We started Shypmate to allow people across the globe to send and receive items at an affordable rate while ensuring fast delivery times. From the beginning, every decision has been guided by the company’s mission — “Creating access across the world.” For us as founders this mission is deeply personal, and we are excited to be moving closer towards that goal with some major changes we will be making over the next several months.
For context on how we got here and the upcoming changes, we’ll start with a brief discussion on our YC Fellowship experience. During the first week, we had a brainstorming session with the partners and outlined the risks involved in our business. Two issues discussed focused on shipping items that were already purchased, and allowing customers to self-purchase to an address we would provide. Due to our limited security resources to accommodate the above stated concerns, we decided that we would only ship items that we purchased directly from merchants. In other words, if a customer already had an item purchased and needed it delivered across the globe, we had to turn them down. This decision allowed us to assure our travelers that they were carrying safe and verified packages directly from reputable e-commerce stores like Amazon.
Yes, the solution we came up with ensured that our travelers were safe, but it also meant that we would be leaving a large number of the people we wanted to serve unserved. Today, we get and turn down requests from people seeking to send already purchased items to Africa — specifically to Nigeria and Ghana. We have been reminded that this is a huge need for a lot of people, and that people also want to be in control of their purchases. With this in mind we started working to add peer to peer delivery service to Shypmate.
The expansion of the peer to peer delivery will allow people to purchase items themselves and still have it delivered to either Ghana or Nigeria using Shypmate. People in the U.S. will now be able to send items to their loved ones in Ghana and Nigeria, such as gifts etc that they purchased themselves. Some might be wondering if Shypmate will still purchase items for customers, and the answer is Yes. We realize that there is a good amount of our users who do not have the means to purchase items themselves. Our new service will be an extension and not a replacement to the current service that we offer. With this new service, Shypmate will screen and thoroughly vet all items in order to ensure that we are still giving our travelers the same guarantee of safety as that is our topmost priority.
Our timeframe for the extension of peer to peer delivery launch is tentative, but we have created a waiting list where people can signup for notifications and progress updates. We will begin Peer to Peer delivery with the launch of an experimental beta which will accept only specific items on an individual basis and then eventually open it up to the public.
We are very excited about peer to peer delivery service as it is a step towards achieving the global vision we have for the company.
