The Ledger
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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 …”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Wu: Listening to every customer prevents founders from following their roadmap
“I think being extremely customer centric has a lot of upsides, but it has the downside of like, if you listen to every single customer,
You're not going to be able to follow your own roadmap.
You're just going, going to be dragged into all kinds of different d…”
Founders must manufacture fundraising urgency to prevent endless investor delays
“I think in terms of fundraising, it needs to be like, it needs to be driven by the founder in the sense that you need to create like that typical, like FOMO situation where you can tell investors that other people are going to be making a decision like in the …”
Behrens Wu: Product-market fit must be continuously rediscovered for each new segment
“You find product market fit within one customer segment or for one product, and you need to continuously be finding product market fit, either for new products that you launch or for new customer segments that you're entering into.”
Behrens Wu: Waiting until core product growth flattens to invest in new bets is too late
“Ideally you start investing in horizon two and three when horizon one is still growing very well. I think when horizon one is like starting to flatten, It's a little too late.”
Behrens Wu: Founders overlook and delay hiring People leaders too long
“So that's one role that I think founders tend to hire a little too late for because it seems like it's a nice to have Like there is no pressing, like it does not contribute to growth or customer acquisition. So it feels like it's overlooked.”
Behrens Wu sends an unfiltered company-wide email every Sunday
“And I've been doing it every Sunday since. It's like almost, I think, year and a half, two years now, and it's something that the team really is looking forward to. Like I, and I'm kind of embraced the same style, like the same direction as he was describing, …”
Behrens Wu: Exploring multiple directions is cheap early on but costly at scale
“If they take you in a different direction, like early on, it's like, it really doesn't cost too much to go explore it. I think it becomes more costly when you have an organization and like different people you need to manage. But if it was just you and the co-…”
Wu: Amazon creates a shipping expectations mismatch for online SMBs
“Retail giants such as Amazon who have set consumer expectations to be like, sky, sky high around free and fast shipping. So there's a mismatch in like what an online merchant can deliver versus what the consumer expectations are.”
Wu: Shippo's earliest revenue all came from the Shopify App Store
“The Shopify app store was great timing for us. And I think if I look at some of our initial revenue charts, they are like our earliest revenue all came from the Shopify app store.”
Shippo spent eight to nine years closing its FedEx partnership
“Just this year, we got our, like, we got FedEx to agree to this kind of account structure. So it's really, it's literally taken us like eight to nine years with certain shipping providers to get them comfortable with that.”
Shippo bypassed early carrier barriers by piggybacking on a third-party aggregator
“The first thing we did was we hacked it a little. We worked with a third party aggregator that had the, like, had a special, like a different kind of contract that allowed us to do this. So we first worked with an aggregator. And then as we got enough volume, …”
Behrens Wu: Shippo was rejected by YC before joining 500 Startups
“We did get into like an accelerator at some point, like we were rejected by YC and then got into 500 startups.”
Shippo pitched 125 investors to secure 11 checks for its seed round
“But yes, in total, I talked to 125 investors for that round of financing and ended up ended up raising from 11.”
Albert Wenger passed on Shippo's seed before leading its Series A
“I met one investor during our seed round, Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures, who wouldn't invest at that point in time, but we really, like, hit it off, and he's also from Germany, and we, like, just decided to stay in touch, and I think it was more of …”