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Whiplash counted subsidized carrier pass-through costs as top-line revenue
“And so we did want it to flow through our accounts and we did consider it revenue, even at times when we were subsidizing it.”
Whiplash operated on a lean 16 percent gross margin
“I mean, really, you know, we can get it down to about a 16% gross margin, and then we're paying salaries out of that.”
The 'billion-dollar-or-bust' VC path is unfair to startup employees
“You know, we want to be able to grow at, you know, two or three X per year and have that and have investors that want to be a part of that and not put us on this, you know, billion dollar valuation or bust path. It's important for us to have the company secure…”
Marks: Low-volume e-commerce customers are often the hardest to support
“There's an inversion where the less volume you have, the harder customer you are. There, there's something about I don't want to get too diminutive about it, but there's something where small customers are sometimes small for a reason. And it's because they're…”
Port Logistics Group acquired Whiplash in April 2020
“In April we were acquired by Port Logistics Group.”
Whiplash abandoned profitability to increase burn rate after joining 500 Startups
“Right now, we've just gone to cashflow negative, so we just joined 500 startups, and we're beginning a process of, you know, higher, higher burn.
yeah, we were profitable before, but we just stopped that.”
Whiplash is navigating tax complexities to equalize co-founder equity
“Now we're trying to have that be the case legally because we are a C-Corp and you can't just give people stock anymore because there is value being assigned, so you get into some complex tax issues.”
Whiplash shifted to an asset-light warehouse network with 18 partners
“I think we were up to three when we got out of that part of it, and we pivoted to the network model, and today we've got about 18.”
Whiplash reached 800,000 square feet of capacity through partner warehouses
“The largest was 16,000, so we're about 20,000 in total, and that's when we realized it wasn't our game. And so we're the network partners, and now we've got, you know, like 800,000 square feet, right?”
Whiplash tested warehouse partners with two-month trials instead of annual commitments
“Because warehouses have the space already and it's not like we're saying, okay, commit this to us for a year
and maybe we'll do something down the road. It's, you know, two months and, you know, we get a small experiment companies are, you know, we find the ri…”
Whiplash charges fixed handling fees and spreads, not GMV percentages
“It's not a percent of GMV. So fulfillment works on usually you've got like a fixed handling fee that's, you know, we have like a retail rate that we charge our customers and the wholesale rate that we're going to pay to the warehouse partners. So it's, and it'…”
Whiplash shipped approximately three million items over the trailing twelve months
“I'd say, off the top of my head, I think it's probably in the three million range.”
Whiplash platform serves approximately 400 active e-commerce brands
“So our list right now is probably around 400 customers.”
Whiplash customers spent an average of $2,000 to $3,000 monthly
“I'd say if you look at true, true average is something like, you know, two or 3000 dollars a month.”
Shipping carriers captured roughly 50 percent of Whiplash's gross billing
“So that's about 50%. It goes straight out to the carriers.”
Whiplash bootstrapped for seven years before raising from 500 Startups
“We had done both, so we bootstrapped for about seven years, and then we went through 500 startups, and then we raised a small seed round from Tim Draper, and you know, there's a few folks involved in that point, and it felt like we had, we owed them a return, …”
Rebilled postage accounts for roughly half of Whiplash's gross revenue
“About half of that is the carrier fees. What, you know, we rebuild the postage, whether that's UPS or USPS.”
James Marks: Whiplash targets an $8M to $10M valuation cap
“You know, we think it'll be between eight and 10.”
Whiplash top-line platform volume grew 25 percent year-over-year
“Last year was about 25% year over year on the top line.”
Whiplash operated with just 15 employees across engineering and support
“We are, you know, we're about 15 people total and not all of them engineers. So it's probably half of those are engineers and half of them are technical support.”
Whiplash handles fulfillment for Betabrand's crowdsourced apparel
“The last customer, well, probably the last word that left the warehouse is a company called Beta Brand, and they sell online, they do crowdsourced clothing design, and when, after their stuff gets manufactured, They put it in our warehouse, and we ship it to t…”
Whiplash Has Never Had a Formal Sales Process or Outbound Funnel
“We've never had a formal sales process. Everything we've done, I mean, we've got, we're in, you know, in the Shopify app store, we get a lot of referrals from existing customers, but we've never gone out and, you know, hit the pavement and had a hit list and, …”