After raising millions from some of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley , Shyp — a startup that cull up your hooey and ship it for you — told user today that it’ssignificantly downsizingits service , cancelling operations in three metropolis : New York , Los Angeles , and Chicago . It ’s also put off some of the people who figure out at its headquarters .
The modification classify Shyp to perhaps the only market that could possibly hold its business fashion model : the San Francisco Bay Area .
Shyp come to be in 2013 , at the height of the Uber clone craze . build around a sleek , eponymous app , the Robert William Service indeed works a bit like Uber . It rent you request a courier , who drives or bikes to your doorstep , pick up whatever items you want to ship , packs them up into a boxful , and then hands your hooey off to a inspection and repair like FedEx .
But unlike Uber , which often manages to undercut the price of city taxicab cabs , Shyp level users significant fees for its service — often doubling the monetary value of shipping mathematical product in the first seat . A laptop , for instance , might normally cost $ 17.30 to ship , but $ 5.00 to blame up and $ 15.00 to pack . Like overpriced intellectual nourishment speech , Shyp vend the sort of slew that only a supremely indolent person would succumb to . And of course , for foil ’s rice beer , that include yours truly . My otiose ass has used it eight times .
So why is Shyp scaling back and aching for gainfulness now , four years after it launched ? You know the solvent : The money ’s gone . “ The market for speculation funding has changed and there is now a higher taproom for gainfulness , ” wrote Shyp CEO Kevin Gibbon .
Ablog post write by Gibbonsuggested that Shyp had not turned a profit in any of the city it ’s launched in . Gibbon , however , believes that downsize the company ’s staff and working with “ line customers ” in the Valley — that is , packing and shipping ware for other companies , instead of just normal the great unwashed — will turn over things around .
Last year , Fast Companyranked Shyp among “ the most innovative company in the world . ” In an expansive profile , Gibbon disclose his ambition to not just hand over packages to the real transport service — FedEx , UPS , and the like — but to tucker them . “ We absolutely want to begin chip away at a mint of the other pieces in this full process that we can improve , ” said Gibbon . “ It ’s a stepping stone to in reality starting to do the bringing . ”
jillion of dollars later , Shyp is now a local jobber . A packing and merchant marine service with a super aerodynamic app . It turn out few people really want to pay two-fold - price to ship stuff . In fact , in the 24-hour interval of Amazon Prime , who wants to ante up for shipping at all .
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