About Shipright
Back in 2018 I co-founded Shipright with my partners of boutique agency Grible – an agency that helped organisations build digital experiences.
Shipright started as a way to centralize all qualitative insights across an organisation and later pivoted into a way to centralize product-related customer feedback for product managers at B2B SaaS companies.
We got accepted into Techstars and raised a pre-seed venture round. Shipright served the likes of Digital Ocean, Chargebee, Whereby, and many others. I was responsible for Product, Design, and brand.
Techstars Demo Day Pitch
Challenge
During our projects with Grible, we noticed that a lot of organisations didn't tap into the potential of qualitative insights gathered across the company. This often consisted of past research materials, insights from support, and feedback from sales.
Shipright started out as a way to centralize all of this qualitative data, aiming to assist product people, designers, and researchers to have an easy way to tap into valuable insights and design better solutions.
Over time we learned that there were two distinct areas that both were too different to tackle all at once being a small startup: customer feedback and user research. There was a difference in how this data came to be, how it needed to be processed, and how and by whom it was consumed.
We pivoted into the customer feedback space and decided to focus on smaller B2B SaaS businesses, with a particular focus on highlighting and processing product-related feedback. As first-time founders, it took us quite some time to hone in on a specific customer segment and problem space that was focused enough.
Solution
We learned that for this type of segment, most relevant product-related feedback lived in a wide variety of tools used by customer support, customer success, and sales. As a starting point we figured a browser extension could be an agnostic solution that would allow for centralisation without having to build and maintain multiple integrations as a small startup team.
While it was a lean start to let eager businesses capture snippets of product-related feedback across any tool, it still needed (minimal) manual input from their customer-facing teams. This caused friction in onboarding and adoption, as we not only needed buy-in from a product manager who would benefit from this centralisation. It especially needed buy-in and required a slight change in behaviour from the customer-facing side.
We later started adding integrations with these tools based on the ones that were most in-demand across our user base. We also extended with a 'feedback portal' that allowed for gathering product-related feedback straight from end-users by linking it in their tool or customer communication.
By 2021 we decided to shut down Shipright as we found out that after several changes and pivots, we couldn't find product-market fit and with the required month over month growth to sustain the venture route.
Other projects
