#138 ShipBob: Building and Scaling a Fulfillment Business with Handcrafted Algorithms | Jivko Bojinov, Co-Founder

About ShipBob

“Ultimately, transparency to your customers is extremely important, no matter how difficult it is to display.” – Jivko Bojinov

Jivko Bojinov played professional tennis before co-founding ShipBob with Dhruv Saxena and Divey Gulati in 2014. Jivko is currently the Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects at ShipBob. And over the last eight years, he's led the development and launch of almost every major strategic initiative at ShipBob, from their transition from owning their own fulfillment centers, to developing an asset like partner network of fulfillment centers, to the launch of affordable two day shipping for all of ShipBob's customers.

For more, explore the transcript of this episode.

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Chapters

This episode is our definitive guide to building and scaling a fulfillment business with handcrafted algorithms. In it we cover:

(00:00:00) – Introduction
(00:01:40) – The origin and scaling of ShipBob
(00:06:38) – Meeting customers at their pain points
(00:10:56) – The challenges of a fulfillment business
(00:15:04) – Expanding from ShipBob warehouses to partner locations
(00:24:28) – Custom software for scaling ShipBob
(00:33:18) – ShipBob’s algorithms for stowing, picking, and packaging
(00:43:06) – Strategic projects within the fulfillment space
(00:51:53) – The importance of transparency with staff customers alike

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Our Favorite Quotes

Here are a few ideas we'll be thinking about weeks and months from now:

“Once you realize how many hands touch a package or a good that you buy before it makes it to your door, you will be surprised that it gets there.”
“People are going to want things cheaper, and they're going to want them quicker. So for small businesses to compete with that, it's really difficult.”
“I think it's super interesting from an engineering standpoint, because a lot of what you do in engineering environment is not always physically applicable, but in a warehouse environment, you're tangibly affecting somebody's life of what they have to do every single day by that line of code, and that logic that you're writing.”
“At the end of the day, I think if your staff has the same information that you have when you're making a decision, they're going to be significantly more comfortable with the decision that was made.”