Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Explosive E-Commerce and Technology-Driven Fulfillment: B2B Brilliance from CEO and Founder of ShipMonk, Jan Bednar

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Welcome to another episode on The Radcast. In this episode, host Ryan Alford talks with the CEO and founder of ShipMonk, Jan Bednar.Jan started this company in 2014 with a mission to help small to medium-size businesses "stress less and grow more". The company has brilliant branding, an engaging mission, and an established list of satisfied customers.Ryan and Jan discuss the following topics:Marketing ShipMonk.What makes ShipMonk radically different from its competitors.Current trends for e-commerce and technology-driven fulfillment centers. To stay in touch with Jan and ShipMonk, follow their company on Instagram @theshipmonk | @jan_and_shipmonk | Visit their website: www.shipmonk.comIf you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love what we discuss, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @ryanalford If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better placed in here? What better time than now? Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It is getting through March of 2021 here. And we've had a spectacular list of CEOs this year. It seemed to have been the CEO podcast. I think we might need to rename the podcast, the CEO cast. I'm not sure. We've had some incredible CEOs joined by another one here today. Jan Bednar, CEO of Shipmunk. What's up, Jan? Welcome to the show. What's up, Brian? Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Excited to get into it. This is right down my alley. Sometimes I've got to admit we have guests. We run a digital agency here, and the podcast has become a big part of the agency. But we do have guests occasionally

that it's like out in left field, like trying to talk about a topic. But when you want to talk about fulfillment and e-commerce, let's get after it. This was right down the buddy hole for us. So I appreciate that from this standpoint. And I know we can get after it, but excited to talk some Shipmunk with you. Awesome, yeah, same here. So let's start, let's just get right into it. I like to give everyone and kind of give you that opportunity to kind of set up your background and your story. I know it's out there. It's been around for a number of years, but for our audience, you know, I'd love to give them just, you know, that entrepreneurial story, you know, for, you know, how things have started and, you know, kind of the origin story, if we call it, of Jan and everything Shipmunk. Yeah, yeah. Happy to, happy to share. So I'm, you know, from the Czech Republic originally, moved here when I was 17 to play hockey and just go to school and saw the land of opportunity. and I've always wanted to give it a shot.

So I moved here when I was 17 by myself to just going to jump into this crazy wild, you know, American Dream type lifestyle. Originally it was, it was, you know, I just went to high school, then went to college, started my first business out of college. It was a package forwarding company, which, you know, doesn't really tell you anything. But what we actually did was we bought products that people couldn't get back in the day. So this was 2008. And, you know, you had like Victoria's Secret,

Under Armour, Abercrombie, like all these brains that were kind of starting to figure out online, but not a lot of them have actually shipped to Europe. So we would be buying them in bulk and then sending them over to customers in Europe to kind of create this cross-bridge, you know, between the U.S. and Europe. And it was a good business at the time, but it was just kind of an arbitrage of buying a bunch of random stuff and selling it in Europe. And it works, you know, it worked great as a side business when I was in school, made some extra money, some beer money, you know, it wasn't a massive business, but it was, I think it gave me a pretty

good foundation of just entrepreneurship. And I really, you know, for the first time I realized that it's not as easy as some people make it seem. I think there's this illusion that entrepreneurship is like, you know, hey, you start working for yourself and things are just going to come your way and you're going to make all this money and then you don't really have to work. That's kind of how I grew up. Like I thought in this, that like entrepreneurship is the way to go and it's going to just be like this this fun journey uh without a lot of obstacles and i think that you know it's uh for those of you guys that i've started a business it's anything but that um although contrary to uh the promotion there is not an app for that that that's exactly right and i think you know i think a lot of

people kind of see obviously the the story on the outside right and and i think i i even when i talk about I'm guilty of it of like just sharing a lot of the positive stuff of like hey this is where I started and this is where I am but like a lot of the the tough journey that I've gone through right a lot of the kind of 20 hour days and you know days where

I just thought the whole business is going to go out of business I don't spend a lot of time on it so I can maybe not right now but in a bit I would love to kind of dive into it a little bit because I think it's important for people to you know understand what what entrepreneurship is about and be aware of kind of the

things that they're getting into before they're starting a business. So anyway, so kind of through our college, I really started understanding kind of the basics of business, right? Like just got basic understanding of accounting and marketing and sales and, you know, development or engineering and just got up. It was actually really helpful for me even in school because I could relate to everything I was learning and I could apply it to business. I went to business school.

So it was just like a really, really good exercise in real life. And then when I was graduating, I was deciding what do I want to do out of school? decided that I want to kind of start a business full-time. I won a couple of business bank competitions, which was an amazing start to the career because I didn't really, you know, I didn't have any money. I mean, I have some money saved up, but not a ton in this business bank competition. It was actually two of them and an accelerated program I got into. And they got me, I think overall, probably like 45 or 50K in cash and then a bunch of other like

awards for services. And, you know, and a free warehouse space for a year because they had this new building that they were opening. by the university. So it took advantage of it, got some mentorship through the program, and really started kind of doing this full time. Not what shipwung is today, but the package forwarding business. And then, you know, about, I would say, six months later, the U.S. dollars started getting really strong, and it suddenly started being a lot more expensive for brands, for people internationally through buy products in the U.S. And so the business started

declining and I just was losing customers. And, you know, I pretty much thought I'm going to go out business and had to shut it down. And so I kind of look at like, okay, well, what, what am I doing here? I've got, you know, warehouse, like ship some stuff internationally. Let me try to just go talk to other people and like see what makes sense if I can kind of somehow get some additional business in the U.S. And I completely randomly, I got a call from this guy that just raised a bunch of money for his Internet of Things company and they were looking for a fulfillment partner.

And I didn't even know what fulfillment was at the time. But it was basically just like, hey, you've got to store our stuff. we're going to send you orders and you're going to ship them. And, you know, they were projecting like 2,000 orders a month at the time. And, you know, I was shipping a couple hundred. And, you know, although I was making a lot more money on it, it was just like, it sounded exciting to sign up one customer and they would give me all this business. And so I started getting more into why they're coming to me and like what this market looks like.

And what I realized is that, you know, there's this massive opportunity in the SMB midmarket ecommerce space where, you know, with Shopify, this was 2014. So Shopify was serving it really big. And it opened up a lot of opportunities to anybody to just kind of come in and open their own company and really start selling their products online directly consumer. And there wasn't anybody on the fulfillment side or very few that would be actually servicing that type of customer on the fulfillment side. Because most people, when they come up with a product, they're amazing marketers. They might be great product development people. Very rarely, though, they're like logistics, supply chain people because that's not typically the most exciting part of the business.

So they'll look for somebody like Shepunk to basically outsource or the, fulfillment and logistics. And because there was nobody at the time that was doing it, we kind of like jumped straight in, completely naive about the, you know, like we just thought it was going to be so easy, right? Like you take a product, you put it in the box and you ship it and that said, well, it sounds very easy from the outside. Once you kind of dig into it and start dealing with multiple customers and it becomes

really, really painful. And, you know, one kind of thing that not a lot of people have figured out in the past. So brought in a co-founder who was kind of an engineer to. to really build out the first tech platform that we wanted to give to our customers to be able to manage an inventory and their orders. And also kind of create the warehouse management system to really operate the building because we weren't just like one customer. We had tens of customers that we needed to service in the building. Long story short, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but started bringing on more customers. Bootstrap the business from day one.

So we haven't raised outside capital. So the first 50,000 that I won from this business bank competition, I basically put into the business. And, you know, every day we were just making just a tiny little bit more money and putting that back into the business and completely organically grew, you know, month by month, year by year, brought some amazing team members. And really, we became, you know, a couple of years became the largest kind of SMB mid-market fulfillment solution for companies out there. And, you know, we've obviously been writing this wave of e-commerce where it gives so many brands the opportunity to go direct to consumer and really build a massive company basically out of, you know, a garage in a way because they, you know, they don't really have to have a lot of infrastructure to build a $10, $100 million company. And so I think that's been the most exciting part of seeing all these brands that we started working on early on. And, you know, in two, three, four years, they just started growing exponentially and building massive businesses. with, you know, originally just an idea.

And so being part of that was really rewarding. And so, yeah, long story short, you know, we've, last year we partnered up with Summit to brought in basically $355 million of kind of growth equity capital to really just continue to dominate the fulfillment world and do some acquisitions, enhance the technology, do some more of geographical expansions, and just ultimately bring the best fulfillment solution to this fast-growing Shopify world and not just Shopify, right? Like we're doing a lot of other channels that we're working with as well.

But that's the vision is to really kind of democratize, that word is tough one, democratize fulfillment for small businesses to enable them to compete with larger brands that might have a lot more infrastructure. I love it. I'm going to recap for our listeners exactly what Shipmunk does. I am a small to medium business. I've decided to get into e-commerce or I'm in e-commerce, and I've made a wonderful product,

and I want to sell starting small, 50, 100, 200, how many ever that is I can sell in my first few months. But like you say on your website, which is 100% true working with e-commerce brands, the hardest part of e-commerce is getting the product to the customer. So you guys will accept, let's pretend I'm a mug maker. I send custom mugs, whatever. I send you 500 custom mugs-ish, whatever.

You put them on the shelf. And when my customers order on my e-commerce, Shopify site, I'm sure you have a lot of other integrations, big commerce, others, Magento, all the major platforms, I'm sure. and when that order takes place, that software talks with your software to let you know that Jan Smith in Utah just ordered this mug and you take it off the shelf, you box it, package it,

and you ship it to Jan. And you take care of all of getting the product to the customer for a reasonable cost for new business. Is that correct? There it is. That's absolutely right. Thanks, I'll have gone to this before. I could have told my story.

No, but your story and your background was much more interesting, you know, from what took the business. But I want to make sure people understand because a lot of people want to get in e-commerce or getting into commerce. They don't understand, you know, not to mention the entrepreneurial journey you've gone on, which I do want to get down and talk about that. But the realities of taking, you know, great ideas, great products and everything that happens with that, Shopify has kind of democratized the web experience. And there's other platforms, but we're a Shopify partner.

We push a lot of clients to Shopify because of their ease and simplicity and other things. And, you know, you guys kind of are the, it's not the last mile. It's all the miles getting him there. Yeah, we like to think about ourselves as, you know, when you think of e-commerce, right, you've got kind of the Shopify or Magento, Big Commerce platform, right, which kind of manages the front end of the experience. And then Shipmong is everything on the back end of the experience. So, you know, the platform we've built is not just a solution that takes the orders and then processes them and then, you know, we physically ship the products. But it also does a lot of like inventory management, order management, uh, reversely. logistics, planning and management, a lot of reporting.

So, you know, for a small business that doesn't necessarily have like this supply chain or an operations team in place, we try to kind of be the operations supply chain team through our technology to really give our customers the ability to forecast inventory and really kind of remove the barrier of, we want to add transparency into the entire process. So we want to make sure when you ship us your inventory, right, like you just put your life savings into a product, when you ship us your inventory, we want to make sure that we're allowing you to track it throughout the process, you know, exactly what's going on with it, what the status the orders are in, and we want to be kind of as transparent as possible to kind of give you that

like view into the warehouse without actually owning the warehouse. And, you know, and at the same time give you the absolute scalability to be able to go from, you know, zero sales when you start to like, let's say, thousand sales a day, right, within a month. And we've done that before. for for customers. And that's, again, I think that would be very hard to do, right, if you're shipping out your garage. And so having that, that infrastructure of, you know, not just one facility, but kind of facilities around the world is what ultimately brings up the, the, the, it levels up the playing

field compared to the big guys. And it's stuff that, you know, you know, budding entrepreneurs or creators don't think about. And, you know, we work with, you know, new, start. or whatever and they have an amazing idea, an amazing product, or we work in cosmetics and organic beauty and things like that, and the products are amazing. But what they don't think about is, you know, they know they've got to ship it, they've got to get it out, but they don't realize that nothing can kill their amazing product faster

than it taking 17 days for it to get to the customer. You know, like, it's just, we live in an Amazon world. and even though people recognize, especially now with COVID that slowed things down a bit, I think people have maybe gotten a little this much more patient with shipping and fulfillment. They're still very impatient. We have a very, you know, we have a very spoiled consumer dynamic here in the U.S., probably everywhere, but definitely in the U.S. And you can have this amazing product and you can spend all this time and you've got a beautiful website. And then it all falls apart, getting the product to the customer.

You've never heard that story, right? You've built a multi-million dollar business on that very premise, but it is a very important part of the process. So talk to me about how you guys, I'm always curious, you know, we're a marketing and business podcast. I'm always curious, you know, the nuts and bolts of how you guys acquire customers. I mean, how do people find you? What's some of the, if you could share it,

the marketing recipe for Shipmunk. Yeah, so I think, you know, one of the first things that, I mean, I'm a very passionate marketer and brander, that's a word. But, you know, when we started Shipmunk, it was actually called Betterbox fulfillment originally because BettaBox was the original company and then we just kind of added fulfillment and then soon realized that it's not a great branding experience. And so we really wanted to come up with something different. I give three cheers to whoever made that ship,

the change the shipmunk from a braining perspective. Smart move. You know, so what happened was when you look at the space, when I look at the space back in like 2015, right, everybody we were competing with were these like really, really old school logistics companies back from like the 80s, the 90s. All of them had like three letters as their name, like, you know, BCG or, you know, KPA. And it's like, what the hell does any of this mean?

acronyms from the periodic table. Yeah, exactly. It was like the most boring brand. Like, like, if you think of probably any other industry, maybe mining and oil might be even more boring. But like logistics had some of the like least exciting brands that you would ever come across. And so we're like, well, we're, you know, we're targeting people like us, right?

Like millennials, people that are starting their own businesses, entrepreneurs, people that want us work with a brand that they can somewhat relate to and not like, you know, a 60-year-old brand that their grandfather would use. And so we kind of looked at it and were like, okay, we got to do something different, right? Logistics is very stressful. It's very antiquated.

We want to build a brand around like a harmony piece and kind of taking distress out of the equation. So a lot of people, logistics is very stressful. And so, you know, we wanted something zen. And so we kind of came up with the concept of a monk. And then, you know,

shipmunk obviously just kind of was playing well with it. And build a whole brand around, you know, the monk who we've kind of designed back in like 2016 and what we really, you know, what we loved about the monk was that it was very flexible in the way that it was provided, like, give us a lot of ability

to play with the brain. So I don't know if you've ever seen any of our modifications that we're doing to the monk, but like every holiday season, every you know, like all kinds of, like we basically changed a monk to whatever the occasion is. And so it gives us kind of an amazing like branding

opportunity to really customer it to whatever like we're doing, right? If it's a, you know, if it's a Halloween, we would like change the monk to have like scars and, and, you know, carry like a pumpkin and stuff. Like there's a bunch of stuff. I'll send it up because I think it's pretty interesting. And so anyway, so we came up with this brand. And, you know, I think that was kind of the first step.

And obviously, you know, we relied on the fact that, and Kevin, my co-founder, who is kind of the mastermind behind all of our marketing and sales, he is, you know, he could talk a lot more details around kind of our sales strategy, marketing strategy. But we, we, you know, we didn't really have a lot of money to just kind of throw in marketing. So originally we were extremely frugal to really try to get the biggest bank for the buck. And, you know, when Kevin started, he was one of the first employees. And we basically, he said, look, like we, you know, we don't have a lot of capital. We have to start with something that's the most economical.

So we started just doing like a ton of organic, free SEO, basically. So, you know, started publishing a lot of work. White papers started publishing a ton of like block articles, posting in different forums to really build like, you know, more of the more of the like being an authority, right, on the subject. We started building this, this academy for e-commerce companies to really give them all the tools that they would need to start a business. So we were, you know, and bringing in some different like guests for, you know,

for packaging, for transportation, for other kind of parts or product developments. sourcing and we would just write these like really targeted articles on on different topics. And so that really started like, you know, it took about a year, six to 12 months to really start driving a lot of traffic. And and then at the same time, obviously we're doing, you know, some paid stuff, social media, not as much actually because, you know, our business is more B2B as social is not huge for us. But it was, you know, something that we were doing. A little bit of like trade shows, more kind of just visiting and like putting our name out there. We built this costume of a monk that actually a person can go into, right?

And so we would just take that and run it across all the different shows and, you know, just getting a lot of people's attention and just kind of build that brand recognition. So that definitely wasn't driving like specific leads to the website, but it was just better for brand recognition. And so like our, you know, our marketing budget has been like extremely slim ever since the beginning. We really started kind of increasing the budget, I would say about like the year, year and a half ago. but most of the leads that we get are organic so about 80% of our leads are organic 20% paid and you know and that just so we continue to kind of build on that foundation of really trying to be helpful first and then selling second right because you know we want to make sure

that we can explain to people everything that they need to know to start the business and then obviously targets kind of the small customer right that's starting and then the bigger you know But the other piece of this equation, which is, I guess, more like sales strategy is really about referrals and building a community of people that really like service and they're referring it through other people. So that's been probably the single biggest business kind of source because, like, especially in our industry, when you're looking for a fulfillment partner, you go to your friends, you ask them like what, you know, with who they should use.

And so building a really good network of partners and customer kind of referral programs was crucial and really allowed us to build like an amazing community of people that every time somebody asks them, they just send them to us. And that's been a massive driver of our revenue and just new customers growth. I love it. A lot to unpack there on the on the marketing side. What do you think you're, you know, thinking about through some of that. You know, I heard a little bit, you guys have fun with the monk. But like if you were, and I know you've got like the stress less grow more, but is there like a brand? persona that you guys think you are like you know is it is that we work hard play hard is it like

is there kind of a persona that that you think the brand has yeah it's a good question uh we i mean definitely work hard play hard is more of my personal motto i don't think we really we don't really bring that to work but uh that's you know that's the one one thing that i live by personally uh i think the brand itself like our motto has been stressed less more so that that's kind of the key, really decision, like we're really trying to take the stress out of fulfillment and allow customers to really focus on growth. So we're, you know, trying to be, and, you know, it's interesting because our place is very, you know, you're working with a lot of people, and so there is a lot that can go wrong in

logistics, like the inevitably is. And so trying to create an amazing brand experience, right, in an environment where inherently a lot of things are going to go wrong is very challenging. And so building that type of mindset of like, hey, well, you know, things are going to go wrong inevitably. A lot of the times outside of our control, sometimes in our control, but we're always going to be there to fix it and make sure that we're your partner in growth. So I don't know if there's like a, you know, a say that I would summarize that in.

But again, kind of goes back to like stress less grow more, which means that we want to take that stress on and allow you to really focus on your business to enable it to grow. Yes, you make the complex easier, it might be how I would. Yeah, yeah, right? Because there is a lot there. What, you know, if you're, pretend I'm a business owner or someone that's, you know, getting in the e-commerce game or a brand that's getting into it, you guys work with so many you've seen kind of the ups and the downs.

Is there like, I know there's always a million things and you can't be in their shoes for everything. But is there like, if I'm someone listening to the podcast and I'm thinking about getting into e-commerce, is there like a couple notions or tips or anything like, hey, just be aware of this or just consider, is there anything like that that just comes naturally top of mind? Yeah, you know, I try to look at some of the best customers that we not, well, the highest, the best performing customers that we've been lucky enough to work with. And I think at the end of the day, it does come down to, I would say, core two or three things.

Number one is the product. You know, if you have a shitty product, it's never going to sell, no matter how good of a market or you are. So I would say that's kind of the first thing, right? And it doesn't necessarily have to be innovative. You know, I think a lot of people get hung up on I need to build something that nobody's ever done before at like completely new category. And I think, you know, not that, I mean, copying is a whole another subject that I think I would strongly discourage from doing that. But I think like taking, you know, like you don't have to reinvent the world to have a successful brand. Like I think, you know, when you look at apparel, like it's very difficult to innovate in apparel.

Yet there's new successful apparel companies that are launching every single day. And so what I think is really important is building that amazing product and understanding your audience of who you're really going after. And then the second piece of this is the marketing part, right? So some of the best products that we've worked with that did not have that marketing component to it completely failed kind of, you know, belly flopped and just didn't really ever take off. And, you know, we actually had products that I would question their quality or their potential for success. But they were run by amazing marketers that would take the products and just market the hell out of them and made a lot of money, right? And so I think when you get the, when you get both right, they become ultimately kind of that like, I don't want to call it recipe for success because that's such a cliche. But it is something that I think is the most important kind of elements or formula for starting an e-commerce company.

Right. And then I think it's really building and surrounding yourself by people that can, you know, really help you kind of scale the brain. So I think given, you know, like some people are just naturally really good marketers. they don't know anything about product design. So you should bring in amazing product designers to help you kind of cover your blind spots. If you're not very good in marketing, that doesn't mean you can't launch an e-commerce brain. Like one of my best friends who's also a really good customer of ours, you started a company called Brumade, right? Like he knew nothing about marketing.

He was maybe doing marketing for the first, you know, a couple of months. He was an amazing product developer. But he just brought in the best marketers that he could find and, you know, help them through that journey. So I think self-awareness and identifying your blind spots and really understand where you personally, because in the beginning it's going to be most of you. Identifying where you can bring in people to fill in those gaps is absolutely crucial to ultimately be a success of the company. I'm going to have to make a note to my producer, Riley, to send you an extra couple grand for calling out the importance of marketing as a digital agency. Like I'm sitting here going, this is like music to my ears.

I thought I was like at a Michael Jackson concert hearing his great. greatest hits like while you were talking right there. You consider me a Vimover crush. You know, you don't want to self-promote on your own podcast, but when you're playing up the importance of marketing, and we tend to agree here at Radical with that notion, but no, in all seriousness. But it is funny. My creative director and I were talking this morning, you can put lipstick on a pig sometimes,

but it is hard. Nothing kills great marketing faster. and a shitty product sometimes. Like, you got to get, if you get both of them right, then you probably have a 98% chance of success. So anyway, I love all that. I do want to transition back, you know, here in the latter part here of the interview

to your, you know, the entrepreneurial journey for you. And I like to ask, you know, entrepreneurs this. I asked Michael Loeb, who started Price Line and some other gigantic companies. And, you know, if there's an entrepreneurial gene, if there's like a characteristic, I know I'm not going to ask you to put that on everyone or you know exactly what it is, but is there something in you that's innate or is there a characteristic that stands out to you being an entrepreneur? Yeah, I think there's definitely, I don't know if it's a gene,

but I think there's a certain personality type that you want to be when you want to start a business. And not that there isn't successful entrepreneurs that are kind of unlike most other entrepreneurs. But I think generally speaking, there's definitely a little bit about, like when I was a kid, I've always known that I kind of wanted to start my own business. Although I knew nothing about it, I was completely naive to just kind of think how easy it's going to be, right? But I've always wanted to, and not because I didn't want to work for other. or because I didn't, you know, like, it was just something that I felt like if I can kind of put a bunch of things together and make something great, whatever that was, I know that was going

to be really exciting. I love building things as a kid, which I think was also like an additional kind of things that was adding up to that experience. You know, I think there's entrepreneurship can really be taught. You can learn a lot to be a better entrepreneur, but I think there's something about, the risk taking, the being comfortable with the uncomfortable, the ability to recognize patterns and hire the best people that you can hire, there's something about that that I think makes things a lot easier. You know, if you're not handling stress well or, you know, you don't like,

you need support from others all the time. Like, I don't think entrepreneurship is really for you. And I think there's a lot of, you know, other amazing jobs that probably a lot of people can do. But I think the reward of entrepreneurship is probably one like none. There's not a lot of other things you can do that would give you the same type of reward. So I don't know that answers the question. No, I think it does. I think, you know, being an entrepreneur myself, you know, a few times over, I think you just nailed it. I never heard it put that way, but I think you really nailed it.

I think I have a blind spot and I think a lot of entrepreneurs do for risk and the negative side of risk. I think I have a blind spot for like I can take risk and not worry. It's less that I am heartless or something like that, but I just somehow there's a blind spot somewhere in me for the other side of risk. You know, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs must have that because you would get, I see other people and you get so paralyzed. You get paralysis from analysis because you see the other side of the risk, you see the downside so much, it just encompasses you.

And I've never had that. I don't sense that in you, but I've never thought about it that way, but I think that's a huge one. Yeah, no, I think about this a lot because I kind of look back in my journey and I look back and I'm like, okay, what makes me different

or what did I do right to get to where I am and where the company is? And, you know, I get this, this, like, syndrome, imposter syndrome a lot of the times because I'm like, I'm not special in any way. Like, I don't have some sort of a secret skill that would allow me to do all these things, right? I'm not, you know, an amazing marketer. I'm not an amazing sales guy. Like, I can do a little bit of everything and I just enjoy learning about it and then putting it together. But maybe that's kind of that, like, the thing that has allowed me to get to where I am because I try to find the best people that I could find.

And I was wrong a lot of the times, right? And, you know, some people are an amazing fit for an early part of the business. Some people are a great fit later. There's so many things that we could be ours here to kind of talk about a lot of those different mistakes that I made. But, you know, I think ultimately it's, you know, you don't need to have like a very specific skill set to be an entrepreneur. Like I think a lot of it is just understanding the world we live in, the goal, like kind of

purpose driven, right, to try to identify, like, okay, what am I trying to do here and built a plan around that goal and ultimately force and get enough people around you to be able to get to that same goal and share, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, right? So I was really, really lucky. One of the, you know, early on, my kind of two, three co-founders that I brought in, kind of in year one, didn't have any money to pay them. So I gave them a little bit of equity, a little bit of cash. And, you know, I like, and they took the risk.

Like, they went from a hundred thousand dollar paying, you know, a job. They're all young guys, but they left those jobs to come work for me for basically free and some equity and some like crazy vision that I had for this business, right? And so what I had to do a really good job on is selling them on the concept of, hey, this is what we're doing. This is where we're going. This is what if everything works out, this is where we're going to be, right? Like you're never going to be able to make the money anywhere else and have as much fun building something from scratch. And if they're going to be like, no, this is really not for me. Then they're not the right person, right?

you've got to find somebody that has that same mindset of risk-daking and, you know, and that's going to be completely, it's going to change the game because I couldn't ever get here without those people that joined me early on. I think you have to have like this natural curiosity too. Like I, it's like, it's like I have this, I don't know what it is. Like I don't consider myself always the best listener necessarily, but like I'm all, I think entrepreneurs just have this curiosity. of deep curiosity in a lot of different things.

And it's not just, and it's like, and that drives like either learning about, you know, a system of process to solve an issue that you find or I don't know what it is. I think it's, I think that's another one of those, there's several characteristics, but kind of heard that in some of your things. It sounds like your partners do as well. So, I mean, where's this all going, Jan? What's the next five years look like or five minutes, depending on how you think? What's, where are we going with Shipmunk?

Yeah, let's say the last couple, let's say the last couple months, I've had to do a lot more of that five-year thinking rather than the five minutes because I think that's, you know, by the way, one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur thing, especially one without a prior experience like me. Like, you know, going from that super micro day-to-day operational stuff to more of a macro strategy, it's really, really challenging. and the ability to go really deep and then really high up to the macro viewpoint is super important, especially as the company gets larger. And I've never really done a great job at it. But I think I've been getting a little better. And, you know, as I build out the team, I've been able to take a little bit of a step back to be more strategic. But to answer your question, the number one focus right now is to really like bring in some of the top talent that we can from around the world.

So we've, I can't yet share who it is, but we're about to bring on a COO who, It comes from a really, really impressive background. So that's really, really excited about that, higher, as well as chief product officer and a couple other kind of key roles that we're trying to fill in. We're trying to, you know, we're looking at a couple of potential acquisitions to expand some strategic kind of value add services, geographical expansion, things like that. We're looking to open a European facility this year and then kind of open a couple more facilities in the U.S. and then just continuing to do what we've been doing over the last couple of years. So really just trying to build the best possible experience

and enable brands to stress less and grow more. Hey man, you're really doing it. They say by 2040, 95% of e-commerce will be all sales. So all sales, 95% will be e-commerce. So I think you're well positioned, brother, and already changing the game, and I see big things ahead for Shipmunk and look forward to continuing our dialogue

and learning more about you and stuff like that. You've done a lot, but I can see big things coming for you guys. Let's do one thing before we leave Jan. Where can everybody keep up with you and everything Shipmunk? Where are the good channels? Yeah, so I'm on Instagram,

Jan underscore Nt, underscore Shipmunk. You know, we also have a Shipmong Instagram, page at Shipmunk or the Shipmunk. And on LinkedIn, just Jan Bednar and our website, www.shipmong.com. I think those are kind of the best channels. Awesome. So you know where to find Jan. You know where to find Shipmunk. If you are an e-commerce brand starting, you need to worry about fulfillment and getting it turned turn key. And you should consider Shipmunk. We really appreciate Shan, Jan Bednar coming on today. Thank you, Jan. You know where to find us. We're at the.rad.cast on Instagram, theradcast.com.

And you can find me at Ryan Offord on Instagram, almost all day anytime, because I just seem to be addicted to Instagram. But what do you do? Anyway, thank you, Jan. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.