[EP 13] Modern Merchant Podcast: Special Guest, Jim w/ ShipEngine

Below, you will find a transcript of the episode.

Austin Rose:

All right. Hey, thanks for jumping on our Modern Merchant Podcast. I’m your host Austin. With me, as always, I have Travis Mariea, CEO of Flxpoint. In today’s episode, we have a very special guest. It is the general manager, Jim at ShipEngine. Jim, thanks for jumping on. I appreciate it.

Jim Gagliardi:

Likewise, thanks for having me.

Austin Rose:

Of course, of course, we always love bringing on companies that either we work with or we partner with, get some insight in e-commerce, software, APIs, things like that. You guys, as being ShipEngine, a part of the Octane portfolio, you guys hear the likes of ShipStation, ShipWorks, ShippingEasy. ShipEngine we work with pretty well. I’m super excited to have you on and really just to kick us off, give us a quick little overview of ShipEngine and what you currently do with the company.

Jim Gagliardi:

Sure, great. Thanks, Austin. Yeah. I’m the general manager for ShipEngine. Overall, I’m responsible for the overall business and growing that business. I spend a lot of time talking to our customers on what they need and where they’re seeing the market and how ShipEngine can add value to what they’re trying to do from a shipping perspective. Ultimately, at its core, ShipEngine is an API-first, multi-carrier shipping solution.

Jim Gagliardi:

What that means is we go out and integrate to all the shipping carriers around the world. We have about 80 of them now that we then normalize to be able to provide a more seamless integration for our partners to leverage. We predominantly focus on working with ERP solutions, warehouse management solutions, order management solutions, e-commerce platforms, POS solutions, but also high-end or more customized solutions required for merchants themselves. We work with a high number of merchants that are looking for a customized workflow where our API solution would be a better fit than say ShipStation, ShipWorks or ShippingEasy.

Austin Rose:

Gotcha. How did you get started with the company?

Jim Gagliardi:

It actually goes back a number of years. I moved to Austin, Texas, which is where ShipStation and the rest of the brands are headquartered. Moved here about eight years ago. Just part of my networking to get embedded into the business scene here, connected with the folks at ShipStation. It was about the time that they were in the process of creating what is now ShipEngine. Ultimately, what ShipEngine was spun out of ShipStation as an API product is how it was really started and had the opportunity to meet the folks at ShipStation as they were going through that process.

Jim Gagliardi:

Based off of what I did previously, there was some good alignment and good discussions about lesson learned in what ShipStation was trying to do with their API product. Over the course of a few years when the opportunity came up that they were looking to actually turn it into a standalone business, I got the call to see if I was interested in making the move to lead this business.

Austin Rose:

Gotcha. Travis, you had a good question kind of starting out here. I think this kind of scene is nice in regards to the background. You kind of give us a quick little background, but the background of ShipEngine and how that was launched off of ShipStation. Take us back to that moment, at least from what you know, how did that all work? I don’t know, Travis, if you have a specific question on that front.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, just specifically, I guess, Jim, just I would love to be kind of, the wheels were already in motion when you joined, but just anything that you’ve learned just being there. Fly on the wall, like was it, “Hey, this is a great idea. We should spin this off.”? Was there negotiation talking about who’s going to be on the ShipEngine team? I’m just curious about any insight there that you have. Because it’s always interesting, we’ve had inventory sources of the brand and we’ve kind of spun off Flxpoint as our upmarket brand. We’ve kind of gone through a similar transition. I’m just, I would love to learn more about how that went.

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah. Yeah, originally, frankly, we started seeing customers, and again, this predates me, but there were customers on ShipStation that were bumping up against the headroom of the capabilities within ShipStation’s native workflow. There wasn’t a lot of flexibility that you had in terms of the feature set and it deeply integrated that capability. They had built out some APIs, but not to the point of really going after, again, those customers that were doing excess of 10,000 shipments a month, et cetera. They did spin off a team to focus on really looking at how do we more or less build a facade, an API facade, around ShipStation to extend its capabilities to allow for customers to interact with it from an API perspective.

Jim Gagliardi:

But through that process, really what then started to come out was, “Hey, we should start modernizing the technology that was built on ShipStation and start to build out micro-services and really start to leverage from that perspective as well as it was … it really started as an augmentation to ShipStation. But as we started getting into the development and the conversation started to flow, again as I noted earlier, we saw this as an opportunity to plug our shipping capabilities into the ERP systems, into warehouse management systems, natively into these commerce platforms and the like.

Jim Gagliardi:

It was at that stage that we decided, “Hey, we’re going to break this off and actually have a clean break between the two with its own P&L, with its own sales leadership, its own engineering and product organizations, its own support staff and the like.” It really then diverged from there. That started happening around 2018 or so is when that break really started to happen. There was a dedicated sales organization to go after and provide a shipping solution predominantly to platforms. Then, at that point, to customers that were outgrowing ShipStation or needed to augment what they were doing on ShipStation. Since then, now we obviously go and we’ve got our own pipeline independent of those customers that are also looking for ShipStation workflow-type products.

Travis Mariea:

Very cool. Very cool, yeah. I’m curious, I’d love to kind of double-click into the whole building out the sales org and really switch … it’s a very different sales motion, right? I’m assuming you guys sell it … would you say developers is your primary persona you’re going after? With ShipEngine or ShipStation, it’s the merchant, right? I’m curious how that really just in general, selling to developers, building out your go to market for ShipEngine and building that sales team, I would love to know more about that progression in the last three years.

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. Obviously, again, leveraging just ShipStation, but even ShipStation and ShippingEasy, the merchant, all of our products, frankly, the merchant is still at the center of our universe. Still trying to serve the merchants, even though in our case for ShipEngine, we predominantly are partnering and offering our capabilities to platforms, it’s still our platform that is in service of their merchants as we look at that.

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, for the first couple of years, it was really building out an organization where we were very, very developer-focused. We still are, obviously, very developer-focused in developing a whole strategy around how to speak to developers. We brought in a leader of developer experience to really sort of drive how we should be building the products, building our APIs and speaking to the developer community.

Jim Gagliardi:

It was a lot of just target messaging to the specific developers. Of course, what we’ve learned is developers predominantly have become the influencer over decision-makers. Those aren’t necessarily the same people. We still spend a lot of time talking to the developers, influencing the developers, trying to get the developers to leverage and use our capabilities. Then at that point, then start talking to the business users, the merchants, whichever the decision maker is, the business owner on that side and what value then ShipEngine can bring to the business side, not just the developer side.

Travis Mariea:

Certainly, and just that bottom-up approach where you get them as your champion, you get them in, kind of provide them the materials, enable them to really help, kind of translate information and almost pitch to the decision-maker for you and in a lot of cases make it easy.

Jim Gagliardi:

That’s exactly right. That’s why it all rolls down even into our pricing model. When we first launched, it was entirely a pay-as-you-go plan where you only pay for that specific usage. That’s still a predominant use case for us is developers signing up getting their API key and starting using the product. It’s fractions of pennies to start creating labels or tracking, et cetera, et cetera, in terms of whatever their shipping needs are.

Jim Gagliardi:

Then, of course, we’ve got platform economics that go along with that, that price comes down. That’s then where enterprise sales comes into play to say, “All right, we’re seeing that you’re doing more than 10,000 shipments a month. You’re doing 100,000 shipments a month. You’re doing a million shipments a week,” those types of things. All right, well, let’s lay out a committed use-type plan that will then obviously reduce their overall shipping costs.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see that in the model, for sure. I’m curious, would you say that ShipEngine is definitely, there’s no doubt about it, all the ships, ShippingEasy, ShipStation, everyone kind of benefited from this direct-to-consumer movement and really just ultimately more parcel than freight happening. I mean, that’s kind of the wave that we’re running, a lot of us are running where there’s more people who are equipped to ship our parcel. There’s three 3PLs popping up, all of that direct-to-consumer, drop shipping. If someone’s shipping freight a good portion of what they’re doing and they also might be doing parcel or looking to get into parcel, how did they look at ShipEngine? Does ShipEngine benefit someone that’s shipping primarily freight or not so much?

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, again, your point is exactly right. Obviously, the volume that’s running through any of the Octane products, again, which includes ShipEngine, ShipStation, ShippingEasy, ShipWorks is predominantly going to be related to parcel shipments, which in very general terms is going to be something that’s less than 50 pounds, et cetera. You guys might have your own definition of that, but that’s the oversimplified version of that, anything that’s coming to your house from Amazon, which we all know and love. That is the predominant use case for us. We did actually roll out just this year an LTL offering as well.

Travis Mariea:

Did you?

Jim Gagliardi:

Now we have 27 LTL carriers as part of our portfolio. The primary driver for us is, like you said, it’s still augmenting their parcel. Look at merchants that are auto parts as an example. Most of their products will fit inside of a parcel, but they’re also then sending engines. It’s like, “Okay, well, how do we handle that?” The workflow for those customers was they were going off and directly integrating or just directly working with a specific LTL carrier as an example. We’ve seen a shift in that the predominant influx of customers that are looking for ShipEngine is parcel, plus some portion of their products is LTL, but we expect over time that we’ll see a healthy balance of more customers looking at LTL as part of our solution.

Jim Gagliardi:

One of the things that we end up talking about internally is around how do we support beyond parcel? Obviously, LTL would certainly fit into that. But even just in general, one of the things we’ve talked about even recently, to your point about sort of balancing the supply chain, that more and more warehouses and 3PLs, et cetera, are supporting that direct-to-consumer model instead of through distribution, inbound inventory and the like. But even just recently, you’ve seen, obviously, the shipping delays at all these ocean ports or sea ports. It’s sort of this balance that needs to happen if that is still a good strategy for a portion of your products, but doing things like cross-border fulfillment and air shipments and just that straight B to C-type of shipment, it may cost more. It’s, obviously, potentially more economical to do ocean, but there’s also the avenue of customers are still willing to potentially pay more for shipping if they know they can get it this week or tomorrow or the next day, rather than some of those products that come in three weeks from now or whatever it happens to be.

Travis Mariea:

Sure, sure. Yeah, it makes sense. That was interesting. I promise I wasn’t just throwing a softball there. I didn’t know you guys had an LTL, seriously, just rolled out. I was just generally curious. But it kind of goes into my next question of market share. You guys, ShipStation, one of the most well-known names out there, you’re getting a lot of leads, picking off the top tier or the more flexible-needs customers there. You’ve probably got a good amount of inbound flow there. ShipEngine in general has been establishing a brand pretty well alongside. You guys did a good job going to the market there. It sounds like you’ve tapped into the developer community with your leader of development experience and things like that.

Travis Mariea:

But just in general, how do you guys look at, as everyone is thinking about how do you grow market share, how do you drive revenue, already having a pretty good brand and exposure in the market that you’re in, I heard LTL is one thing you’re doing, you’re expanding the product there, but anything else on the roadmap on how you guys are looking to drive revenue in the coming year or two?

Jim Gagliardi:

Sure, yeah. Again, at the center of our capabilities is, again, we’re a multi-carrier shipping solution. Continuing to fill out our carrier portfolio is still going to be paramount to what we’re doing. One aspect of that is taking it global. We’ve recently added Australia, about a half a dozen or more carriers in Australia, the same in New Zealand. We continue to add more in Canada, Germany, France. Mexico we just rolled out as well. Part of our strategy is going to be on expanding our capabilities in two ways globally.

Jim Gagliardi:

One is how do we serve the merchants selling to their customers in their own country, Australian merchants selling to Australians? Second piece then is selling cross-border. We’ve seen, obviously, there’s a fair amount of companies selling in, I’ll continue to use the South Pacific and Southeast Asia as my example here, but, obviously, with a lot of products being sent out of Singapore, out of Australia into that region. Being able to do two things, one is having the carrier network to go outside and ship internationally, wherever you are domestically. Then the reverse, is what happens if there’s an issue with that product? How do we make sure that we’ve got the ability for returns coming from those countries? You start getting into not just having Australian carriers, but where are those shipments going outside of Australia? Do we have those carriers, predominantly the postal agencies, because that’s likely going to be your lowest cost in getting those back. Global is a huge portion of what we’re looking at doing there.

Jim Gagliardi:

Another avenue for us is around more sophistication around shipping optimization. We’ve got this huge network. One of the benefits from using a company like ShipEngine is you can start to do rate comparisons against all of those carriers to find the lowest option for that. Many of these carriers have, again, things like two-day shipping, guaranteed shipping. Well, when you have a two-day guaranteed shipping, well, rate is going to vary depending on where you’re shipping it from and where you’re shipping it to. We’re starting to build in additional algorithms to not only just help them select that option to be able to provide what’s the cheapest, what’s the fastest, what’s the greenest? Also, then building in some levels of predictiveness based off of actuals. Again, get into economy shipping that may have some variability to that and you can look and say, “Well, 96% of the time the economy shipping is still getting delivered in two days. Let’s go ahead and make the recommendation that they should be using these things.”

Jim Gagliardi:

Building in a lot more of that shipping optimization-type capabilities to really, again, sort of provide the merchants with ways to lower their cost, at the same time increase the customer choice that’s available because, of course, even on today we’ve only been talking about what’s right for the merchant. What’s right for the customer is the second piece of this. Where there’s a general sort of consensus that we all want fast and free. Well, shipping, as you know, is far from free for the merchants. How do you lower that cost and still be able to provide free, but even in general, there’s a lot of customers that they don’t necessarily need fast and free. It’s, “Look, give me a free option. Give me fast,” and then the question is how fast is fast and what are the options that we need to provide on that sample?

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I think the main value prop that I’ve always perceived as a customer, honestly, we’re a customer, Flxpoint is, was that normalization. That was like value prop number one, normalizing the API, one central API. You’ve got UPS, FedEx, DHL, anything else we’re using, USPS, obviously, but we did leverage, I would assume one of the first algorithms that you guys kind of rolled out in the API, which is that rate shopping, the package dimensions and that side of things. I think it sounds like adding more of those and you leveraging the data that you guys have and the predictive and really just understanding the flow in general to be able to write these algorithms that provide more value than just the normalization, sounds like a great, I mean, I love to hear that as a customer, and a great way to grow the product.

Travis Mariea:

One more before I turn it over to Austin. I’m just curious because we were going through something similar and you mentioned international, which I assumed would probably be one of the things you guys were doing. Just curious how tough that’s been or any kind of new challenges. I mean, the idea is you got another carrier, they ship stuff and you just plug them in like you plugged in the rest. I wonder if there’s any specific examples. I mean, we ran into this with a recent integration that we were evaluating with QuickBooks and the GST tax, a goods and services tax in Australia and the fact that we had to completely look at it in a whole different way than our current integration because of that tax in Australia. I’m curious if you run into any similar issues that you could just bring out for the merchants listening, to developers listening that you might see when you go international like that?

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. I mean, there are a handful of things. Again, we sort of have to break it into those two categories of are you attempting cross-border because there’s a whole level of more complexity that comes from a merchant doing those activities? Things like estimated duties and taxes. Are your products, do they have the right harmonized codes to estimate those duties and taxes? Do you want to offer to your customers duties paid upfront and showing them what those landing costs are? There’s a lot of scenarios that happen when a merchant says, “Well, I’m just going to fulfill my orders from my warehouse in the US or from the Netherlands or from Singapore,” without necessarily contemplating, “Do we have all that and what experience is it for the end customer?”

Jim Gagliardi:

Because one of the things that we’ve seen in the past is customers will sign up, “Yep, I’m going to do international shipping.” Well, they don’t either collect, they don’t tell the customer that there’s landed costs and duties and taxes. They don’t tell them upfront. When the product shows up at the door, they’re like, “Hey, you just bought this $1,000 dollar laptop or 1,000 euro laptop and you owe us another 100 euros for the duties and taxes.” Then what happens is either the customer pays it or they refuse. Now you have additional expenses of a refusal coming back to you, et cetera.

Jim Gagliardi:

There’s a whole other element around what the experience is for the merchants when doing cross-border and then ultimately for the merchants in trying to sell to customers in their own region. Obviously, having a better understanding of the overall, again, consumer expectation. There’s places in the world, and Europe is one example where [PUDO 00:00:09] points, access points, out-of-home delivery, lockers, those types of things become more prevalent than they do here, especially in high-density, high-urban locations where you might be in an apartment or you might be in some type of a scenario like that where deliveries, you can’t have them delivered to your home for a variety of reasons.

Jim Gagliardi:

There’s other places like in Japan where scheduled deliveries are more prevalent. Which carriers support that? What’s the user flow within your customer experience that you have to accommodate for? Again, some of that’s just the implications of what the customer expectations are and the customer impact on making that purchase even upfront, regardless of what’s happening with the carrier integration. But we’ve seen a number of the, in particular, the out-of-home delivery is one thing that’s just another dimension that needs to be applied when integrating additional carriers outside the US.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, that locker part is interesting. I’ve seen some of them start to pop-up here, but it’s interesting to know that they’re more popular over there. I mean, it’s funny, the second you go international, it’s just one little thing, but it just flips everything on its head and adds a ton of complexity. Pretty cool insights there.

Jim Gagliardi:

What we’ve ended up doing is, obviously, then part of when we say we’ve got an expansion strategy to go to these different countries, is we need to find somebody on the ground in that region that really has their pulse on what’s happening for, again, predominantly for the consumer expectations, number one. Then number two is who can help manage the relationships with each of those carriers to bring them onboard? Obviously, the second half of what we do is, obviously, we talk to the carriers about, “Hey, you should be part of our network.” While we’re going to predominantly do the work and integrate with them, we still want a relationship with them to onboard them into ShipEngine or onto ShipEngine.

Travis Mariea:

It makes sense.

Austin Rose:

Yeah, that’s a good point. A lot of downstream effects, we see that in software. You think you see it and then there’s the tip of the iceberg and then everything underneath it. One thing that I wanted to hit on because I work with ShipStation a lot from a partner’s perspective. We recently saw ShipEngine Connect was a new release that you guys were able to do. I guess this question might be kind of twofold in the sense of if I’m a user, if I’m a merchant and I don’t have a development team and I get on ShipStation, ShipWork, ShippingEasy, I know you and I talked that there’s kind of different customers per different software in the Octane portfolio. If I’m on at least one of those softwares, am I able to do almost a lot of stuff that you guys provide? Do you guys expose that to those different softwares?

Austin Rose:

Then, I guess at the same time, is that where ShipEngine Connect comes from? Because I know ShipEngine Connect is a new way of connecting into all of those softwares from a partner’s perspective, from a shipping carrier perspective and things like that.

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, there’s two parts to that answer. The first, is one of the things that we’ve done as we’ve evolved ShipEngine is really, again as I mentioned before, it was how do we modernize a lot of the things we’re doing? As we brought those brands together into the portfolio, we’ve evolved ShipEngine to really be the microservices platform that powers a lot of the capabilities that are inside of ShipStation, Easy and Works. Predominantly, and first and foremost, is the carrier integrations, order sources, marketplaces, 3PLs, and the like that are all wedded in there. About a little over a year ago, we built our ShipEngine Connect. ShipEngine Connect is our integration platform. That’s what speaks to all of the different services that we want to be able to normalize and offer to our merchants and platforms.

Jim Gagliardi:

ShipEngine Connect is where all of those 80 plus carrier integrations I mentioned, the 150 order sources that we have integrated in the platform, the 30 or so 3PLs that we have in the platform, et cetera, all of those get funneled into ShipEngine Connect. You can think of that as almost like an app marketplace, where it was how does the Octane portfolio effectively be able to manage all of those integrations? We built out a centralized place for us to do that. But the other part that’s done is it allows us to extend that capability and make it self-service for any of those types of vendors to leverage ShipEngine Connect. We have carriers that are doing self-integrating to our platform because they do want access to our merchant base. We do have order sources that want to take over their own integration and elevate its capabilities to provide more value, again, downstream into our workflow products like ShipStation.

Jim Gagliardi:

It’s our integration platform. The intent is one integration gets you access to all of the products, ShipStation, ShipEngine, ShipWorks, ShippingEasy as part of that. Now, it’s still up to my peers at the GM level in working with our product organization to decide whether or not we’re going to surface all of those carriers. As an example, we discussed LTL earlier. LTL is likely not a great fit for ShippingEasy-type customers. ShippingEasy, it’s intent is to be the more casual shippers in general. Its ideal customer profile is more of the casual shipper doing 50 orders a month, in that ballpark. Whereas, ShipStation is going to be north of that. ShipEngine is going to be in the tens of thousands typically. ShipWorks is in that kind of ballpark as well. LTL, with that one integration that we did with LTL, it’ll likely be surfaced in ShipStation as well as ShipWorks through that single integration through ShipEngine Connect.

Travis Mariea:

Jim, it makes sense. Just real quick, just so I’m understanding you correctly, we have an integration that we built a couple of years ago with ShipStation. We also have integration with ShippingEasy. We have a different integration with ShipEngine that does different things, but for our ShipStation and ShippingEasy integrations, it sounds like, if I’m hearing you correctly and just clarify if I’m not, that eventually we would probably just want to reintegrate with this new ShipEngine Connect. Then that will allow us for a more long-term, normalized integration. We could potentially very easily add ShipWorks to that. Is that what I’m hearing?

Jim Gagliardi:

You got it. That’s exactly right.

Travis Mariea:

Okay, all right.

Jim Gagliardi:

If that hasn’t already been done, that’s likely in the works somewhere. It might even be transparent to you depending on how that integration was built. You’re providing services to our merchants and at the same time, you’re a customer of ShipEngine and you’re looking at the APIs on that side as well. You have the inbound APIs connected to offer services to all of our platforms. You also then are leveraging the APIs and taking advantage of all those carriers and embedding that into your capabilities.

Austin Rose:

That’s awesome. I don’t know. It’s just kind of cool seeing we were in the world of just downloading apps, whether I’m on Shopify, I’m downloading apps or if I’m just downloading social media apps and it’s you guys being as a marketplace for APIs and just being able to integrate all of these different softwares is a game changer in the sense of, I feel like a lot of people are going to start doing more of that. I’m sure there are some, but that’s a very interesting model. I wanted to bring that up. I know Brooke at the ShipStation team sent me over ShipEngine Connect. I was kind of like, “Well, we integrate here and then we integrate here and we integrate there.” It’s a great way of standardizing that. That’s about all the questions that I have on my side. Travis, anything on your end?

Travis Mariea:

No, I think we’ve touched on a lot of it. I think that maybe there might be something in there. I’m really curious if you’ve been with ShipEngine now for two years or just under, Jim. It sounds like it’s really just kind of growing outside of the ShipStation and really splitting off right when you were getting there, right before you’re getting there. It’s almost like its own little startup in here and you’ve gone to market in your own way. I’m just curious, what kind of campaigns have you guys run that you’re like, “Wow, that one really worked and that got us in front of the customers we were looking for.”?

Travis Mariea:

Anything that you can share there, anything that you can share if you thought it was this great idea, you spent months on this campaign and it really kind of fell flat. Always interested, as we’re both in the go to market world, Austin and myself in launching Flxpoint and things like that. Anything you could share there is always really insightful.

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, I mean, I would go back to the point we were talking about in terms of speaking to the developer community. One of the things that, and if there are any developers listening, they’ll probably curse me, but in general, actually, I’ll take it back. I was going to say that they’re lazy. I’m going to take it back.

Travis Mariea:

Aren’t we all? We’re all lazy when it comes down to it.

Jim Gagliardi:

We are all looking for efficiency. We would all rather edit than create. One of the things that we’ve seen good success at, is, of course, we have our API suite that’s available. I think one of the values that we bring and differentiate is great documentation, great customer support, live chat support and the like. But ultimately what moves the needle for us, is actually those efficiency tools. It’s going to build the SDKs. It’s building out elements. It’s building out other things that allow for developers to more quickly onboard to our capabilities, but even taking it a step further. That’s one piece. That doesn’t get into the campaigns that you were talking about.

Jim Gagliardi:

But then what it is, is how do you go where the developers are going to look? If you were to ask a developer, “When’s the last time you worked with an API directly,” or, “How do you get started,” the first thing they’re going to do is say, “I’m going to go to Stack Overflow. I’m going to go somewhere else and see who else has created something that’s available.” As we have been building out new native integrations to things like Zapier, other no-code, low-code platforms, in putting out things in GitHub, in putting things out there that actually extend our reach that allow for those merchants when they are doing a search on whatever developer platform they’re using, that we’re showing up in those contexts.

Jim Gagliardi:

That’s how we’re onboarding a significant number of customers at that PayGo rate. Then we can start to engage with them to then say, “Well, why are you using us,” and then ramping up there to then get in front of that developer or, ultimately, the business owner that’s writing the check usually for our capabilities. We have tried other things, things like Quora and Facebook and LinkedIn and the typical kind of channels. Now, obviously, you can do some great things with segmenting the specific business users and business owners, but our highest ROI is when we’re actually providing the tools available to those developers to start leveraging us as soon as possible.

Travis Mariea:

Yeah. I mean, that makes a ton of sense. They’re usually online looking to accomplish a job. You guys give them the tools to get up and get going. It’s shared easily with their other developer friends and co-workers. This is something that we didn’t really prepare you for and I apologize if it’s a curveball, but your just kind of saying made me think of it, open sourcing. Have you guys ever talked about it? Are their thoughts about it, certain pieces of it? Because you talk about being out there and adding value to the developer community, I’m just curious, what is transcribed in the walls of ShipEngine about open sourcing?

Jim Gagliardi:

Yeah, I mean, the only thing that we’ve done is put the stuff out in GitHub or orchestrating our APIs together. If you wanted to go build a simple label gen tool for, I don’t know, one example that comes to mind with all the kids that went back to school. The number of my friends that are now having college-aged kids going off to school is not driving. They’re flying to their college. Now they want to send boxes of stuff to their kids at these universities. Well, what’s the best, most economical way to do that? There’s a business opportunity for somebody to target parents of college students to ship the supplies there at the beginning of school and when they’re coming home for summer to ship those products back. We’ve provided open source sort of orchestration of somebody being able to put in to address, a from address, choose their options, address validation, get a label and send that. That’s available out on our GitHub as one example of things we’re doing.

Jim Gagliardi:

We haven’t extended that further, to your point, about how do we extend beyond that? If I was to talk to our head of developer experience, he probably has more thoughts on-

Travis Mariea:

Sure.

Jim Gagliardi:

… opportunities to do that. But, [crosstalk 00:38:01].

Travis Mariea:

Yeah, that’s super interesting. Well, I mean, you guys have something out there. That’s more than we have. It’s just something that’s been brought up recently with us that we’re thinking about how do we get more out there? As we move into more of a developer community, we redid our API just recently and we’re pushing more into this API-first, microservices approach and open source came up. Really cool to see what you guys are already kind of doing there, but it seems like there’s a ton of value in getting in front of developers by doing that. It’s been proven.

Jim Gagliardi:

My recommendation there, if you haven’t already, is to put somebody on your team that is dedicated to being a developer evangelist. That’s sitting in the shoes of what a developer would be looking for, that can speak to the developer community, that really understands the developer psyche. Because what happens is that in general, developers, in general, would say, “I’m a developer. I know what I’m going to build.” But in general, that’s not what they’re building for. Like I said before, it’s, “Well, yeah, I’m going to build this elegant-looking API.” If you turn it around and you ask them, “Well, when’s the last time you used a native API from scratch,” they would say, “Well, only if I was forced to did I do that,” again, going out and looking at well, what are the components of other things that you need to do? That’s where developer evangelists can actually sort of question your own developers on whether or not what they’re building is actually the best solution for adopting new developers.

Travis Mariea:

Interesting, very cool. Awesome.

Austin Rose:

Oh, that’s great. That’s some great insight. We haven’t had a conversation like this in a while. ShipEngine, we integrate with you guys and you guys are a great provider. Thank you so much, Jim, for all the context and content. It sounds like you guys are doing a lot of really cool stuff. Hopefully, we can ride that wave with you kind of on the API-first. Quick, before we jump off, give us a quick little ShipEngine plug. Let everybody know why someone would want to take a look at you guys or the Octane portfolio.

Jim Gagliardi:

No, you’re exactly right. We offer a very low-cost, effective, API-first, multi-carrier solution with over 80 different carriers to provide the best type of capabilities. You can check us out at ShipEngine.com.

Austin Rose:

Perfect. Well, thanks Jim. Thanks for jumping on. Travis, thanks as always. Obviously, if you have any questions for us, we’re all on LinkedIn. Head to ShipEngine.com or come over to Flxpoint.com as well. Be sure to check us out. We’ve got our podcast going up on Apple Podcasts and iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify. We’ll be up on YouTube as well. Make sure to subscribe to all the different episodes that we’ve got coming out. Jim, thanks again for jumping on. I appreciate it and everybody for tuning in.

Jim Gagliardi:

Thank you.

Travis Mariea:

Thanks, Jim.