Flexport's founder spent four to five years navigating 43 government agencies to launch a freight-forwarding company. He built a fake Photoshop website that got hundreds of sign-ups before the product existed, proving demand was real. Getting licensed took years, but he says the regulatory wall isn't impossible if you're determined.
Chapters
So going back to the very beginning, what were the actual first steps, you know, that you took to start Flexport at the time?
So we, we're now 15 years since I started, first started working on it, but we've only had customers for 10 years. So it tells you there's a, it was a long time to get going. Heavily regulated industry. So had to spend a lot of time researching the regulations. There's 43 government agencies that are taking interest in imported products. So we had to get licensed by Customs and Border Protection. Federal Maritime Commission basically before you could get started at all. And that's a hard, you have to clear an FBI background check that took several years. So getting that going is, I don't think that's a real barrier to entry. I mean, someone who's determined, I did it, other people can do it, but definitely harder than just starting some SaaS company or something like, you know, it takes a long time to get a minimum viable product in place and And then knowing whether to go through all that was hard. So, you know, you don't want to do all that work if there's no customers on the other end. So one of the things I did was kind of confirm that there would be demand if the product existed. And I did that using my very advanced Photoshop skills, made a fake website, fake app, and then put it out on the web to see if people would sign up. If this service did exist, would people sign up for it? And I started getting hundreds of signups before we had anything. There were certain, there's no app, no license, no business, just me. And that was confirmation that, okay, I should in fact go through this process, get licensed, go through the FBI background process, et cetera. That, so that it was all about 4 or 5 years before we ever Yeah, did anything. And then once we got licensed, I applied for Y Combinator like right after the license came through and kind of the rest is much more publicly known about our story, getting a more kind of traditional venture capital route. But that was the first time raising venture capital. I've been doing the— been an entrepreneur for about 14 years or so before I ever raised any venture capital. Um, and I think, yeah, there's pluses and minuses. If people want to talk about that, I'm happy to talk to it.
