YouSaid · the spoken record

Laura Behrens Wu

lines on the record: 45
first: 2020-10-29
most recent: 2020-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Internship job at Lendev. None of this could have happened if it wasn't for that really friendly forward of the email. Yeah, a great taste of how open-minded the network in San Francisco is around introductions. In Europe, it's much more tight-knit. They don't want to let you in as easily. While in Silicon Valley, I've repeatedly just experienced people being really kind about opening up their networks for me.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that comes to my mind immediately that is work related, which is before I came to San Francisco, to internet Lendup, I was actually looking around for quite a while by myself to see if there are any internship opportunities that I could find. I was using Angelist for that mostly. Didn't get any responses at all. I was already starting to just accept that I wouldn't be able to come see San Francisco and work for a startup here, by chance ran into someone at a tech conference who happened to be a YC founder. It was in Zurich in Europe, chatted with him over coffee, shared on the site that I'm trying to find an internship job in San Francisco. He just offered to forward my resume to the YC mailing list. He didn't know me. We only just met. Dad emailed that he forwarded for me. I think it got me roughly 27 responses, ended up with my”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I look at Stripe and Tulio, like two companies that are very similar, Stripe Connect, Stripe Relay, Stripe Atlas, they're fraud detection tool. Or Tolio has a bunch of separate product lines as well. How do we make sure that we can make that next step in the evolution? And also I'm wondering what's up that no other shipping software company before us has been able to make that step. So maybe there is something that I don't know yet that's making this particularly hard. I'm optimistic. This is really not rocket science. How come no one else has been able to make that a shift?”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've only scratched a surface. I don't want to downplay it because we've done a lot. But up until now, we're really just offering a very simple product to our customers, which is we give them shipping labels in a straightforward fashion. As we're thinking about what's next, the majority of our competitors, all of our competitors, they're making revenue by mostly this arbitrage model of the shipping discounts. How do we turn this really into much more of a software platform? And again, not saying that we're not a software company today, we are, but how do we generate more software revenue by creating more value to our customers and creating more high margin products for our customers that were reselling shipping rates and shipping label arbitrage can always be the foundation of our platform and is an awesome foundation to have as we grow up? How do we make sure that we start building almost standalone products?”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one trend that I've been investigating, but I just love so much. I love farmers. I love the disruption of the supply chain. Instead of consumers buying farm products or produce in grocery stores, I'm seeing the trend of farmers becoming direct to consumer as well and just letting consumers order from their own websites. Waigu beef, I've ordered purple potatoes from Hawaii. You can order just a ton of produce on the internet, get higher quality, get it delivered to your door, sometimes cheaper than buying it from the grocery store. Bypassing the grocer has been an interesting trend and farmers moving online becoming a dire to consumer model.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people, when they're getting started with an e commerce business, they're mostly thinking about when an order comes in, how do I make sure that this order arrives at the consumer's doorstep? That's the part about where you print out a shipping label, put it in a box, make sure that it goes to the carrier and it's on its way. What we've been realizing over the course of the last four or five years is that shipping comes in much earlier than when a merchant actually needs to put a label on the box. Even before a consumer chooses to buy at your store, they're looking at how much is shipping, shipping free, is there a free shipping threshold? And consumers might not even buy with you unless they're seeing the right shipping options at checkout or on the website. Most merchants think about shipping coming in after purchase. What's needed is a change in perception. Like shipping comes in even before a purchase is being made. And again, this is something that's taught to us.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking to friends the other day, and I think Stripe as an example, they're only selling to people who know what an API is. And then you've got a different company like Square selling to S&Bs and mom and pop businesses that need an interface. And we are trying to do both at once. I think the upside here is how we've tried to minimize overhead is that our dashboard is built on top of the API is basically a client of the API. So these are not two different products. But I think we are completely right. As we're talking about prioritization day to day in our company, this is the hardest to prioritize from a product dev perspective.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the hardest question, and I think operationally, it is an insanely hard question. Because what we're looking at is that roughly 80% of our customers, just the amount of our customers, they're using the dashboard. Together, they're only shipping 20% of our shipping volume. And then 20% of our customers are using the API, doing 80%.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was fine as an individual contributor early on. I think as the companies at this scale, there are much better executors that are able to figure out how to do this at the size of the business we're at right now. Yeah, spent a lot of time this year hiring just people who've been there and done that.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in terms of character persistence is an underrated superpower and it sounds gritty and it is gritty but I think could have given up a lot earlier. There were times in the business that weren't fun. They still come up, but there are also longer times in the business that weren't fun. And especially when starting a company, you just have to be so persistent in making sure that you get to early proof points, you get to people who believe in you enough to put money in. So persistence is a personal characteristic I really appreciate also in my team members. And then what my strengths are, again, I know more about what my weaknesses are and then have hired for those weaknesses. I'd say I'm more high level than in the detail. So when I'm hiring for people, I'm looking for people who can just at this point at least take the ideas that I have and turn them into execution. On the executing side,”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worst question is always what if Amazon dust is? It's the worst question because you can ask this to any company. You can ask it to any company out there. You could ask what if Amazon does this. The best question, it's Shippo specific, actually. I think there's always the question of what happens when our customers grow, when our customers grow and become big enough to be using a 3PL to even have their own warehouse when our shipping discounts might not be as relevant to them anymore compared to our technology advantages. How do we make sure that we don't have a leaky bucket with our best customers? That's a very good question, not because I have the best answer to it, because it's actually something to look out for in the future as we're growing to make sure that we don't have a leaky bucket at end.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not be an immediate death. It used to be running out of money, it's like a slow death when someone else comes up and has a better strategy. That's been interesting. I think for founders, at least for me, this was a hard transition to make, just getting out of firefighting and getting out of that mode. I still think we're a small company when in reality we're not that small of a company anymore.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a few investors have reminded me over the course of the years that it's important to figure this out and I've found this annoying when they kept reminding me but in hindsight I think is a good call out. Not a lot of time comes up for this kind of work because day to day it's not pressing. It's not as if I have a meeting where I need to have understood all of my flywheels and I can't go into this meeting without that. Seems to be nice to have given my daily schedule on my calendar. I'd have to deliberately carve out time to do that. And I think it's become not easier to do but maybe more important to do as we've got to be a larger business. Early on it was all about survival. It's been a very deliberate shift of mindset for me. I'm becoming aware we're not just going to die tomorrow. We're out of that phase. We will die if I don't spend time on making sure that we have our longer term strategy in place.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of trying to figure out our own shipping provider, there are things we can do with the carriers to help them optimize, to make sure that the right carrier is getting the right amount of packages for the capacity level that they're at.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the reason why, let's say, an Amazon or Walmart can have their own shipping infrastructure is because their pickup locations are very predictable. They know where their warehouses are. They know where to pick up from. Our customer base is spread all across the country. And we're working with more than, I think, 50,000 SMVs right now. So they're all across the US. We can't pick up from 50,000 different locations. So it's actually more cost effective to have other carriers do this. I think this is where it gets interesting around it's getting a little obscure, but if we compare this to, let's say, the airline industry, and the airline industry, we have dynamic pricing. So if the plane is full or about to get full, you're paying more than if the plane is half empty. On the shipping provider side, there is no dynamic pricing. Everyone's always paying the same for the same package. And I think where as we grow, instead of”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other one that we've been excited about for a really long time is the one around data, and I think this is now where a few companies, they get easier as they scale, as they grow, with our current scale, we're taken much more seriously by the different shipping providers than we were four or five years ago. This is easier for us now. And now that we've aggregated, all of that shipping data from our customers, I think we can build our product in ways that are more intelligent than we could do in the past. What I mean by that is we can start making recommendations to our customers around which shipping provider to choose, we can share with them benchmarks from the shipping industry that we see across the board. We can also tell them what shipping provider is seeing delays for very specific routes, for very specific service levels. So there is a lot of data driven optimization.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of things that you can plan, so I'm not trying to figure out the exact product roadmap for the next five to ten years. However, there are a few just underlying mechanisms of how this business works that we all need to understand in this business and then make decisions around those. And for Shippo specifically, there are a few flywheels that are just in our favor. So our goal is to make sure that we keep fueling those flywheels. The number one flywheel is the one around shipping volume. So the more packages we ship, the better our shipping rates, our leverage become with the carriers, and then we're able to offer more attractive shipping options to our customers, acquire more customers faster and get more shipping volume. So that's a really nice flightwheel. And we've had by now five years of data to prove that this is a flywheel that works for Shippo. We're starting to roll this out across most shipping providers out there. Now I'm thinking about what's the next flywheel? What else is in our business?”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. And I think there's a lot to be said about this Shopify ecosystem, the App Store ecosystem. I think it's the most vibrant compared to all the other shopping cart builders out there. I think it is actually a big draw for merchants to figure out where they want to start building their website.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anyone can build to their app store, and as soon as you've done that and you start getting positive reviews, the algorithm just lists you up front. That's where word of mouth kicks in.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were two, I think a lot of these larger companies were now starting to be in a similar position as well. At some point, they realized there are a lot of features that their customers are looking for, but they just can't keep up building all these features themselves. Plus, it's not the core of their business. Might as well enable third-party developers to help out and to create more value for the customer base. So that's, I think, Shopify has done that very well. Salesforce is another awesome example, just creating this app store, this ecosystem for other startups, other developers to build services for their customer base. And that's what we did early on. You can do that without a lot of contacts at these companies. Anyone can submit an app. You have to go through approval process. We've been growing in those ecosystems. We started to get to know the Shopify people. But I think early on, it was a very nice merit-based system.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“E commerce merchant is a reflection of that. Now I think paid has started to scale up nicely as well. You're trying to find ways to bring demand to your website and do that in a scalable way instead of trying to find customers one by one and hit them up one by one because the contract values are just not big enough to be worth an AE's time.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, once you get to that point where you can think about diversifying revenue sources, it's a luxury problem to have. You're no longer in the bucket of there's not enough revenue, we might die tomorrow. So it's a good problem to have, but that's the next problem. And I think what works very well with S&Bs as well is when you have some early customers that are really happy with your products, there's great word of mouth. Online merchants, they have forms that they participate in where Facebook or another channel where they recommend what they're already using. So word of mouth has been great for us. And then at some point you realize that organic growth is just not going to cut it anymore. You've grown to a size where organic growth has taken you there, but it's not going to take you to the next level SEO SEM, let's see what else, content. Content is a big one. And that ties very well into our mission as well of making shipping easy, bringing easy to read and accessible shipping content to”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SMVs, I mean, yeah, as you said, very different from enterprise clients. First of all, it's hard to figure out where they are. How do you reach someone, I don't know, knitting cat sweaters in the middle of America? How do you market to them? So we, at the beginning, really nicely piggybacked on a bunch of super obvious SMB aggregators. So as an example, Shopify has already aggregated hundreds of thousands of SMBs. Is there a great place to start? WooCommerce has done the same. Probably big commerce as well. So there are a bunch of known SMB aggregators out there that have ecosystems where you can participate and get customer referrals from. So that was our early customer acquisition strategy, just piggybacking on existing SMB aggregators. Shopify was just starting to grow like crazy. So there were great customer acquisition channel. Then, of course, you run into the challenge of you have to have diversified revenue sources.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turning from what we used to be, let's say, an aggregator, we aggregated a ton of SMBs and we offered them a fairly simple product. All we do is give them the right shipping label and now we turn this into a platform and we have a nice mode already because we figured out how to acquire customers in a scalable way and now we can just solve more problems for them, which also translates into sell them more products.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our rates, our shipping rates, our customer shipping rates on our own servers instead of calling upstream APIs. Again, harder than you'd think in our minds at least it was absolutely necessary before we start adding more customers and especially larger customers to our platform. We invested a bunch into the infrastructure and making sure that we're ready to scale, that we're selling something to larger customers, that we're actually proud of. And then from there, we started thinking about expanding the platform. That is a fairly common evolution in SaaS companies. You start by just selling something very simple, a shipping interface, a shipping API, a payments API, whatever that is. And then from there, you think about how else can we”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite early on, we realized that our customers, when they were using Shippo, they held us accountable for if the FedEx API was down or the UPS or the USPS API. So even though they knew that the shipping was done by different shipping providers, that was not the issue. They were well aware of it. By using the SHIPO interface, they trusted our technology and were pissed off if something else was not working and we couldn't point to, let's say, USPS or FedEx. That was not good enough of an excuse. Also not for us to accept. So we started investing into making sure that even though we're making use of the different shipping providers that we're controlling the entire technology experience, that we're able to guarantee uptime, reliability, making sure that we're able to return shipping rates and shipping labels, even if carrier APIs are down. So that involved a lot of work around storing”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're really bad at pricing. We didn't really treat it as a science, I think, at the beginning. Even nowadays, we're looking for growth over anything else. So we're looking at pricing our product in a way that is attributing value to our software, our merchants understand that our software is not free. We're not trying to price it too high for merchants to not want to give this a try. I'm saying this from a perspective that we're still mostly an S&B focused business. So everything that's public out there in terms of pricing is for S&Bs. However, I think the difference between us and most other businesses is that our software fees are only part of our business model. The other part is really our ability to resell discounted shipping rates. So it's this aggregation model. That is more about what we're able to negotiate with the shipping providers, what kinds of rates we're allowed to pass on to our customers.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes I talk to founders and I can see that they're overthinking just what they want to build and what's worked very well for me and my co-founder is that when we had an idea we just started building and then other ideas come up. Shippo today is nothing like what we started out with. If we remain paralyzed trying to figure out what the best idea could be, we wouldn't have found this idea. So I think there is a lot to be said about just getting into action starting to build something and then you'll figure it out as you go there is no shame around pivoting or changing your idea, but I think that all of that is better than trying to overthink it. I'm tying this thought into talking to customers as well. I think by talking to people, to customers specifically, like your ideas will evolve. That's only for the better.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. They're not going to give you extra points for this to work, but they'll be really pissed off if it doesn't work. So all our engineers are tied up doing this kind of critical infrastructure work. We have to find carve out engineering teams to be able to build new features, functionalities that we're actually excited about and make sure that we're able to balance both. So I think that's the hardest part. And it's something that's never going to go away. It's expensive and it's sometimes annoying work. I always just remind our team members that if we're doing all this annoying work for our customers, our customers don't have to do it. That's exactly the point. Not every e-commerce business should have to go through the challenge of figuring out UPS endpoint API endpoint changes one by one. But were the buffer in between, we can make sure that we take care of that.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's making this industry really hard is that we're built on top of a bunch of other APIs that we don't really control. As we grow our business and expand into more countries, we add even more shipping APIs to the mix. And these different shipping companies, they change their API endpoints. They don't really let us know when they do that. They have compliance certification things that come up once a year and then we have to go through certification again. When I say that, on the one hand, the fact that we're doing all of this and customers don't have to do all of this one by one is a big value product for our customers. So I think it is already a mode or a competitive advantage if we can do this well. On the other hand, it is taking up a lot of engineering resources and it's tying them up to do something. Well, I would just put that into a bucket where customers expect this to work, but they're not going to give you”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have very strange error messages. There can be an error message that there's a delay because the driver ran into a deer, ran over a deer. These are just very real life occurrences that will happen and you have to figure out how to map that back to something that merchants and consumers understand”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, everything in e-commerce happens online up until you need to ship. And then shipping is the convergence of online and offline, where these two worlds meet and you have to find a way to make them fit. There are real-life people involved in packing the boxes, in figuring out what goes into which box and putting the shipping label on the box. So software needs to direct them to do all these things. And you have to take the workflow of real life people into account. And then as a package is on its way, that's happening in the real world. And then we need to figure out how to translate what's going on in the real world back to the internet and relay that to the consumers and to the merchants. That's where it gets complicated. I think it's just different from payments or from text messaging. There's a real life component to this. That's where it gets messy because you don't know what's going on. You have to find a way to figure out what's going on in the real world and bring that back to the internet.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. And I think that's harder than you think. It makes perfect sense that that's what it should be like when you sign up on Shippo. You shouldn't have to get your own FedEx or your own UPS or USPS account. In this industry, there's not a known way to do business before we started pushing for it. I think some carriers were more open towards this kind of setup. Other carriers were and are still more resistant. There's a big argument to be made that this is a win-win for both Chippot customers. They don't have to go through the signup process anymore, but then also shipping providers who don't have to do account management or customer support. And it's an easy customer acquisition channel for them.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then give our customers access to better shipping rates before going into the business. That was not something that we were aware of. By now, this is a big part of our business model, the aggregation factor.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in hindsight, again, a very straightforward realization, but for us it was a realization that in addition to giving our customers access to very easy and simple to use technology, they have a second challenge, which is they are too small to get access to any kind of shipping discounts or shipping rates. And it's not just a technology that's challenging for them. It's also just going through signup or account setup with all different shipping carriers and figuring out how to set up different accounts, what kinds of rates they qualify for, how to compare rates. So when we started the business, we thought this would be mostly an API or a dashboard. And when we went deeper into the business, we realized that through economies of scale, we can remove another pain point for our customers, which is around account setup with the carriers. And it gives us the additional advantage that we can aggregate volume.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. And I think in the meantime, the platform has evolved quite a lot already. So I can talk about what it's like today and what we're thinking about for the future. But it really leads me back to this motto of build something that's a painkiller, not a vitamin. And I think when we approached a larger companies, they already had some sort of shipping options in place. We could do it better. They were not in such a big pain that they were willing to take a risk to try an unproven startup when we approached the mom and pop businesses. There's just such a giant ping point that they didn't care that we've only been around for a few months. They just wanted help to solve this problem.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of our earliest customers that were using either the USPS interface directly, so the USPS has an online interface on their website, or they were going to FedEx, the UPS store. So they were just walking there, handing over their packages. After signing them up on Shippo, what we're able to do is we're able to pull in all of the orders from whatever platform they're selling on. So Shopify, let's just take Shopify as an example. So we're pulling those orders automatically into the Shippo dashboard from there. We're creating shipment for them. We show them all different shipping rates, shipping options, recommend them the cheapest, the fastest, whatever preferences they have. And then with one click, they either print all of the labels or label at a time. And another click, the postman comes to pick it up. The FedEx person comes to pick it up.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And pop businesses first, we decided to build in easy to use user interface on top of our API to sell it to smaller businesses so that they don't need to learn how to integrate an API. Started aggregating volume by aggregating a ton of SMBs. And in the meantime, with that aggregated volume, we've been able to go after larger and larger customers because by now we're able to say that we actually have a lot of packages going through our API. That's how I would describe the progression of our focus. At the beginning it was really tiny mom and pop businesses before we started to go after larger and larger ones and it came out of necessity not necessarily a calculated decision.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The MVP was to build a wrapper around existing APIs trying to sell that to a few e-commerce merchants. And when we approached e-commerce merchants, I think especially the mid-sized or larger ones, the first question that they asked us was how many packages are going through your API today. At the beginning, there were no packages going through our API. We failed that. We weren't able to get through that question. That led us to going to much, much smaller customers, customers who were, let's say, more desperate for better, more efficient, cheaper, easier to use shipping technology. Going to much smaller customers, so mom and pop businesses, we encountered a different challenge, actually. The challenge with those customers was we're super excited. They wanted help. They needed help. They had no idea how to do shipping, but they had no idea what an API was. We approached them with the wrong offering, then kind of putting two and two together, we decided to focus on SMB and”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before I get to that, just double clicking on this being a giant market, I think a great piece of advice for founders is giant markets are awesome, but it's even better if this giant market is continuously expanding. For us, when I looked at shipping or even today, like shipping is growing like crazy because e-commerce is still in its earlier days. So it's not an industry that's going away, it's giant and the pi is continuously expanding. And I think those are really, really nice industries to be in. To answer your question about what we decided to focus on, I think it was a little bit of a trial and error. In hindsight, everything seems like a fairly straightforward story. What you read out there, I don't know, on TechWrench or Forbes. We started out just chatting with potential e-commerce customers, e-commerce merchants. Our initial thought was there are all these different shipping APIs. They're really difficult to use. The API documentations are terrible. You have to write in to get API access.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't sure we weren't shipping or logistics experts beforehand, but we decided to just give it a try, built an MVP, talk to some customers, and see what happens, and then not get paralyzed by this uncertainty. From there, I think Having talked to a few customers is extremely obvious. Shipping is actually more exciting than we thought, mostly because there are so many low-hanging fruits, so many inefficiencies because this is such an old business, and also because e-commerce has advanced at such a That's the founding story. It's been more than five years by now getting out of bed every single day to work on shipping. I haven't regretted it.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple to use technology at writing API documentations that are developer friendly. From there, my realization was that it is too hard. If it's hard for me, then it's probably hard for other people as well. The founder I used to work for, he had this kind of cheesy mantra that was built something that's a painkiller, not a vitamin. From there, I think putting these two things together, it is hard for a ton of people. This is a giant pain point in e-commerce because every single e-commerce store needs to ship. There's just no way around that at that point had reconnected with a friend from college who is more technical than I am and we decided to just jump on this opportunity and figure it out. And sometimes we joke about that still, but like at the beginning when I pitched my co-founder Simon this idea, both of us, he asked me, is shipping something you'd be excited to get out of bed for for the next 10, 15 years. And I wasn't sure.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surprise to me was that shipping was much more difficult. Early on I first walked to the USPS location, to the FedEx store and realized that first of all, the people working there, they're not super helpful. They're not going to give you any advice or tell you how to do things better. But then standing in line, there is a waste of time. These locations are only open between 10 and 4. So these are normal working hours. And then in addition to that, when I started looking into just the technologies that these companies provide, the interfaces were extremely clunky. And you can imagine that a FedEx API, a UPS, or USPS API, they're not as easy and simple to use as a stripe or folio. Because these companies, they're not tech companies. They're really good at doing the complex logistics of shipping, figuring out how to move packages across the country and across the world, but they're not good at building”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhere, the thought was really there are no bad ideas. Anything that I can come up with. And truth to be told, at the end of the day, I didn't have any super disruptive ideas. So I decided to keep it simple, just get started with an e-commerce business. That's what popout was. So I built a small e-commerce business that was never meant to be anything bake. It was a side project to do on the weekends. I was using Shopify. I was using Stripe. Just used all of the existing building blocks. It wasn't supposed to be venture backable or scalable. It was just supposed to be a tool to teach me how to run a small company. And then running that small e-commerce business, I realized that all of the different e-commerce building blocks, they were really easy and intuitive to use to put together. I've never done e-commerce before that. But it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to set up a Shopify store, how to use Stripe, and how to start selling on the internet. What came as a”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a path down memory lane. I haven't thought about popout for a long time. What happened was, so I'm originally from Germany, roughly six years ago, I came to San Francisco first as a summer intern to join a Y combinator startup called Lendepp. That brought me to the city initially. Working at Lendep, they were pre-series A. It was a team of roughly 20 people. We were working just day and night to make sure that we're hitting the kinds of growth numbers that Series A investors would be looking for. So it's an amazing and very energizing experience. And I think coming from a German environment where I was used to a lot more hierarchy in the workplace, it's nothing like I've ever experienced. I decided that I wanted to stay in San Francisco full-time, keep working there. From there, I think my next thought was given that I like the startup environment this much, maybe there is a company that I could start down the road. I started brainstorming, came up with a ton of different ideas. I might still have that spreadsheet.”
2020-10-29 · Invest Like the Best · Laura Behrens Wu - When Digital and Physical Worlds Converge - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.5] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source