How Shippo found product market fit: Laura Behrens Wu on democratizing shipping for small businesses

Successful startups need to solve a problem, but there is a big difference between a founder knowing a problem exists in the abstract and a founder experiencing the pain points firsthand and developing ways to solve it. Laura Behrens Wu is the Founder and CEO of Shippo, a shipping platform designed to give every merchant access to the best-in-class tools and technology reserved for retail giants. Over 100k brands trust Shippo to ensure their customers love how their products are delivered. In this episode, Laura takes us through the product-market fit journey of Shippo and her journey of evolving as its CEO. Join us as we discuss: The origin story of Shippo when Laura first launched the company in 2014 How Laura approached the path to find product-market fit Shopify app vs API company - solving the chicken and egg shipping problem How the pandemic affected Shippo and what it was like making decisions amid all the chaos happening in the logistics and supply chain industry How Laura invested in herself as a founder and CEO About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, 
and Vivun. About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/). Further reading: Customer validation: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/pmf-customer-validation The Unusual Guide to pre-seed: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/building-conviction CEO/founder prioritization template: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/leadership-ceo-and-founder-prioritization Leading through uncertainty: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/leadership-through-crisis