LatPost 2.0

Complete overhaul of Latvian post with gig work and tamper bag.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the great revolutions and disruptions we have seen worldwide in a number of industries and fields in recent years. It was amazing to see that such a large (and perhaps often portrayed in a negative light) organization turned out to be so welcoming toward change and we want to take full advantage of that to eliminate everything that does not make sense and bring in the latest technologies while being inspired in large part by the great initiatives already undertaken under the leadership of Raitis Sturmanis like the personal parcel lockers.

What it does

We enable a new generation of postal couriers that do not need to have a rigid work schedule or be only employed as a mail courier. Our technology and solution enables this job to be done as a side job in the now popular gig work manner. We will bring in new but proven technologies to supplement the existing value chain at strategic locations. This will allow us to enhance the synergy between the different constituent parts around the entire organization and even beyond it.

How we built it

We looked into solutions used abroad, new scientific discoveries, possibilities for interesting combinations, expert opinions, and leading criticisms, and the legal and health and safety landscape to ensure complete compliance and safety. In order to enable this paradigm shift we have turned to two main tech solutions. On the one hand we have made the receiving of packages a lot easier by both making it so you can share your schedule and location to enable completely seamless and dynamic delivery of packages. It works so well it seems like magic. We also have created a completely never before seen hardware solution with immense potential in both the postal sector and many others. A tamper evident bag that ensures incredibly effective deterrence and guaranteed tamper evidence and notification with a thought through design to ensure all possible attack vectors are considered.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was undoubtedly the freedom that we had to choose literally anything to solve the problems, hardships, and pain points currently faced by Latvian Post both Internally and with its external partners (including but not limited to the pre-existing and future customer bases). Many of the solutions we came up with turned out to already be planned by latvian post and as that we decided to put our focus towards other ideas. This was a great challenge but we were happy to fail fast and get amazingly rapid feedback from the Latvian Post representative. The requirements to ensure security, data privacy, legal compliance also proved challenging due to a lack of past experience. Since our solution processes client's calendar information as well as GPS location we had to make sure it was GDPR compliant. For this our solution follows GDPR article 6 (1)(b): processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the amazing progress we managed to make and our ability to adhere to great guiding principles despite the extreme time crunch we faced. We have already not only looked at pre-existing solutions and analyzed the problem but come up with solutions, validated them, gathered feedback, and made improvements continually in accordance with Agile principles of design. We managed a novel innovative physical product prototype along with the IT infrastructure to make it work wirelessly. This was combined with a map and calendar connection prototype and an amazing video to show it all off. We have also verified the extent of our technologies uses and identified that in our niche it has never been done before.

What we learned

It was an amazing learning experience. We have previously had merely limited experience with the logistics sector and with the baltic market (excluding our home country of Estonia of course). We learned a lot about the practical hardships faced by national postal operators and acquired a real world view of package management and shipping.

What's next for LtPst 2.0

The next steps are going beyond our currently limited-scale testing to move on to a full-scale test done in a staggered manner with a gradual rollout that enables us to make for rapid closed feedback loops to integrate the feedback we gather based on key KPI-s. In more specific terms we are really excited about the opportunities for our novel technology application based on a tamper detecting mesh integrated into a fabric for use in the protection of sensitive materials and personal belongings that require securing in a light weight, portable and modern manner. We are definitely planning to continue with this idea and the boost from winning Codex 2022 would give us the initial boost we need to get this thing off the ground really quick and to actually start the next unicorn. Having been to many startups before a lot of teams create prototypes or come up with ideas but we are about to revolutionize an industry.

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