Last updated 1 November 2026
Most last-mile delivery in a growing East African city runs on a blind spot. There is no common reference point between the three people involved — the sender, the runner in the middle, and the person receiving the parcel. Nothing any of them can check that the other two can check too.
Technology has not fixed this by itself. There are more ways than ever to move a parcel across Nairobi: people on foot running errands, cyclists on bikes and e-bikes, riders on boda bodas, cars. The pattern between sender and receiver has not changed with any of them. It is still a manual system, and it still takes about six phone calls.
- The sender calls the receiver.
- The sender calls around to find a runner.
- The runner calls the sender for collection directions.
- The runner calls the receiver at the start of the trip.
- The receiver calls the sender to confirm the parcel left.
- The receiver calls the runner, who is somewhere on the road.
Six calls, all of them asking a question that a shared record would have answered. That is productive time, spent on nothing.
Two messages instead
When a parcel is sent through Pinned, both the sender and the receiver get a message. It contains a link that never changes. Whenever either of them wants to know where the parcel is, they follow it.
Because the link is a web page, there is nothing to install for a parcel you will receive once. And because both sides see the same page, nobody is relaying information to anybody. The point of the link is not to manage expectations — it is to remove the need for the relay, with each stage timestamped as it happens.
The other thing that stalls a handover
The second thing that paralyses a simple pick-and-drop is identifying the right person at the end of it.
In an ordinary arrangement, verification is improvised and personal. People describe what they are wearing or where they are standing, which is often wildly misleading and tends to end in somebody saying you do not understand me. Identification alone can take a quarter of an hour at each end — half an hour lost on one trip. And where a business is dispatching more than one parcel at a time, there is a real chance of the wrong parcel reaching the wrong person, or the wrong runner leaving with it.
A handover code settles it. When a parcel is sent, a six-digit code reaches the receiver once, by SMS, whether they are expecting it at their door or collecting it from a Pod. At a Pod it opens the compartment. At a door, the runner can only close the trip when the code they are given matches, which means the person in front of them is the person the parcel was addressed to. It records the change of custody, and both the sender and the receiver see it happen.
Why a Pod is sometimes the better option
Missed deliveries are an ordinary fact of a working week, and they cost time nobody budgeted.
Consider something ordered for the house rather than the office — home gym equipment or an accessory from a supplier like smartplyconnect.com, a travel wash bag, an indoor game, anything whose whole purpose lives at home. It has to be received at home, and you have to be at work. The delivery hangs in limbo.
Pods exist for that gap. They sit at filling stations on the way home, in supermarket car parks, at hospitals and malls — places you pass anyway — and they hold the parcel until you get there. You collect it with your code. And if even that does not fit your week, you can turn the collection into a door delivery from the tracking page instead.
Storage costs nothing for the whole collection window. You are charged only if the parcel stays past it, and reminders go out at sensible intervals before that happens.