Shippo CEO Laura Behrens Wu describes how she and her co-founder decided to build a shipping logistics platform despite having no background in the industry.
Insight
Behrens Wu: Hard tech requires domain expertise, but SMB software favors outsider perspective
“There are some problems where like, for example, if you're building like a hard tech startup, like you actually, you need the expertise in order to be credible, to know what you're talking about and to be able to build that product. For us, it was the kind of …”
Insight
Behrens Wu: Zero-to-one early builders often cannot scale with the company
“I do think that it is a distinct personality type. And like at times those people are not scalable when you need someone to scale this up. You might be looking at a different skill set and personality compared to the person who built it.”
Insight
Hiring big-tech executives too early is a frequent founder mistake
“I think an easy or like a mistake that we made early on, I think hiring people with those fancy titles is a mistake that I often hear from other startup founders where like we have people where, you know, if someone's been a VP at Facebook at that point in tim…”
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Behrens Wu: In 2013, no shipping interface matched Stripe or Shopify's usability
“There was just no good resource for getting advice and no like technology interface that we thought was kind of Up to par with the other e-commerce technologies we were using. And like, specifically we were using our e-commerce stack was like the usual one, St…”
Insight
Unproven APIs struggle to win mission-critical infrastructure like shipping
“Shipping is such a mission critical infrastructure component that if you are a company that knows how to integrate an API, you really don't want to integrate an API that is like unproven and unused by anyone else.”
Insight
Enterprise sales demands maturity, but SMBs favor peer-to-peer founder authenticity
“Again, I think if you're selling to an enterprise company, you might want to like make yourself bigger than you actually are. So it depends on the audience, but I think for the SMB audience, like one of the upsides is that you are able to talk to the store own…”