t work like that. A gift has completely different requirements from a grocery order:
- Curation. Nobody wants to pick from a thousand products when they’re in a hurry. They want a few good options, chosen by someone who knows what they’re doing.
- Presentation. The wrapping is part of the gift. A box dropped in a plastic bag isn’t a present, it’s a delivery.
- A personal message. A note written for that particular person sometimes matters more than the object itself.
- Quality. A slightly bruised tomato is annoying. A damaged gift is embarrassing.
All of this takes time, and we’re promising speed. The tension between the two is really the whole challenge of the project.
What I bring from the early days of e-commerce
This isn’t my first encounter with online retail. In 2005 I launched MarketOnline, an online store, at a time when many Romanians still didn’t trust paying on the internet. In 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, I founded Floria, an online florist. Flowers are probably the closest relative of the fast gift: they’re often ordered at the last minute, it matters enormously that they arrive on the right day, and they look bad if they aren’t arranged with care.
I learned something else back then: trust is hard to earn and can be lost with a single failed order. A customer who gets wilted flowers on his wife’s birthday won’t come back, whatever discount you offer. I played with ideas about how I’d start an online business today in a piece on starting an online store from scratch, and we’re applying some of them now.
Then there’s the app side. I’ve been through building an app from scratch with Slide, a dating app with real people, and I once wrote about what it really costs to launch a mobile app. The conclusion hasn’t changed: launching is the easy part. What comes after is the hard bit.
The challenges, stated plainly
I don’t want to sell a dream. Fast delivery is one of the hardest businesses online, and we’ve picked an even more complicated version of it. Here’s what keeps me up at night:
- Logistics and unit economics. Delivering fast is expensive. Every order has to cover the product, the wrapping and the transport, otherwise you’re just growing in order to lose more.
- Stock and curation. You need exactly what people want close at hand, without ending up with shelves full of things nobody buys.
- Predictable peaks. Valentine’s Day, 1 March (Martisor, the Romanian spring tradition of small tokens) and 8 March (Women’s Day, a big gift day in Romania), Christmas. You know exactly when they come, but that doesn’t make them easier. Demand can multiply overnight, and customers in a rush are the least patient ones.
- Trust. People hand you an important moment. If you get it wrong, you don’t just lose an order, you lose someone who will tell others about it.
What quick commerce taught us before we even started
Over the past few years I’ve watched the ultra-fast delivery sector closely. Many companies around the world grew spectacularly, raised big rounds and burned cash at a pace that was hard to sustain. Some disappeared, others shrank or were acquired. The lesson for me is clear: growth speed means nothing if every order costs you more than it brings in.
That’s why I want Joylo to grow healthily, not loudly. To learn from every order, to look at the numbers before we look at headlines, and not to promise more than we can deliver. I’d rather have a smaller app that works flawlessly than a big one that disappoints.
An invitation, not an announcement
We’re at the beginning. There will certainly be things to fix, products to change and processes to improve. That’s exactly why I need the people who actually use the app. If you’ve ever been caught at the last minute without a gift, try Joylo and tell me honestly what worked and what didn’t. Critical feedback helps me more than praise.
And a question for you: what was the most last-minute gift you’ve ever given, and what would have saved you back then?