Try Free Request demo

Launching a national courier in 90 days: the FAN Moldova story

In April 2021, the leadership team at FAN Courier — Romania’s number-one courier company since 2006 — started a conversation about expanding into Moldova as a fully-owned subsidiary. By late September the contract was signed. By November the operation was live, processing parcels at national coverage, with linehaul, hubs, COD, and a partner bridge to FAN Romania running in production.

Under three months from contract to country-wide operations.

The launch was led by Luigi Vendrami, who served as CEO of FAN Moldova through the first phase. He’s since moved on, on good terms, and is open to speaking with prospects who want to ask the unfiltered version of what follows. (FAN Moldova has, since launch, grown to 100,000+ shipments per month and roughly 20% market share, with leadership ambitions in the 35% range. None of that was guaranteed in November 2021.)

What follows is what they scoped in, what they deferred, and what surprised them.

What had to be live on day one

A national courier operation isn’t an MVP. The shipper clients don’t care that you launched yesterday — they care that the parcel they handed you arrives tomorrow. The day-one scope, therefore, had to cover the entire operational chain end to end:

  • Last mile — courier app, route assignment, proof of delivery, COD collection
  • Linehaul — hub-to-hub batching, trip management, handoff between linehaul drivers and last-mile couriers
  • Central hub operations — receipt, sorting, dispatch
  • Partner integration — API bridge to FAN Romania for cross-border shipments
  • Subcontractor management — local subcontractor companies operationally embedded but financially separate, with commission tracking
  • Client self-service — a portal for shipper clients to create shipments, get status updates, and view their settlements
  • COD lifecycle — collection, reconciliation, settlement to client, payout
  • Pricing engine and invoicing — per-client pricing rules, automated invoicing, financial closing

Everything except local accounting (Moldova-specific tax) and HR/payroll ran on CourierManager from day one.

What they deferred

The list of features that didn’t make the cut for the November launch is, retrospectively, as informative as the list that did:

  • Custom analytics dashboards — operations ran on the standard reporting set; bespoke executive views came in 2022.
  • Mobile app for shipper clients — the web portal was sufficient for launch. Mobile followed once usage justified it.
  • Some partner integrations — the FAN Romania bridge was day-one critical. Other partner integrations were added incrementally as volume justified the work.
  • Bespoke financial workflows — the platform’s standard COD and settlement flows were used as-is. Custom workflows came after the team had run the standard flows for two months and knew which edge cases they actually had.

The pattern: anything that was operationally critical shipped on day one. Anything that was strategically valuable but not blocking shipped in the months that followed. The deferred items shipped with much higher confidence because by then the operation had real volume to validate against.

What the first 1,000 shipments taught them

Three things, in order of importance:

The subcontractor commission flow needed tightening. Local subcontractors used the same courier app as FAN Moldova employees, but the commission calculation and statement format had been specified abstractly during scoping. Within the first two weeks of real volume, edge cases surfaced — partial deliveries, COD discrepancies that resolved later, subcontractor handoffs mid-shift — that the original spec hadn’t covered. The platform was flexible enough to absorb the changes; the lesson was that “we’ll figure out the commission flow once we see real cases” turned out to be the right call.

Partner-bridge timing was tighter than expected. Cross-border shipments between FAN Moldova and FAN Romania had to clear customs and hit the partner system within specific windows or they’d bounce. The integration handled this, but operations needed visibility into which shipments were approaching the deadline. A status filter that hadn’t been in the launch scope was added in week three and stayed.

Client onboarding was the slowest part. Not technical — operational. Each new shipper client meant a pricing setup, a portal account, an AWB series allocation, and a billing configuration. By month two the team had templated the configuration and reduced new-client setup from a half-day to under an hour. None of that was technology; all of it was process learned from doing.

What’s transferable to anyone running this playbook

The FAN Moldova launch is unusual mostly because of the speed. But the constraints aren’t unusual:

  • A new market requires complete operational capability on day one
  • A subsidiary needs to be financially distinct from the parent
  • Cross-border partner integrations are a launch dependency, not a phase-two
  • Subcontractor flexibility — local companies operationally embedded, financially separate — is the norm, not the exception
  • The first 90 days of real volume teach things that no scoping document captures

For prospects considering a similar launch — whether it’s a new country, a new operating company under a holding group, or a courier brand spinning up from a freight or retail parent — the FAN Moldova playbook is reusable. The platform that handled it then is the platform we run today.

Planning a launch like this? See the new-market-launch page → for the playbook in detail. Or book a call and we’ll walk through the FAN Moldova timeline against your shape — Luigi is available as a reference if you want unfiltered context from the operator side.