ShotPut (YC S15) helps fulfill product orders at a price that works for startups | Hacker News Reader

ShotPut (YC S15) helps fulfill product orders at a price that works for startups

venturebeat.com

54 pointsjustin37 comments

Love the ShotPut crew. Some of the hardest working founders I've met.

Admittedly we were damn pretty terrible on the shipping and fulfillment side of our business early on and they've been a huge help getting everything figured out for us.

You definitely want to work with these guys.

Working with Pakible is phenomenal we've recommended all our customers who want custom boxes to use their service! And we already handle their fulfillment.

How do your customers handle inserts in your boxes? Seems that many products need some really custom insert to keep from rattling around.

Generally we call inserts: marketing messages companies put in each shipment.

There's another material called dunnage i.e. fill that is placed such as air packs, bubble wrap, paper, cardboard, mushroom (yes a product made from mushrooms!), etc. are used to keep the product tight.

Another method is to use a smaller box which cuts down on both shipping costs as well as is a more secure way of securing products.

This is Praful another co-founder of Shotput. Happy to answer any questions regarding tech or operations of our company and the fulfillment industry as a whole.

Amazon offers FBA, which allows you to store your inventory in their warehouses, and ship products to customers via an api. How sets you apart from this? I'm guessing simpler user interface (Amazon's leaves a lot to be desired)?

FBA is literally 2-3x industry standard pricing and is used almost entirely in order to increase the value proposition to buyers from/in the Amazon markerplaces exclusively. Pretty much no one sells through other channels and ships from FBA. Many sellers maintain a non-amazon warehouse.

Having said that, I am guessing this startup is not attempting to compete on pricing.

You hit it on the nose. People rarely decide between us and Amazon, usually it is between some random fulfillment centers their friends heard of and us. We have been pretty competitive on price so far, but mostly our benefit is we give total pricling upfront. Seemingly cheaper warehouses will give a low rate, but what is the true cost of using them? Are you hiring people or paying for mistakes they make?

We do our best to be price competitive which is part of our pricing model. We never try to win on a price war but we're better in terms of pricing compared to both FBA & Shipwire.

Amazon also has a very arcane fee structure. Our fees are guaranteed to be the final price you see on the page. We've developed our pricing model so we have confidence we can manage your account without any issues.

Additionally, you have more control of the process with us than Amazon.

Ok, I just tried to use your website. I have no idea what you are going to charge me to ship the orders.

I put in one pallet, 960 pieces at 12 per case, 80 cases. 3 pounds each, ship as one, no special work needed.

I got a price for move in easily, but then what?

Hey Greg, the third step page is where we tell you the "move-out" or basically shipping and handling pricing. Why don't you give a message at james@theshotput.com though and I can give you a quote. You took the time to sign up on our site, the least I can do is take the time and answer all your questions.

Ok, will send

Is anyone else concerned about all these startups catering to other startups? When the VC bubble bursts, the majority of them are going to go up in smoke.

We do want to clarify, we can work with businesses ranging from a few hundred orders/ month all the way up to 100,000's of orders. The way our network is set up, we can easily scale up or down the fulfillment needs of our customers. We work with many young businesses today because they need help finding their first warehouse, but we also work with more advanced businesses too.

I am actually less concerned about VC money as it is a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of things, than I am about all the private equity money going into unicorns. The VCs will rock and roll with the funding environment, but the private equity market can go poof in an instant. If (when) it does the fallout will be vey nasty.

The amount of companies / organizations that need fulfillment goes well beyond just startups

Do you think the amount of products being shipped to customers will be shrinking soon?

No. Actually the amount has been increasing exponentially the last few years especially because of fast prototyping due to 3D printing and crowd funding. Additionally many of the new shippers have much different profiles than those before. Finally subscriptions have increased rapidly which is even more shipping.

The last trend is recycling subscriptions e.g. Le Tote which has increased the need for our service. (Le Tote is not a customer).

I might be worried but this seems at the very other end of the spectrum.

The shovel-sellers only make money as long as the gold rush lasts.

Shovels & Levis still seem to be doing well ;)

The whole point of a gold rush is that the big players haven't moved in yet, so there's still room for a single operator to get rich.

Hey there, it's James one of founders of Shotput here. Feel free to ask any questions about product fulfillment or going through y Combinator!

This reminds me of Dave Jones, an electronics engineer that runs the EEVBlog on YouTube.

He created a little product, a small electronic tester, and sold them on KS/IGG.

I remember a whole bunch of tweets and youtube videos about how much of a PITA the fulfilment was.

I remember that he had some particular problems with international shipping too.

ShotPut's website doesn't explicitly say that they cover international shipping, but they do, right?

A fulfillment service that can't ship internationally is pretty lame, don't you think? Of course we cover international shipping! We don't mention it because it should be a standard!

Haha, my apologies!

Do you handle fulfillment to Canada as well? Or US only? How about Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands?

Yes, we can ship to those countries.

Our fulfillment centers are all over the US and coming to Canada soon! But again, they can ship internationally.

Where is the scale in the business? How does it get better when it's 1,000x bigger?

We are able to use our growing volume even now to lower the costs all around (freight, fulfillment, shipping). At 1000x growth, we could push those prices much lower. This is huge for start-ups.

Since we only deal with fulfillment once it enters the country, we have people we would love to pass to your service too. It would be beneficial for both of us to talk and set something up soon.

Cool to see other companies in the fulfillment space!

How do you differ from a company like Shipwire?

Shipwire is a fantastic company, however, their prices have been historically high and their customer support has lacked recently. Though their international warehouses are a huge boost to small companies that need that capability.

Our biggest differentiator is that we give you an upfront invoice and once you pay you'll never see a penny increase. Even your shipping is upfront (we're working on fixing it now as we speak).

Awesome, best of luck beating the big guys. Theres lots of room to innovate here.

Small suggestion: an easy pricing calculator would definitely help on the site before capturing email

We had one before but the types of products varied so wildly the ultimate cost was different. Currently we capture all that data and give our final price which uses our calculator.

Though we'll discuss this issue and if it keeps coming up we'll act on it.

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