00:00
It has to start some time. 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.

00:30
Some incredible CEOs joined by another one here today. Jan Bednar, CEO of ShipBunk. What's up, Jan? Welcome to the show. What's up, Ryan? Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Excited to get into it. This is like right down my alley. Sometimes I gotta 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.

00:57
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, you know, that opportunity to kind of set up.

01:24
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, the origin story, if we call it, of Jan and everything Shipmunk. Yeah, yeah. Happy to, happy to share. So.

01:48
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, I just went to high school, then went to college, started my first business out of college. It was a package forwarding company, which doesn't really.

02:17
tell you anything but we actually did was we bought products that people couldn't get back in the day so this is 2008 and you know you had like Victoria 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 US and Europe and it was a good business at the time but it was just

02:47
buying a bunch of random stuff and selling it in Europe. And it worked great as a side business when I was in school, made some extra money, some beer money. It wasn't a massive business, but I think it gave me a pretty good foundation of just entrepreneurship. And 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, hey, you start working for yourself and...

03:14
things just gonna come your way and you're gonna 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 gonna just be like this fun journey with 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.

03:42
That's exactly right. And I think a lot of people will kind of see obviously the story on the outside, right? And I think even when I talk about it, I'm guilty of it of just sharing a lot of the positive stuff of like, hey, this is where I started and this is where I am. But a lot of the tough journey that I've gone through, right? A lot of the kind of 20 hour days and 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.

04:09
right now but in a bit I would love to dive into it a little bit because I think it's important for people to understand what entrepreneurship is about and be aware of the things that they're getting into before they're starting a business. So anyway, through our college I really started understanding the basics of business, like just got basic understanding of accounting and marketing and sales and development or engineering and just kind of…

04:36
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 after school, decided that I want to 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...

05:05
two of them and an accelerator 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 took advantage of it, got some mentorship through the program and really started kind of doing this full time. Not what's shipped by us today but the package forwarding business and then you know about

05:35
the US dollar started getting really strong and it suddenly started being a lot more expensive for brands, for people internationally to buy products in the US. And so the business started declining and I just was losing customers. And I pretty much thought I'm gonna go out of business and have to shut it down. And so I kind of look at like, okay, well, what am I doing here? I've got 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.

06:04
And I completely randomly 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. It was basically just like, hey, you 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. I was shipping a couple hundred and although I was making a lot more money on it, it was just like, it sounded exciting. Sign up one customer.

06:31
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 to anybody to just kind of come in and open their own company and really start selling their products online direct to consumer. And there wasn't anybody on the fulfillment side or very few that would be actually.

07:00
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 Shipwunk to basically outsource all of 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, the like.

07:27
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'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 a 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.

07:54
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, 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...

08:22
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 in some amazing team members and really we became, you know, a couple 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...

08:51
a garage in a way because they don't really have to have a lot of infrastructure to build a $100M company. And so I think that's been the most exciting part is seeing all these brands that we started working on early on. And in two, three, four years, they just started growing exponentially and building massive businesses with originally just an idea. And so being part of that was really rewarding. And so yeah, long story short, last year we partnered up with Summit.

09:20
to brought in basically $355M 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.

09:45
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 gonna recap for our listeners exactly what Shipmunk does. So I am a small to medium business.

10:14
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.

10:44
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. When that order takes place, that software talks with your software to let you know.

11:14
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.

11:37
Thanks, I should have gone through this before I could have told my story. No, your story and your background was much more interesting for what took the business. But I want to make sure people understand because a lot of people want to get into e-commerce or 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, you know,

12:08
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, it's all the miles getting in there.

12:31
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, 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.

12:59
reverse logistics, planning and management, a lot of reporting. So, for 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...

13:23
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 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.

13:52
you know, zero sales when you start to like, let's say 1000 sales a day, right. Within a month. If, and we've done that before for customers. And, uh, that's again, I think that's, that would be very hard to do, right. If you 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, um, brings up the, the, the, the, it levels up the playing field compared to the big guys. And it's stuff that, you know, you know,

14:21
budding entrepreneurs or creators don't think about. And we work with new startups 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, they know they've gotta ship it, they've gotta get it out, but they don't realize that nothing can kill their amazing product faster.

14:49
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, you know, we have a very spoiled consumer dynamic here in the US, probably everywhere, but definitely in the US.

15:16
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

15:46
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,

16:11
It was actually called better box fulfillment originally, uh, because better box was the original company. And then we just kind of added fulfillment and then soon realized that is not a great branding experience. And so we really wanted to, uh, come up with something different. I give a three cheers to whoever made that ship, uh, the, uh, that changed the ship bunk from a branding perspective. Smart move. You know, so, so what happened was when you look at the space, when I look at the space back in like 2015, right.

16:37
everybody we were competing with were these like really, really old school logistics companies back from like the eighties, the nineties. Um, all of them had like three letters as their name, like, you know, BCG or, or, you know, K K P a 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, brain, like, like, like, if you think of probably any other industry, maybe mining and oil might be more boring, but like,

17:05
Logistics had some of the least exciting brands that you would ever come across. And so we're like, 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-year-old brand that their grandfather would use. And so we kind of looked at it 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 …

17:34
harmony, peace, and taking the stress out of the equation. So a lot of people, logistics is very stressful. And so we wanted something Zen. And so we came up with the concept of a monk. And then Shipwunk obviously just was playing well with it. And built a whole brand around the monk, who we've designed back in 2016. And what we loved about the monk was that it was very flexible in the way that

18:02
It was providing, 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, like, modifications that we're doing to the monk, but like every holiday season, every, you know, like all kinds of things, like we basically changed the 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, if it's a Halloween.

18:27
we would change the mug to have like scars and carry like a pumpkin and stuff. There's a bunch of stuff. I'll set it up because I think it's pretty interesting. And so anyways, we came up with this brand and I think that was kind of the first step and obviously 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, he could talk a lot more details around kind of our sales strategy, marketing strategy.

18:54
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. And when Kevin started, he was one of the first employees and we basically, he said, look, 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 started publishing a lot of white papers, started publishing a ton of like block articles.

19:24
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. So we were bringing in some different guests for packaging, for transportation, for other kind of parts of our product development, sourcing, and we would just write these really targeted.

19:53
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, you know, some paid stuff, social media, not as much actually, because, you know, our business is more V2V, so 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

20:23
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 a year, year and a half ago.

20:48
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 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

21:18
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 to other people. So that's been probably the biggest, 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.

21:46
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. Um, on the, on the marketing side, the, um, 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.

22:16
is that we work hard, play hard. Is there kind of a persona that you think the brand has? Yeah, that's a good question. 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 of the key.

22:44
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 and so there is a lot that can go wrong in logistics, like inevitably is. So, trying to create an amazing brand experience in an environment where inherently a lot of things are going to go wrong is very challenging.

23:14
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 in, 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, on your business to, to enable it to grow. Yes.

23:43
uh, easier, uh, it might be how I would. Yeah. Right. Cause there is a lot there. What, um, you know, if you're pretend I'm a, uh, 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, and you can't be in their shoes for everything, but is there like, if

24:12
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, 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

24:41
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, right? 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 not that... I mean...

25:08
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.

25:37
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.

26:06
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 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, 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.

26:34
cover your blind spots, right? If you're not very good at marketing, that doesn't mean you can't launch an e-commerce brand. Like one of my best friends, who's also a really good customer of ours, started a company called Brewmade, right? Like he knew nothing about marketing. He was maybe doing marketing for the first couple months. He was an amazing product developer, but he just brought in the best marketers that he could find and 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 mostly you.

27:02
Identifying where you can bring in people to fill in those gaps is absolutely crucial to ultimately the success of the company. I'm going to have to make a note to my producer Riley to send you an extra couple of 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 the...

27:28
his greatest hits, like while you were talking right there. You can send me a Venmo request. You know, you don't wanna 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.

27:56
It is hard, nothing kills great marketing faster than a shitty product sometimes. If you get both of them right, then you probably have a 98% chance of success. So anyway, I love all that. I do wanna transition back here in the latter part here of the interview to the entrepreneurial journey for you. And I like to ask entrepreneurs this. I asked Michael Loeb.

28:26
who started Priceline and some other gigantic companies. And if there's an entrepreneurial gene, if there's like a characteristic, I know I'm not gonna 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,

28:54
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.

29:23
And not because I didn't want to work for others 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 loved 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't really be.

29:50
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.

30:19
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 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, but 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

30:46
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. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs must have that.

31:15
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 just, 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 at back and I'm like, okay, what makes me?

31:43
different or what did I do right to get to where I am and where the company is and you know I get 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.

32:10
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 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 hours here to kind of talk about a lot of those different mistakes that I made, but I think ultimately, it's you don't need to have a very specific skill set to be an entrepreneur. I think a lot of it is just understanding

32:39
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 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, 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, I got 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.

33:09
And they took the risk, they went from $100,000 paying a job, they're all young guys, but they left those jobs to come work for me for basically freeing some equity and some crazy vision that I had for this business. 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. You're never going to be able to make the money anywhere else and have as much fun.

33:38
building something from scratch. And if they're gonna be like, no, this is really not for me, then they're not the right person, right? You gotta find somebody that has that same mindset of risk taking and that's gonna be completely, it's gonna 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. Like, it's like, I have this, I don't know what it is. Like, I.

34:06
I don't consider myself always the best listener necessarily, but I think entrepreneurs just have this curiosity of deep curiosity in a lot of different things. That drives either learning about 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.

34:36
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 Shipmunk? Yeah, 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, by the way, one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, I think, especially one without a prior experience like me, like going from that super micro day-to-day

35:06
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 like bring in some of the top talent that

35:35
around the world, so we've, 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. So that's, you know, 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.

36:03
things like that, we're looking to open a European facility this year and then kind of open a couple more facilities in the US 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.

36:29
So all sales, 95% will be e-commerce. So I think you're a 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.

36:53
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. You know, we also have a Shipmunk Instagram page at Shipmunk or the Shipmunk and on LinkedIn, just Jan Badnar and our website www.shipmunk.com. I think those are kind of the best channels.

37:22
Awesome. So you know where to find Jan. You know where to find Shipmunk. If you are an e-commerce brand start and 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 dot rad dot cast on Instagram, theradcast.com. And you can find me at Ryan Alford on Instagram almost all day anytime, because I'm just seem to be addicted to Instagram. But what do you do?

37:50
Anyway, thank you, Jan. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.