
How Shyp Sunk: The Rise and Fall of an On-Demand Startup - sachitgupta
https://www.fastcompany.com/40549442/how-shyp-sunk-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-on-demand-startup
======
akurilin
Too bad, they were pretty convenient for consumers. Made selling stuff online
super snappy, as you never had to worry about packaging, dragging something to
the post office and waiting in line during lunch rush hour. Any chance a
still-alive competitor exists?

I remember thinking that the business model did seem tricky. Early on, when
they just started, they let me ship half of my already boxed apartment for $5
+ whatever USPS shipping costs. They had to bring over a truck, and I think
about 3 guys to pick up the boxes over maybe an hour or so. I don't know if I
was the person who had shipped the most stuff ever with the company at that
point.

That was an interesting hands-on experience with watching a company deploy VC
capital on early product discovery.

~~~
jjeaff
Anyone who is still waiting in line at the post office to ship something seems
like they would not be tech savvy enough to use an app like shyp. Almost any
online marketplace let's you print a shipping label right off their site. Then
you can drop it in a blue box or just swing by the post office, skip the line,
and set the ready to go package on the counter.

In the case of UPS or FedEx, there is usually an option for them to come by
and pick it up for free or a few dollars. I get enough packages from USPS that
I can just leave an outgoing package on my porch with a sign for the carrier
to get it.

Shyp just seemed to be a solution looking for a problem.

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nikanj
If there's no demand at a true-cost price point, it means there's no demand.

You can artificially inflate market interest by selling $20s for $10, but
don't take that to mean you can later increase price to $30 and reach
profitability.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Your second sentence is the clearest way I've seen unit economics viability
summed up, nice.

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LrnByTeach
CEO Gibbon talk sums it up. \- prematurely scaled, charging deep discount
price of $5 with the help of $65 Million VC money.

Looking back, Gibbon says that “the investment we took, everything we got,
wasn’t warranted for where the business was at. And I think that really hurt
us. The expectations were way too high. We had a lot of capital. We had to
deploy it. And I don’t think we were ready to do that. We prematurely scaled.”

~~~
rahimnathwani
"charging deep discount price of $5 with the help of $65 Million VC money"

Your comment reminds me of the pizza company in the most recent episode of
Silicon Valley.

~~~
lkrubner
Except Sliceline, in the HBO show, was inspired by real-life Slice, which
makes a shocking amount of money.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slicelife....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slicelife.storefront&hl=en)

Slice is here in New York and I've been to their office and I know many of the
programmers who work there, so I know they are surprisingly successful.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
It's a completely business model, though. Slice just provides online ordering
for existing pizzerias. The marginal cost of each pizza sold is very low, so
they don't have to make a lot off of each pizza to eventually be successful if
they have high enough volume.

Sliceline was doing things with high operational costs like repackaging and
delivering pizzas, so their marginal costs for each pizza were very high. That
means they have to make a lot off of each individual pizza no matter how high
their volume gets.

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rconti
I didn't even really know they existed. I mean, we have a package sitting in
the closet with Shyp tape on it, and I guess I was vaguely aware that the
person who sent it had a service package it up, but that's about all I knew. I
never bothered to investigate, I never heard about them from friends or folks
on the internet, but I would have LOVED to have used their service. Shipping
things is one of my least favorite activities ever. It's such a hassle for so
many reasons; even though I live 2 blocks from a post office it still takes 30
minutes every time I ship anything due to lines, the fact that I forgot the
one thing they don't have (tape or pens or something), it's impossible to
figure out which shipping vendor will be best for an unboxed item of a given
size (and trying to figure out what size box to use under which vendor for
which price).

~~~
corvallis
I go through periods of frequent shipping, and I find it pretty easy. I bought
a small scale and the USPS website is pretty solid for giving price
comparisons and allowing you to buy/print postage and drop it in the mail. You
can order flat rate boxes and they send them to you. I've almost always found
UPS/Fedex to be more expensive so I simply stopped comparing. If it's local,
I'll use a courier. I'd rather just work with what I know even if it means
rarely overspending a few bucks. Saves a lot of time, money, and hassle in the
long run. I guess I don't understand how others seem to overcomplicate or
overthink this to the point that something like Shyp existed for as long as it
did.

~~~
cepth
Worth noting that UPS/FedEx/USPS each has its own shipping niches.

YMMV, but I've generally found that FedEx for home delivery of larger packages
is cheaper than UPS and USPS, who each charge a surcharge for residential
delivery vs commercial delivery. If you need to ship things overnight, FedEx's
air/express prices are a competitive advantage.

USPS is very price-competitive if you are able to use their standard sized
packaging, their "flat rate boxes".

For shipping larger items via ground, UPS still generally has that niche.
Worth noting that if you do large volumes of smaller items, say the size of a
book, UPS Surepost combines UPS's speed with USPS last-mile delivery.

------
nartz
I think their whole approach was off - why even have warehouses, custom
packaging, etc? Why not charge what it actually costs to ship something, plus
a little more?

All they need is a bunch of vans that drive around and have a bunch of boxes
and tape, basically ubers. They show up, package my thing up, and take it to
the closest fedex store - enough said.

No custom boxes needed. No warehousing.

~~~
ryanworl
They made money through discounts on retail shipping as well as fees.
Concentrating pick-ups to a small number of warehouses while doing the
specific packaging and labeling and palletizing requirements of the shipper
increases the discount.

If they just charged retail plus a little more the product would’ve been even
more expensive.

------
jjeaff
It seemed to me that shyp's market was simply too small. One of those juicero
like ideas that only seem great in SV.

There seem to be two primary segments. Those that sell a lot online or at
least rather frequently. And those that are very infrequent shippers.

For the frequent shippers, it's simply not cost effective. Especially
considering that most online marketplaces, like eBay and Amazon have easy
shipping label printing and you can request that ups or FedEx come pick up the
package. So except for the hassle of finding a box and tape, I'm not sure why
you would use shyp. (And most always have Amazon boxes lying around now).

And if you are simply a very infrequent shipper, it's still probably easier to
just swing by a shipping location like mailnmore. Plus, if you are
infrequently shipping, you probably aren't trying to find a service to make it
that easy. It's not enough of a pain point.

Those that fall between those two groups would seem vanishingly small.

I was dumbfounded everytime shyp raised more money. But I assumed they had
some great growth numbers that the public weren't privy to. But maybe not.

------
FriedPickles
Every experience I had with Shyp was flawless. Very sad to see them go.

~~~
ukd1
Ditto! I agree it's something needed, sorry to see it shutdown.

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andymoe
It’s too bad, I looked into them a few years ago when I needed to ship a
couple hundred items out over the course of a week or two. Ultimately it made
more sense to spend 150 bucks on a label printer and clobber together a
workable system to do it ourselves. They were focusing on consumers at the
time but had they provided a scalable turn-key solution to small business at
the time I think they could have made it work.

~~~
elvirs
thats what they did a little later, pivoted towards serving physical shipping
needs of small businesses but looks like picking up, packing and shipping out
for just $5 per package would not cut it.

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jt2190
Here is Gibbon's post about Shyp shutting down:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-
we-d...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-do-next-
kevin-gibbon/)

------
misterbowfinger
All I remember about Shyp is when TJ Miller called a Shyp employee a "bitch"
at the Crunchies:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ1qcD6isI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ1qcD6isI8)

Sorry for the gossip.....

~~~
brian_
"'Shyp' It's like FedEX, but spelled wrong."

