How do you deliver mail to someone with no fixed address?

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Ulaanbaatar: Chris Sheldrick was used to everyone getting lost.

On his farm in rural Hertfordshire in England in the 1990s, police struggled to find the right gate after a break-in.

what3words founder Chris Sheldrick in Ulaanbaatar.Credit: Sanghee Liu

“I grew up in an environment where addresses didn’t take you to the right place,” he says.

“In Australia, when I lived there for a while, I went to Alice Springs and stayed with a family where the husband was a Flying Doctor. They had to communicate the location of where someone needed an air ambulance very, very quickly.”

Often, they would lose precious minutes as dispatchers battled to pin down where the patient was located in areas without addresses or clear landmarks.

In his 20s when he started booking gigs in London, the band and the gear were regularly being dropped off at the wrong place.

“I was running a music business, just getting musicians to events, and it was them getting lost which, I think, was the driver to push me to do this,” he says.

Frustrated by centuries-old postal systems and complicated GPS coordinates, Sheldrick and his two friends – Mohan Ganesalingam a mathematician at Cambridge University, and Jack Waley-Cohen, a linguist – developed a system that would carve up the world into three-metre squares.

Now it is being used to deliver mail to nomadic herders in Mongolia, direct taxis in the labyrinth streets of Japan and mark the locations of walkers around Sydney harbour.

Each three-metre square is defined by three words: A picnic spot on Cockatoo Island? “themes.films.grows”. A stall inside Queen Victoria Market? “blunt.shine.aims”. Wandered just off the Three Sisters walking track in the Blue Mountains? “pooches.throwing.churn”.

“Let’s say the Japanese version, we put the easiest Japanese words in Japan, and the more complicated Japanese words in the Brazilian rainforest, where there are not many Japanese speakers,” says Sheldrick.

The company’s system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words, making it possible to navigate any point on the surface. The tool has become a household name in densely populated cities like London, where deliveries can be sent to exact three-metre locations in crowded apartment and office blocks, and is growing in Tokyo, where a bedlam of streets and an unwieldy address system have long made navigation difficult.

But in sparsely populated countries like Mongolia where entire neighbourhoods often do not have street names and up to a third of the population is nomadic, What3words is transforming access to the global economy.

“Things are very directionally based in Mongolia. If you go out outside the middle of Ulaanbaatar, then people will just write on an envelope a series of directions to get somewhere,” says Sheldrick.

“Often the only way to get around is to call me when you’re near and I’ll guide you through a series of landmarks.”

Mail delivered by what3words in Mongolia. 

To post deliveries in Mongolia, an address is no longer needed – just three words that correspond to those three square metres.

In the Taiga snow forest, 26 hours north of Ulaanbaatar, reindeer herders Zorigt and Otgonbayar follow the movements of their herd every few weeks.

Their life is defined by finding the best shelter to get through brutal winters where temperatures can drop as low as -28 degrees. Now the couple have a side hustle to supplement their incomes during summer. It is the most remote Airbnb in the world.

Reindeer herders Zorigt and his wife Otgonbayar run an AirBnB in remote Mongolia.

“We love hosting people,” says Zorigt. “Tourists discover the area and learn about life here.”

Each time herders move their ger, also known as a yurt, they update the listing with the three words for their location.

“I can definitely say we did not have that [one on the cards],” says Sheldrick. “I mean, I know Australia is vast…but this was vast.”

A reindeer in northern Mongolia.

Increasingly, emergency services in Australia are asking people in distress to use three words to describe their location. At Wanda Beach near Cronulla, surfers will walk past a sign that tells them to quote “placed.shiny.necks” in an emergency.

When Matty Askew’s mum Pamela collapsed with chest pains in Huskisson on the NSW South Coast in April, the 51-year-old struggled to define where they were in the middle of a thousand Anzac Day revellers.

“I tried describing where we were, but the operator who picked up the phone was based in Sydney, over 200 km away, so she had no local knowledge and couldn’t pinpoint our exact location,” he says.

The three words: driveways.stably.outdoors directed paramedics to where she was battling a heart infection.

what3words allows users to pinpoint their location to three square metres.

“That stuff is very powerful,” says Shedrick, who does not charge emergency services for the services. “Because I don’t think your mind immediately goes to oh, my God every day you’re going to see those kinds of real-life stories coming in. But it is great to see that our tech is being used in that way.”

Fresh out of university, Sheldrick and his friends did not envision a future linking up reindeer herders in Mongolia, bushwalkers in Sydney or commuters in Tokyo with three-word squares.

Sheldrick had his sights set on a career as a classical musician, including a stint at Barker College in Sydney’s north where taught bassoon. Then he punched his hand through a glass window while sleepwalking. He holds up two of his fingers that have since stopped working. That was the end of that.

“Funnily enough, I [recently] gave a speech at my old university and I literally said one month after graduating as a music performer, I had this injury and everyone was like, ‘oh my gosh’,” he says. “But yeah, I think in retrospect, it was fate.”

Sheldrick’s optimism masks the reality that What3words faces ongoing threats to its business model from the world’s largest tech companies and after a decade of operations, is still leaking cash.

In May, it reduced its losses from £43.3 million ($83 million) in 2021 to £31.5 million ($60 million) in 2022, UK after a $10 million crowdfunding campaign last year.

It generates money by charging businesses to integrate their services into their websites. The three words are turned into GPS code through the system, which is still needed by most location services around the world.

“The company continues to invest in research and development activities, including the development of new product concepts and integrations for commercial partners and consumer users,” the company said in a statement accompanying its annual results in May.

More than 20 companies have tried to create alphanumeric codes for deliveries, including Google, but few have caught on, mainly because they are easily forgettable as addresses. In an emergency, pinning your location, finding your raw GPS coordinates and sharing them in Google Maps can be both time-consuming and clunky.

what3words in the Northern Territory.

So can What3words make real money?

“The next year is about international replication. So in the UK, we’re a household name, very well known. The task at hand is to replicate that in several countries simultaneously,” says Sheldrick.

“I think we’re just on the cusp with drone delivery. Royal Mail [Britain’s national mail] provider has committed to using all three words for drone delivery, and they are doing that on some Scottish Islands at the moment.”

What3words long-term success will hinge on whether it can achieve one goal: to change the way people think.

“We have to get into the minds of the population,” he says. “We just have to change behaviour from what they did yesterday to using three words.”

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