8 questions to easyship - building meaningful product and maintaining best practices.

Can you give a brief introduction about your company?

Easyship is a Hong Kong­based technology startup focused on empowering eCommerce merchants to ship worldwide in a matter of clicks. We currently provide an all­in­one logistic solution for our clients with a pick & pack service, accompanied with our platform’s algorithm to determine the best shipping solution from our deep network of partner couriers.

What was your biggest challenge or the worst decision you had made and had to flip away from afterwards?

On the tech perspective, the biggest challenge was to build the team and at the same time develop a new platform from scratch. We now have a very strong team of which I am very proud, and we have been able to consistently develop and push out great sustainable software. When growing our team, I have focused more on people’s mindset and ability to pick up new things rather than the length of their experience. It was quite hard to spot the right people and also foresee how well they would fit with our culture.

What is your dream and vision for Easyship?

Our dream is to enable everyone to ship goods from and to anywhere in the world. We are focused on encouraging and nourishing cross border trade by creating a product that minimises the barriers in the process. There are quite significant hurdles along the way of achieving this. Beyond the base shipping prices there is a lot of data to take into consideration, such as taxes and duties, custom clearances & etc and we want our users to have full visibility and control over the entire journey of their shipments.

How do you get your brand out there? (Did you leverage any connections to other startups? Any other meaningful relationships or connections that helped you?)

Securing strong partnerships with eCommerce marketplaces and with merchants has been key in getting our brand out. We’ve also been working closely with other startups, from Hong Kong and abroad as we strongly believe in solidarity between companies that share the same values. Being part of the first batch of the Blueprint accelerator and being a past Instructor at General Assembly has also kept us close to the startup community in Hong Kong.

TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More. What keeps your team going? What do they value the most?

Everyone here is driven by the same motivation: building meaningful product and maintaining best practices. At the same time, everyone is super pragmatic, and our priority one duty is to always learn, learn and learn more. For myself, I see no value in someone full of knowledge who stops improving himself. One of our key values at Easyship humility: we have a very fun and solid team where everyone is hardworking and ambitious, but also very humble and caring. If someone arrives on our team with the will to step on others, it will be hard for them to fit.

How quick can or should a startup team grow? Any advice/ watch­outs?

Funding obviously makes a difference if you want to grow fast. We have been lucky enough to raise early funds, which allowed us to quickly grow and build the team, and we are now in our second round of hiring. For that, finding the right mix between equity and salary is also essential. I believe that everyone in the company should be a shareholder, as we are all building this together. It helps a lot finding people who driven by the challenge and the upside potential of bringing a company to the top rather than the comfort of more mature company. For the watch­outs, we are now well­ beyond the '2­pizza team' and we see the growing difficulty of hiring people who fit with the team's culture and values. We also had very philosophical debates over the frequency and scope of our team meetings!

What is the one reason to start a startup in HK? And what would be the reason not to do so?

Hong Kong is a very business­focused city where everyone seems either involved in a startup or side­business, or thinking about starting one! The proximity with Shenzhen is also key for sectors like IoT and eCommerce. The current main downside I see is the visa policy: you spend 48 hours setting up a company, but then several months getting a visa for a web developer!

What is your #Startup Passion?

Building a meaningful product that’s used extensively by our customers is amazing. I also love looking at the team we’ve built and being able to see the drive in everyone to achieve the same goal. With everyone enjoying what they do, I can’t help but to really love my job!