First customersPublished 2021-02-23 · founder reported
Follow the pain after the purchase button
How Shippo approached first customers.
What they did
Shippo’s founders found that setting up a store and accepting payments was relatively easy, while dealing with shipping and carrier interfaces was not. They switched to working on shipping software and learned from small merchants.
Reported outcome
The 2021 account reported serving more than 70,000 ecommerce businesses; it distinguishes shipping activity from the company’s own revenue.
An idea to test, from Afterlaunch
An apparently solved workflow may still contain a painful handoff into the physical world.
Small experiment: Observe five customers after they complete the main transaction and identify the next manual task they must perform.
A company’s reported outcome doesn’t prove one tactic caused it. Treat this as a hypothesis.
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