ShipBob
1. How long have you been in business?
Since June 2014 (1 year and 4 months)
2. What’s unique about your story or business?
Our founders started a logistics company with a couple of engineers and business analyst realizing how painful shipping is when starting a company. So they dropped everything else in their lives and decided to fix the broken shipping process.
We met our first 100 customers literally standing outside the post-office and letting people know that there is simpler and more efficient way to ship with ShipBob. From the moment people got out of their car and in the 30 seconds before they entered the post office, we pitched them on our idea. Since than we have grown significantly and optimize parcel logistics for small business, startups and crowdfunded campaigns.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have face in business and how did you overcome it?
A challenged that we faced while starting up was being pulled in lot of different directions for shipping services. Logistics is a really really big space and our early users had a lot of different pain points and requests from freight shipping to courier deliveries and many others. Starting out, it is difficult to turn down business as you are trying to grow and acquire new users, but it is also detrimental to deviate from your core competencies. It was difficult to determine which services we should offer and which to turn down. For example warehousing inventory was a large deviation from our original model compared to picking up shipments from our clients, but now we store a lot of product for clients. To select what worked and what didn’t we used a simple process of reflecting on our strengths and how well they can be leveraged into new offerings. We tried to figure out if we can do the service significantly better then what was currently available, built out a super simple process/product to test interest in our clients, and if it was efficient and highly demanded we enabled; if not we cut it and referred our clients to available alternatives. This focus has been crucial to our survival and growth as a company.
4. Please list a few of your most recent accomplishments.
Since June 2014 (1 year and 4 months)
2. What’s unique about your story or business?
Our founders started a logistics company with a couple of engineers and business analyst realizing how painful shipping is when starting a company. So they dropped everything else in their lives and decided to fix the broken shipping process.
We met our first 100 customers literally standing outside the post-office and letting people know that there is simpler and more efficient way to ship with ShipBob. From the moment people got out of their car and in the 30 seconds before they entered the post office, we pitched them on our idea. Since than we have grown significantly and optimize parcel logistics for small business, startups and crowdfunded campaigns.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have face in business and how did you overcome it?
A challenged that we faced while starting up was being pulled in lot of different directions for shipping services. Logistics is a really really big space and our early users had a lot of different pain points and requests from freight shipping to courier deliveries and many others. Starting out, it is difficult to turn down business as you are trying to grow and acquire new users, but it is also detrimental to deviate from your core competencies. It was difficult to determine which services we should offer and which to turn down. For example warehousing inventory was a large deviation from our original model compared to picking up shipments from our clients, but now we store a lot of product for clients. To select what worked and what didn’t we used a simple process of reflecting on our strengths and how well they can be leveraged into new offerings. We tried to figure out if we can do the service significantly better then what was currently available, built out a super simple process/product to test interest in our clients, and if it was efficient and highly demanded we enabled; if not we cut it and referred our clients to available alternatives. This focus has been crucial to our survival and growth as a company.
4. Please list a few of your most recent accomplishments.
- Recently recognized as Chicago’s Best Tech Startup by Tech-in-motion
- Second largest employer of Lawrence Hall’s youth mentoring program, "My Time"
- Expanded to a second city in Brooklyn, New York.