Most entrepreneurs like shouting about their company’s successes, but Robert Matthams chooses his words carefully when talking about his award-winning start-up. He tells GB why staying tight-lipped will keep Shiply ahead of an emerging army of copycats.
“If you’d spoken to me a year ago I’d probably have been a lot more candid,” says Robert Matthams after pulling out the no comment card for the fourth time in half an hour. He’s not trying to be difficult, he insists, but there are just a few too many copycat rivals hungry to learn the secret to his rapid success. In just two years, the 25 year-old has taken his idea for a goods transportation marketplace and turned it into a European triumph.
Shiply.com allows users to list goods they want moved or delivered. Haulage and delivery companies then bid for jobs along similar routes to ones they would be travelling anyway, in exchange for commission paid to Shiply, reducing the miles their lorries travel empty. Matthams first came up with idea at university. A driver who’d delivered him a pool table informed him he’d be travelling back to the depot with an empty truck. “It really shocked me,” says Matthams. “I had no idea this kind of waste was happening on a daily basis.”
According to government research, 25% of lorries run completely empty of cargo and over half run only part full, equating to around 36 million tonnes of co2 wasted every year. Scepticism on the environmental benefits of offsetting carbon emissions has grown rapidly over the past few years. Combine that with a recession and souring fuel prices and Shiply’s launch couldn’t have been more timely.
The initial site was built by Matthams for minimal cost, but with a marketable proposition it wasn’t long before customers and the press started to take notice. Several awards, including one in Holland which carried a €100,000 prize and, more recently, top billing in BT’s Essence of the Entrepreneur competition, which provided a further £10,000 boost, have helped attract more than 7,000 transport companies serving 75,000 registered members. “When we first launched we had plenty of supply from transport companies but more recently the sheer demand from consumers has been great,” Matthams says.
The careful early bootstrapping coupled with the speed at which the site gained traction has also put Shiply in a very strong financial position. A current 10-20% month-on-month growth rate has allowed Matthams the privilege of an ambivalent, yet confident, outlook on funding. “We’ve had lots of offers from angels and a couple of VCs but we’re more concerned with waiting for the right offer with the right team. We’ve got the business into a position where banks can provide capital if we need it so we can avoid equity financing with contractual clauses we don’t like."
Matthams has an equally hesitant attitude to diversification, insisting he wants to “‘keep the main thing the main thing”, with no intention of applying the platform to other sectors at this stage. “We do get pulled in a lot of different directions but we have a big market to go after here and we want to stay focused on that.”
Resources are currently being dedicated to building on the company’s European footing. The German site launched in November 2009, while a Dutch offering has just gone live, which Matthams has found challenging. “There are the obvious language barriers and you also have to place a lot of trust in individual country managers,” he says. While Matthams is confident of Shiply’s position in the market, he remains vigilant to the threat of new players. “We always knew people would launch similar offerings so we built a strong network and critical mass as quickly as we could. It’s a case of keeping an eye out and not being naïve but at the same time concentrating on our core offering.”
As the overall winner of the BT Business Essence of the Entrepreneur competition, Matthams won a £10,000 grant and a photoshoot with renowned photographer Rankin. To find out about the other winners or learn more about the scheme, visit
www.essenceoftheentrepreneur.co.uk