Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You had a bit of cash that you could start ShipMonk with. You didn’t need to look outside for seed capital. 

Jan Bednar: Exactly. I already had one year for free on the warehouse. Everything else was set up within the warehouse. I was doing a lot of it myself along with my girlfriend. Other than that, very minimal capital investment.

When I needed to build the tech, I knew that there’s no way I can afford to hire developers and build out this tech with the money I had. I posted a job in a technical university in Czech Republic for an unpaid internship. I was going to take care of their flights, accommodation, and food.

Surprisingly, I got amazing candidates. I got 50 to 60. I evaluated them and ended up picking my co-founder who ended up being my CTO and started building the platform for free. I got him a visa eventually. He became an employee. He has been running our product and engineering ever since. 

Sramana Mitra: Where in Florida were you doing this from?

Jan Bednar: Fort Lauderdale.

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re in 2015. You have this young Czech guy who’s developing the product as an intern and then subsequently as an employee. What is the concept that you have been building with ShipMonk?

Jan Bednar: I was approached by a startup in Fort Lauderdale that raised a bunch of money for an Internet of Things company. They were just going to build a product for the Apple Home Kit platform. They had really big plans.

They’d read somewhere about this logistics startup. They thought I could take their product and ship it to their customers. They reached out to me. I started looking at the industry. It sounded like a huge opportunity. I started doing research.

I realized that there’s a massive market in e-commerce with brands. These are companies that create their own products and sell them directly to consumers through Shopify or any other platform. It was an extremely fast-growing market.

I saw an opportunity and thought, “Why don’t I try this?” A lot of the companies at that time were very old school. I thought I can build a brand and service that market. That’s exactly what we did. I brought in my college buddy who was my classmate. I gave him a job with no pay. It was commission only.

I said, “This is what we’re doing. We’re bringing on e-commerce companies, storing their products, integrating with their platforms, and then shipping out the orders.” For him, it was a great opportunity.

We hit the ground running. In mid-2015, it was just me, him, my girlfriend, and my CTO at that time. He was just going to trade shows. We were going to conferences and trade shows and telling people that we had this concept. That’s how we got the first few customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar
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