Ship Hero

Aaron Rubin had already proven his entrepreneurial chops by founding and running a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu apparel e-commerce company starting at age 19. But running his own warehouse operations taught him a painful lesson: the software available for managing shipments and logistics was either clunky, expensive, or both. In 2013, he and a co-founder started Ship Hero nights and weekends to solve this problem for themselves and others like them.

The early days were lean. Aaron and his co-founder worked on the product while Aaron continued running his own e-commerce business. They got their first customer in 2015—a friend running Wine Shattel, a wine and spirits retailer with physical stores. Aaron's own company was customer number two. The product was narrow and rough around the edges, but it solved a real problem. They even got early conversations with Fashion Nova, who would later become one of the world's largest Shopify stores, but the timing wasn't right and the product wasn't ready.

Their initial growth engine was the Shopify App Store. In the early days, Shopify catered to tiny merchants, so Ship Hero faced an uphill battle against entrenched competitors like ShipStation who had far more reviews. But as Shopify's customer base grew into merchants doing hundreds of orders per day, Ship Hero's narrow focus became an advantage. They captured customers who had outgrown other solutions. By 2017, they started getting "real traffic."

But the real breakthrough came through 3PLs—third-party logistics companies. A merchant familiar with Ship Hero's software would recommend it to their 3PL provider, saying the 3PL's native software was inferior. The 3PL would try Ship Hero just for that one merchant. Once they experienced the better product, they'd start deploying it to new merchants who didn't have software preferences, creating a land-and-expand motion that drove expansion revenue.

Ship Hero's growth has been fueled almost entirely by word-of-mouth and expansion revenue from existing customers—not by new customer acquisition. Aaron estimates negative net churn of about 2% per month, meaning existing customers are growing their spend faster than they're leaving. Once customers go live on the platform, churn drops to less than 1% per month.

What hasn't happened: traditional sales and marketing. Ship Hero hired its first salesperson in September and had zero SDRs or marketing team until recently. They've been utterly product-focused and reliant on organic growth. This has been both a strength (they're profitable) and a limitation (they can't scale growth predictably). Aaron is candid about this: "It's not ideal because you can't push the pedal."

Ship Hero operates at a ~$5M ARR run rate with around 300 paying customers (counting each 3PL as one customer, regardless of their sub-merchants). Average SMB customers pay ~$1,500/month; 3PLs pay $5,000-$10,000/month depending on seats and warehouse square footage. The company has been profitable for the last year despite aggressive growth. To fuel expansion, Aaron put in $1.2M of his own capital, raised $435K from friends and family via SAFE notes around the time they hit $100K MRR, and recently borrowed $800K from Lighter Capital on a term loan (10-20% interest, no warrants, no personal guarantee). With 41 team members and year-over-year revenue growth of roughly 2.6x, Ship Hero is now focusing on building repeatable sales and marketing systems—but only after proving they can scale the business without them.