Right About Now with Ryan Alford - 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. 

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than 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 like right down my alley. Sometimes I 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 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 bunny 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. Shipmunk'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 share. So I'm 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 kind of jump into this crazy, wild 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 brands 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 uh in europe and it works you know it worked great as a side business when i was in school made some extra money uh some beer money uh you know wasn't a massive business but it was i think it gave me a pretty good foundation of just entrepreneurship and i really like 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 just kind of 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 without a lot of obstacles. And I think that, you know, it's for those of you guys that have started a business, it's anything but that. Contrary to the promotion, there is not an app for 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 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 of like hey this is where i started and this is where i am but like a lot of the the the tough journey that i've gone through right a lot of the kind of 20-hour days and uh you, 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, I'm, you know, 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, uh, you know, understand what, what, what entrepreneurship is about and be aware of kind of the things that they're getting into when, you know, before they're starting a business. Um, so anyway, so I, you know, kind of through our college, it was a, it was a, I really started understanding kind of the basics that they're getting into before they're starting a business. Anyway, through our college, I really started understanding the basics of business. I got basic understanding of accounting, marketing, sales, development, or engineering. 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. It was just a really, really good exercise in real life.

And then when I was graduating, I was deciding what do I want to do after 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. And 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 $45,000 or $50,000 in cash and then a bunch of other awards for services. And a free warehouse space for a year because they had this new building that they were opening by the university. So I took advantage of it. I got some mentorship through the program,

and really started kind of doing this full-time. Not what Shipmonger is today, but the package forwarding business. And then about, I would say, six months later, the U.S. dollar started getting really strong, and it suddenly started being a lot more expensive for brands, for people internationally to 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 of 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, I 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 US. 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 they were projecting like 2,000 orders a month at the time, and I was shipping a couple hundred, and although i was making a lot more money on it it was just

like it sounded exciting like 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 mid-market e-commerce space where you know with shopify this was 2014. So Shopify was starting to get really big and it opened up a lot of opportunities for anybody to just kind of come in and open their own company and really start selling their products online directly to the 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 uh they'll look for somebody like shipmunk to basically outsource all of the fulfillment logistics and because there was nobody at the time that was doing it we kind of like jumped straight in completely 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 a box and you ship it and that's it. 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 really build out the first

tech platform that we wanted to give to our customers to be able to manage their 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, right? 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, you know, started bringing on more customers, bootstrapped 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 month by month, year by year.

Brought in some amazing team members. And really we became, a couple of years, became the largest SMB mid-market fulfillment solution for companies out there. And, you know, we've obviously been riding this wave of e-commerce where it gives so many brands the opportunity to go direct to the 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. 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 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. So 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 a hundred, 200, how many ever that is I can sell in my first few months. But like you say on your website, which is a hundred percent 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, BigCommerce, 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, Al. Should have gone through this before. I could have told my story. No, but your story and your background was much more interesting from what took the business.

But I want to make sure people understand because a lot of people want to get into e-commerce. They're getting into e-commerce. They don't understand, 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 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 guys kind of are the – it's not the last mile. 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 in there.

Yeah, we like to think of ourselves as, you know, when you think of e-commerce, right, you've got kind of the Shopify or Magento, BigCommerce 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, reverse 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 you know we want to be kind of as transparent as possible to kind of give you that uh like view into the warehouse without actually owning the warehouse and you know and and 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, a thousand sales a day. Right. Within a month. And we've done that before for customers. And that's again, I think that's that would be very hard to do, right, if you're shipping out of your garage. And so having that infrastructure of, you know, not just one facility but kind of facilities around the world is what ultimately brings up the – it levels up the playing field compared to the big guys. And it's stuff that, you know, budding entrepreneurs or creators don't think about.

We work with new startups or whatever, and they have an amazing idea or 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 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, you know, 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 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 multimillion-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. We're a marketing and business podcast. about how you guys, I'm always curious, you know, we're a marketing and business podcast. I'm always curious, you know, the, uh, the nuts and bolts of how you guys acquire customers. I mean, how do people find you? What's, what's some of the, uh, if you could share it, the, uh, the marketing recipe for, uh, for ship for Shipmunk. Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, one of the, one of the first things that I, I mean, I'm, I'm a very passionate marketer and brander, if that's a word. But when we started ShipMonk, it was actually called Betabox Fulfillment originally, because Betabox was the original company, and then we just kind of added Fulfillment,

and then soon realized that this is 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, that changed the ship bunk from a branding 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 k 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 uh brand like like like if you think of probably any other industry maybe maybe mining and oil might be 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 targeting people like us, right? Like millennials, people that are starting their own businesses, entrepreneurs, people that want to work with a brand that they can somewhat relate to and not like a 60-, a 60 year old brand that their grandfather would use. And so we kind of looked at it and we're 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, and, and kind of taking the stress 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 Ship Monk, obviously, just kind of was playing well with it

and built a whole brand around the monk who we've kind of designed back in like 2016. And what we loved about the monk was that it was very flexible in the way that it was providing, like giving 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 customize it to whatever like we're doing right if it's a you know uh if it's a halloween uh we 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 set it up because i think it's pretty interesting um and so anyway so we came up with this brand and you know i think that was kind of the first step um and obviously you know we uh relied on the fact, and Kevin, my co-founder, who is kind of the mastermind behind all of our marketing and sales, he could talk a lot more details around kind of our sales strategy, marketing strategy. But 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 bang for the buck. frugal to really try to get the biggest bang 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 white papers, started publishing a ton of like blog articles, started publishing a lot of white papers, started publishing a ton of blog articles, posting in different forums to really build more of the being an authority on the subject. We started building this academy for e-commerce companies to really give them all the tools that they would need to start a business. And bringing in some different like guests for, you know, for packaging, for transportation, for other kind of parts

or product development sourcing. And we would just write these like really targeted articles 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 then at the same time, obviously, we're doing some paid stuff, social media. Not as much, actually, because our business is more B2B, so social is not huge for us. But it was something that we were doing. A little bit of trade shows, more kind of just visiting and putting our name out there. We built this costume of a monk that actually a person can go into. 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, 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 say, about a 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. So we continue to 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 Target's kind of the small customer, right, that's starting. And then the bigger, you know, 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 Reservice

and they're referring it to other people. So that's been probably the single biggest business source because especially in our industry, when you're looking for a fulfillment partner, you go to your friends, you ask them who they should use. And so building a really good network of partners and customer referral programs was crucial and really allowed us to build 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 marketing side. What do you think you're, you know, thinking about through some of that? You know, I heard a little bit bit you guys have fun with the monk. But if you were, and I know you've got the stress less, grow more, but is there a brand persona that you guys think you are? Is it we work hard, play hard? Is there kind of a persona that you think the brand has? Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, definitely work hard, play hard is more of my personal motto. I don't think we really bring that to work, but that's the one thing that I live by personally. I think the brand itself, our motto has been stress less, grow more. So that's kind's the key. We're really trying to take the stress out of fulfillment and allow customers to really focus on growth. It's interesting because our place is very – you work with a lot of people. There is a lot that can go wrong in logistics. Inevitably, yes. And so there is a lot that can go wrong in logistics like that 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. 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 saying that I would summarize that. But again, kind of goes back to like, stress, let's 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. Well, you make the complex easier. It might be how I would.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Cause there is a lot there. What, you know, if you're pretend I'm a, 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, 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. If I'm someone listening to the podcast and I'm thinking about getting into e-commerce, is there a couple notions or tips or anything like, hey, just be aware of this? Is there anything like that that, 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, 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. If you have a shitty product, it's never going to sell no matter how good of a marketer you are. So I would say that's kind of the first thing. And it doesn't necessarily have to be innovative.

I think a lot of people get hung up on, I need to build something that nobody's ever done before, 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, felt a belly flop 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 both right, they become ultimately kind of that – 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. And then I think it's really building and surrounding yourself by people that can really help you scale the brand. So I think given – 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 cover your blind spots.

If you're not very good at marketing, that doesn't mean you can't launch an e-commerce brand. One of my best friends who's also a really good customer of ours, he started a company called Brewmade. He knew nothing about marketing. He was maybe doing marketing for the first couple of months. He was an amazing product developer, but he just brought in the best marketers that he could find and helped them through that journey. So I think self-awareness and identifying your blind spots and really understanding where you personally, because in the beginning, it's going to be mostly you. In the beginning, it's going to be mostly you.

Identifying where you can bring in people to fill in those gaps is absolutely crucial to ultimately 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. I'm sitting here going, this is like music to my ears i thought i was like at a michael jackson concert hearing the the his greatest hits like while you were talking right there you can send me a vim over crush you know you never want to self-promote on your own podcast but um but when you're 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 than a shitty product sometimes. Like, you gotta 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 here in the latter part here of the interview

to the entrepreneurial journey for you. And I like to ask, you know, entrepreneurs this, I asked Michael Loeb, who started Priceline 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 uh i think generally speaking there's definitely

um 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 others or because i 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 and make something great whatever that was i know that was going to be really exciting i loved building things as a kid uh which i think was also like an additional kind of things that that was that was adding up to that experience. You know, I think there's entrepreneurship can't 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. If you're not handling stress well or you need support from others all the time, I don't think entrepreneurship is really for you. And I think there's a lot of other amazing jobs that probably a lot of people can do. But I think the reward of lot of, um, you know, other amazing jobs that probably a lot of people can do, but I think the, the, 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. Um, so I don't know if that answers the question, but 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 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. Like it's less that I am heartless or something like that, but somehow there's a

blind spot somewhere in me for the other side of risk. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs must have that because 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, I think about this a lot because I kind of look back at my journey and I look back and I'm like, okay, what makes me different? Or what did I do right to, to get to where I am and where the company is? And, you know, I get this, this,

uh, like syndrome, uh, imposter syndrome a lot of the times, cause 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. Uh, 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 uh but maybe that's kind of that like the thing that has allowed me to to get to where i am because i i try to find the best people that i could find and i was wrong a lot of the times right and and you know some people are an amazing fit for an early part of the business some people are great fit later uh there's so many things that we could be hours 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, like, okay, what am I trying to do here? And build 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 whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. So I was really, really lucky.

Early on, my two, three co-founders that I brought in 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 and they're all young guys but they left those jobs 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, um, uh, and have as much fun building something from scratch. And if they're going to be like, no, this is really not for me. And then they're not the right person, no, this is really not for me, then they're not the right person. You've got to find somebody that has that same mindset of risk taking 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 this natural curiosity too. 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 or process to solve an issue that you find, or I don't know what it is. 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? Where are we going with Shipmonk?

Yeah, let's say the last couple of months, I've had to do a lot more of that five-year thinking rather than the five minutes because I think that's, by the way, one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, I think, especially one without a prior experience like me. 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 you 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 bring in some of the top talent that we can from around the world.

So I can't yet share who it is, but we're about to bring on a COO who comes from a really, really impressive background. We're about to bring on a COO who comes from a really, really impressive background. So that's, you know, really, really excited about that hire 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 and underscore shipmunk um you know we also have a shipmunk instagram page at shipmunk uh or the shipmunk uh and on linkedin uh just jan bednar uh and uh our website www.shipmunk.com um i think those are kind of the best best channels awesome so you know where to find jan 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 key,

and you should consider Shipmunk. We really appreciate 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'm 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.