HeroEx / Blog

ARE YOU LISTENING?! Recording artist Radiant Amar’s song for Haiti, “I Send My Heart to Haiti”, was just released. As you may know, his brother Hasaun Muhammad has accompanied Wyclef Jean for several days at a time since earthquakes ravaged Haiti on January 12.

Jerry Wonder (The Fugees) praises Radiant Amar: “His sound is where hip-hop is heading.”

Radiant Amar has partnered with Knowlove and a group of powerful 1st graders from Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School to record “I Send My Heart to Haiti”.

Please support the tireless, heartfelt efforts of my friends in their efforts to support Wyclef Jean’s Yéle Haiti Foundation by downloading this song and donating a minimum of $1.

TI, Radiant Amar, and Hasaun Muhammad in Houston

Download “I Send My Heart to Haiti” here.

Radiant Amar is a friend and personal muse of mine: his unique brand of social entrepreneurship is backed by his smooth vocals. During his childhood, he saw the bad side of violence, drugs, and gangs – and chose to do something about it. Radiant founded the C.H.A.N.G.E. Initiative, and has partnered with Russell Simmons, T.I., Rev. Al Sharpton, and others to encourage people, regardless of their age, race, class or creed, to become agents of positive social change. Radiant isn’t just a musical talent but a giving soul who is focused on change as a way of life and thought pattern for future-focused young people. I have seen fellow social-cause oriented young leaders of our generation gravitate towards Radiant as a voice of inspiration, a visionary, and a catalyst – he is a true hero.

HeroEx, which promotes social entrepreneurship by giving part-time delivery opportunities to disadvantaged and unemployed members of the San Francisco community, is proud to support unique and talented social entrepreneurs like Radiant Amar.

HeroEx has officially entered the competitive delivery space dominated by FedEx, UPS, and USPS.

These Delivery Dinosaurs are inefficient, risky, and overcharge their customers. Due to their complex logistics infrastructures and physical warehouses, they often take 3-5 days to deliver a package from a store that is located 2 miles away. We the consumers are sick and tired of missing packages while we’re at work or out of town.

This package waiting process reminds me of the pre-cell phone era: we were constricted to landlines and pay phones before we had cell phones. Hey FedEx, UPS, and USPS: We have better things to do than wait at home.

Unfortunately, UPS has 70% of the U.S. ground shipping market. Together with FedEx and USPS, they control nearly all of the package delivery business in the U.S.

The only other alternative you have is expensive courier services which charge an average of $25-100 to deliver small packages in under 1 hour across a small city like San Francisco.

Here’s how HeroEx works: Buy almost any item that is locally available through our website, at market cost including sales tax. Then schedule your delivery, at a price of only $9 for standard orders and $12 for custom items that are not listed on our site. A Delivery Hero will bring the item to your doorstep in 1 hour or less, and we communicate with you during the process. You can order groceries, restaurant orders, lingerie, computer parts, office supplies, books, clothing, and almost anything else that you can describe, as long as it’s under 25 lbs. Pajama Entrepreneur described how they recommend using our service in an article yesterday.

We also crowdsource our Delivery Heroes from the community and do a thorough background check of every Delivery Hero. We communicate with you via emails, text messages, and/or phone calls during the delivery. We are high touch and high tech.

In other words, we are ethical, fast, and go out of our way to ensure that you know exactly what is going on with your delivery. FedEx, UPS, and USPS may never be able to offer the level of service that we offer.

We released the following ad today:

FedEx, UPS, and USPS are outdated and don’t speak to a younger generation of consumers that is tech savvy, educated, does not have time to waste, and is on the cusp of the latest trends. HeroEx is not only led by management that is part of this generation (including myself as CEO), but is entirely aligned towards serving this generation of consumers.

We believe that consumers will spend more online than they do now (an average of $75-$100 per E-commerce transaction) as they begin to adopt local delivery like ours as the preferred medium of package delivery.

Now is our time to demonstrate what the speed of consumer business can really be. We will continue to lead the important real-time services movement by putting our stake firmly in the ground with E-commerce and Deliveries.

Do you also have a need for safer, faster deliveries? Order through our website and give us feedback. Join our Facebook page, and follow our blog and our Twitter. Make sure to tell your friends. As we grow our business, we will expand our hours of operation, which are currently 5pm-10pm.

We are also recruiting fearless supertalents to our cause, so please help us find: Delivery Heroes to help us deliver packages (we pay $8-24 per hour), a Marketing Supergenius, and a Superstar Intern.

Get in touch with us: marissa@heroex.com or (347) 948-HERO.

HeroEx brings it to YOU first:

Here’s a sneak peek of Jason Derulo shooting the new music video for his hit song “In My Head” in Van Nuys, California. “In My Head” debuted at #63 on the Billboard Hot 100, but the music vid hasn’t dropped yet.

He recently shot it on location in front of a Circle K owned by my college friend Frank Ahn. (Frank’s in the video too).

Jason Derulo’s got the moves, check it out:

And if you’re in Van Nuys, swing by Frank Ahn’s famous Circle K on 16056 Sherman Way. Just drop my name, and he’ll hook you up. (Did you know that Frank and I had our own party promotion group called “In Da Club” in college?)

Want more Jason Derulo? He’s on tour with Lady Gaga and you can win tickets here:

Keep your eyes locked on HeroEx as we continue to deliver the good stuff like this all year long.

Lawrence Coburn, the CEO of RateItAll (the premier consumer review website), tried out HeroEx and went on record with a review of his own:

“I’ve used them once (for some batteries for a wireless keyboard), and the service was awesome.”

Read the rest of his review here, and please add your own.

Lawrence Coburn (RateItAll) and Lilia Martinez-Coburn (TownHog)

Thanks, guys!

Just before we hit 2010, Violet Blue (San Francisco Chronicle) released her top 10 sexy geeks 2010.

She describes our CEO Marissa as “firey, effervescent, and gorgeous.”

Check it out here! The news was also picked up by Laughing Squid, Aston Martin News, Serpica Naro, and others.

Keep watching as Marissa stirs up controversy, conversation, music videos, and a media storm in 2010!

For some of us, Christmas consisted of kissing under the mistletoe, drinking spiked eggnog, and getting presents which would probably sit around and collect dust.

Did Santa give you something you didn’t want for Christmas? Even if you were a bad kid this year and deserved the bad present:

HeroEx will help you return it if you have the gift receipt.

Through January 5th 2010, we will help you return your Christmas gifts if you’ve kept the gift receipt, and if the store gives cashback on returns. Or if the store has an exchange-only policy and you know what you’d like to exchange your gift for, we can handle that too. We will make sure to reconcile the difference between the price of the old item and the new item.

We’re doing gift returns for just $12 – that’s the same price as our 1 hour custom deliveries.

All you need to do is order as if you were requesting a custom delivery, and make sure to tell us if you have your gift receipt – just go here.

(Our PR goddess, Marivic Valencia, gave her 4 year old daughter a Husky puppy for Christmas - this is one of the few Christmas gifts we can't return )

BOOM, here it is. The alpha version of HeroEx (short for Hero Express), just in time for Christmas.

HeroEx is crowdsourced local express delivery. Think: FedEx meets Amazon Mechanical Turk.

You can buy almost anything you like and we will deliver it in under 1 hour. Right now, delivery prices are $9-12. The first test market we are making this available in is San Francisco.

If you buy things online but hate waiting for days to receive them, you’re going to really like what we have in store. If you think FedEx, UPS, and USPS are way too slow, you’re right – and you shouldn’t have to put up with it.

At HeroEx, you buy items from our storefront at the price you would normally pay, plus a small fee for delivery. We’re able to keep delivery costs low because we source Delivery Heroes from the community, and we have no warehouses. Jack in the Box says, “We don’t make it til you order it,” but HeroEx says, “We don’t buy it til you order it.”

Here’s what some of our friends are saying about HeroEx:

“Weirdly neat idea!” -Philip Kaplan, Founder of Blippy, AdBrite, and Fuckedcompany

“We were just sitting in a meeting and the batteries for our wireless keyboard ran out.  Who can save us?  HeroEx!” -Lawrence Coburn, CEO of RateItAll

Where do you come in? Help us improve our service by making your first order – choose anything you’d like us to deliver, and tell all your friends about your new secret weapon.

–

Marissa Louie, Founder and CEO of HeroEx

marissa@heroex.com