kevingibbon

My company has used them before. I thought the same before using them. However I was surprised the level of talent they have. For a super senior dev the context that you need for most projects isn’t as much as you think.

It was a net positive for us. Sped up our developer process given its so hard to hire senior devs right now.

They also have domain experts. So say you are using some tech your team isn’t as familiar in. Great to get some extra eyes of that code to check for security issues, potential computation issues etc.

Also they are much more broader than their company name suggests. Think of them as developers as a service. In this hiring environment it’s much needed.

Azure in REAL plain English: Microsoft AWS

I really wish it was that easy. We have tested a bunch of different things and there is no solution that works 100% of the time. For example.. there is no standard fragile item. A fragile item could be 2" of padding or could be 10" of padding.

The #1 most important thing is that the item arrives safely. #2 is reducing the price our customer pay. We even have machinery to create custom on-demand boxes to .1 of an inch so we don't ship air.

Starting today..For customers that are very price sensitive they can package their items, not pay the $5 pickup and still be able to use our great UX/price comparison technology.

We do not use shippo for this product.

For this new product, no. We use a ton of different technologies to make different parts of our business work. We prefer to focus on solving consumer + smb pain points vs owning the entire stack ourselves.

thanks for the feedback. With this new label product you can package your items yourself and print the labels. You get a final price in app/web before purchase.

With our pickup/packaging business there is no way to give a price up front. Only to give an estimate based on the information we receive. There are too many variables that go into the packaging process (padding, re-arranging items, multiple boxes etc). Something that I would love to be perfect on but its a very hard problem.

We typically split items into multiple boxes for safety or to reduce the cost of the overall shipments. There are some very high oversize fees from the carriers that we try to avoid as much as possible.

I hope you will give this new product a try :)

it really depends on a number of things. Fedex and UPS proximity play a part but other things like availability of a suitable warehouse in a reasonable amount of time is more important.

We break into a city starting in a tight geography and expand outwards.

We don't consider Berkeley or Oakland as new cities as we can provide service from one warehouse. We will be overing service to those areas very shortly.

You can select 'shipping options' and get a quote in there.

We are continuously A/B testing every interaction and hiding the price in a sub-menu helped across the board.

yes

I used to be a very successful eBay power seller. I knew the pain-point myself very well. Wanted to solve it for others.

This is exactly the service we are offering to everyone (SF only now, NY in oct) who doesn't use Amazon fulfillment.

The things we are doing behind the scenes to aim for cheapest/fastest service is unbelievable. We will continue to innovate here so business/consumers can focus on what they do best. Shipping is what we do best.

We are launching NY in October. Then looking to stamp out cities as quickly as possible.

We have the barrier of a warehouse in every city + packers but just like anything once you do something enough times you get really good at it.

Looking to be extremely aggressive on city rollout.

not true (disposable income SF dwellers). Using our service will be cheaper than doing it yourself. As we create custom boxes (reduces weight and size) and choose the best carrier for each shipment we are able to offer a very convenient service for a cheaper price that you could get yourself.

We will need to have a warehouse in every major city we launch in. It is a barrier but I can tell you we have the very best team to launch each city cheaply and at a ridiculous pace. We are launching NYC in oct.

USPS priority. If it is <= 13 oz you could use first class.

Their price point can't be beat for < 3 lb items domestically.

San Francisco and launching in NY early Oct. Signup for NY access on our site now.

We do both. The benefit to not using a 3PL (Amazon logistics or other services) is that we don't ever store your items. We ship from your location on-demand. So our costs are less which we pass on.

We actually see a lot of omni-channel retailers love using our service. They utilize their in-store inventory to ship out as purchases come in.

No. Our service will pickup from your location at the point you need to ship.

yep.

Absolutely not true. As the article points out we actually make our money from the price arbitrage between retail and our discounted shipping price. The $5 covers the pickup of an item.

absolutely. The stuff we already do behind the scenes is quite incredible. Not ready to share anything yet but stay tuned.

btw CEO of shyp here.

We do not have a public api yet ;)

We used Easypost initially but have since moved off them.

They already pickup peoples items. However they are not setup logistically to handle 5-20min pickup times. They do something called a milk run which requires them to pre-schedule their routes before hand. They absolutely could offer this service in the future, it would just be logistically very difficult to build it into their current operations.

Our unique advantage is our product/experience UX and our focus on packaging. UPS, Fedex, USPS and our other partners all love us. They see us filling a much needed gap in the market. Just as stripe does for visa/mc/etc.

What these shipping companies are the best at is moving many packed items over large distances. Their logistics networks are unparalleled to no one. We just see a large gap in the first mile.

its really about demand and pickup density. This is why we will launch in major cities first. We spend less than 1min on average pickup up peoples items. So once we are able to get enough demand within a close proximity everything works out great.

USPS flat rate is actually only the cheapest USPS option if you are shipping > 11 lbs. I guarantee you that if you use us it will be cheaper (even including our $5 pickup fee) than for you to do it yourself with all free packaging materials. Then factor what your time is worth.

UPS ground and fedex ground are actually the best/cheapest option if you are shipping anything > 3 lbs. We choose the cheapest carrier automatically and create a custom box for each item.

btw CEO of Shyp here.

The big different is cost. We do not have to store any inventory so we can offer the same service for a much lower price point.

Instead of a company shipping all their items to amazon, we will fulfill out of your storage/office/home/coffee shop.

Plus you don't have to be as organized to pre-ship all your items to amazon's warehouse. Etsy/eBay/Shopfy sellers love it.

btw CEO of Shyp here.

Surprised nobody is talking about how Homejoy is killing it with the exact same model that exec pivoted too.

How does the dataset compare to google? Would love to see some side by side comparisons.

I think your missing the point. You are calculating this on the basis that you were buying and using your car exclusively for Lyft. If a driver is already paying for a vehicle, all of these expenses can be shared with personal use. This is the 'sharing economy'.

To buy a car and use it exclusively for Lyft may not make sense.

try shyp.com

Take a look at Wefunder response above.

"waiting period for Form D is a proposed rule that has never been voted on"