SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 439: $9m Raised, GoShippo Helps Little Guy Drop Ship 1,000,000+ Packages Per Month Already with CEO Laura Behrens Wu
06 Oct 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What inspired Laura Behrens Wu to create Shippo?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top.
Chapter 3: How did Laura's e-commerce business lead to the shipping solution?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Laura face with shipping costs?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 5: How does Shippo negotiate shipping rates?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 6: What is Shippo's pricing model for e-commerce businesses?
Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillins. He's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck. He wants to start his own software business. So congratulations, Rhett, for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning. Simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed.
Folks, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a business.
Chapter 7: What revenue streams does Shippo offer beyond shipping labels?
NathanLacka.com forward slash send later is the name of the business. And I didn't want to give up equity to a developer because I'm a business guy. So what I did is I used a website to find a guy named He Sheming. I paid He over $12,000 to help me build send later.
Chapter 8: How has Shippo grown since its inception?
And the site that I am using now is called Topdol at NathanLacka.com forward slash T-O-P-T-A-L. I will build send later into a big business and I will take it public by the time I turned 30. I'll tell you more later on in the episode. Nathan Latka here. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Sean Howell.
He did 700 grand in revenue last month via 100,000 people paying him $7 per month. His company is called Hornet. It's a gay dating app, and his goal is to beat Grindr. Top Tribe. Good morning. I'm so glad you're here with me again. Our guest this morning is Laura Behrens-Wu. She is the co-founder and the chief executive officer of Shippo.
Laura co-founded Shippo after personally experiencing the obstacles, the obstacles really businesses face when setting up their shipping operations, when she was building her own e-commerce business. We're going to learn all about it. Laura, are you ready to take us to the top? Hey, good morning. Good morning. It's going to be fun.
So tell us first, what was the e-commerce business that you had, uh, that, that, that led you basically to say something like Shippo needs to exist. Yeah. So I always thought e-commerce is such a fun thing to do on this site. So I'm really passionate about e-commerce. Um, I started building a little e-commerce store on Shopify. That's, that was so easy to set up. I was ready to go immediately.
And I was excited about, um, social e-commerce. So I was sourcing goods from NGOs that, um, from all over the world that came socially manufactured. And I wanted to sell them here in the U S tell the story of the people who made those items and allow people to have access to very unique, unique goods from all over the world. So, and then that was, that was how this really started.
So I built my, my Shopify store. That was really easy. Um, payments was part of Shopify already. And then suddenly when the first order started coming in, I needed to get the items from all these different countries to my customers who are mostly in the U.S. And then I also had some items already stored in the U.S. that I wanted to ship over directly.
So it's like facing a really complicated shipping problem. And that was the first time I realized shipping is an issue. What volume did you grow that e-commerce business to in terms of in terms of revenue before you stopped into Chippo? It wasn't big. But everyone starts somewhere. How small was it? So I was selling like one to three items a week. It was very small.
Hey, you have to start there, right? I was still working at another startup on the site. So I was really just doing this for fun. And I realized- How old were you back then? 21. Okay. So you were out of college, right? Yes. Right out of college. I was interning for another startup. Which one? LendUp. LendUp. Yeah, they're a socially responsible payday loan company. Yeah, great, great, great.
So, okay, so you decided you needed to build Shippo. So what happens? It's not like you had a corporate job and had saved up a bunch of money. How'd you get the thing going with little financing? Yeah, so it was, I tried to drop ship everything. So not have any inventory in my own home and drop ship everything from the vendors directly. So that was pretty low cost.
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