When Ben Jackson was a student at Kansas State University in 2014, four people asked him to borrow his pickup truck in one day.
“Now, I’d consider myself a pretty nice guy,” Jackson said. “But I was pretty frustrated.”
The next day in his business class, he shared the dilemma to fellow student Harrison Proffitt, who he said he hardly knew at the time. Jackson’s idea: an app for on-demand pickup trucks. Jackson and Proffitt began brainstorming.
“We walked out of class that day with one thing in mind: tap a button, get a truck,” Proffitt said.
The idea has blossomed from a Kansas State classroom whisper to a business that’s hit seven major U.S. cities in three years since launching in Kansas City.
The app, called Bungii, works in a similar way as ride app companies Uber and Lyft. Customers needing a truck to move a dresser to a friend’s house or get their new bed home from Ikea request a driver through the Bungii app. The vetted and trained Bungii driver then meets the customer, picks up the item and delivers it to the designated location.
As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones with the idea. Similar apps, such as Dolly, GoShare and Lugg, also emerged in recent years. But none has a presence in the Kansas City area like Bungii does.
The name came after Proffitt tossed a bungee cord to Jackson during a delivery. The cords are “reliable, flexible and low in cost,” Jackson said, which reflects the goals of the company. The alternate spelling was because of the available domain name and social handles.
After thinking of the idea, Jackson and Proffitt spent a summer testing the concept on their own, using email and Facebook messenger to receive moving requests, Proffitt said. By themselves, they completed over 350 delivery requests in Manhattan, Kansas.
“It was a sweaty summer to say the least,” Proffitt said. “But we were able to take the data and the statistics of who was using us, when they were using us and what they were moving and translate that over to a Kansas City market size to show the potential revenue and the potential success.”
After a quarter of a million dollar investment from a private investor, the app was able to launch in Kansas City in the beginning of 2017, Proffitt said. The company has since received over $3 million in investments.
Atlanta launched eight months after Kansas City, Washington, D.C., six months after that, Baltimore four months after that and South Florida, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, two months after that.
Bungii launched in Nashville earlier this month, nearly two months after the Chicago launch in April.
Bungii has seen a 499% growth in revenue from 2017 to 2018 and is on track for a 400% growth in revenue from 2018 to 2019, Jackson said.
Jackson and Proffitt, both 27, hope Bungii can make its customers’ lives a little easier. And the startup’s growth shows most of its customers think so, too.
One customer wrote on Facebook that Bungii is an “amazing app that turned a stressful moment into an easy move.”
Overland Park customer Melissa Girdner used Bungii for the first time recently to move a couch from an estate sale to her house. She said she would definitely use the app again.
The seven launches in two and a half years have been a whirlwind for the company. Trying to remember the exact date of the Chicago launch, Proffitt laughed and said all the launch dates were “bleeding together.”
Bungii usually looks for expansion opportunities in cities where there is a population of at least 2 million and Google search queries of moving vans or trucks are high.
One of the biggest challenges the company has run into with its launches is the initial balancing of number of delivery requests with the number of available drivers, Proffitt said.
“When demand is a little bit inconsistent, we see driver turnover. When you don’t have drivers, then customers aren’t getting connected, and that’s a problem,” Proffitt said. “The constant balancing act of bringing supply and demand up together is and probably will continue to be our toughest challenge as we launch these cities.”
Proffitt said it usually takes about two months for the supply to match the demand.
Josh Camacho, vice president of operations, said Bungii uses a lot of Facebook ads to attract drivers. But, when the company launches in a new city, team members go to fire and police stations to recruit people.
Firefighters and police officers’ schedules often follow a 48-hour on and 48-hour off pattern, Camacho said. Also people in those professions often drive a pickup truck.
Drivers typically get about $30 per trip, which includes labor costs, and often an additional 15% tip, Camacho said.
Kansas City driver Kenneth King, 38, said he has been driving for Bungii for two years. He picked up rides while being a full-time student at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, where he just graduated.
He said he heard about the app while searching online for jobs in moving companies. He described finding Bungii as “a blessing.”
“I actually love it,” he said.
This story was originally published June 25, 2019 5:49 PM.