How Shyp Sunk: The Rise and Fall of an On-Demand Startup (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.”

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

Here is Gibbon's post about Shyp shutting down:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-d...

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

Sorry for the gossip.....