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

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

Author: Unusual Ventures October 10, 2022 Duration: 26:07

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 sandhya@unusual.vc and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/).

Further reading:


Behind every so-called overnight success in software, there's a long, often messy journey of finding exactly what customers need and how to deliver it. That's the central theme explored in Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast. This series is built for those in the trenches of early-stage software companies, from founders just starting out to leaders tasked with building something from nothing. Each episode moves beyond theory, offering grounded conversations with people who have actually navigated these challenges. You'll hear them unpack the real work of identifying a true market need, the nuances of early hiring decisions, and the practical steps of crafting a go-to-market strategy. Fundraising, often a opaque process, gets broken down into more understandable components. The focus remains consistently on the actionable and the specific, providing a kind of audio manual for the foundational phase of a business. Tune in for a candid look at the less-glamorous, critical work that separates an idea from a viable company, all brought to you by Unusual Ventures. This podcast serves as a resource for turning those initial concepts into a sustainable operation, one hard-won lesson at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 53

Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
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