Startup of the Week - Camelship

CamelShip, optimizing Shipping & increasing logistical effiency!

Every week we will be featuring a different MAGNiTT Startup in our newsletter. Week after week, we will be exploring the most noteworthy startups in the MENA region whether in tech, trade, or even lifestyle. We hope that learning about other startups will help you with your own endeavour; our purpose is to help you succeed too. This week, we have reached out to CamelShip (check their profile at the following link), and asked them to share his experience with the start-up community.

1. What problem do you solve?

Conventional couriers have not adapted to the needs of ecommerce. Therefore, shipping remains an unpleasant experience. We rapidly changed that by launching our first product and it's the booking.com for couriers.

2. Who are you competing with and what makes your solution better?

We're also the first shipping API in MENA. CamelShip Pro is connected to multiple couriers with an algorithm that selects the best delivery option from streamlined supply delivery capacities. This is especially important in optimizing delivery metrics & improving customer satisfaction for ecommerce platforms. We've seen this in North America but it's the first time this is taking place in MENA.

3. What were the biggest hurdles you faced early on and how did you overcome them?

As a startup, establishing credibility was the biggest challenge. But then our mission was recognized by several sources like Wamda & Forbes. As for the tech, the biggest hurdle was integrating individual courier APIs one by one is a long, tedious, highly manual process while integrating a single API like CamelShip's affords you access to multiple couriers & via multiple accounts in one go. We've engineered our way around courier API downtimes and we offer a 99.9% server uptime.

4. What is your biggest barrier to future success?

We operate in a hot growing market (15% CAGR) and this is very positive. The barriers lie in customer on-boarding & activation and that's why we're actively hiring to build customer development team.

5. How do you plan to make money?

CamelShip's charges a flat-fee per shipment.

6. What advice would you share with other start-ups?

Be persistent. UAE business environment is very positive but entrepreneurs must never give up and follow up 10 times if not more. If you're not being rejected enough, you're goals are not ambitious enough.

7. Is there a particular service provider you would recommend to other start-ups?

We've had great support from a number of freelancers that we found with Fiverr.com. The whole team at CamelShip is dedicated to helping Startups that need to ship orders, documents and arrange for returns; so we'd like to recommend ourselves to help start-ups.

8. Did you discover and use an online tool that is a “must-have” for start-ups?

Our team is process-oriented and data-driven. And we actively invest time into building an effective distributed work environment because our development operation is in Jordan. We've found the combination of Slack, Basecamp & Mixmax to be ideal. Hotjar is great too. We continuously test new tools through ProductHunt.

Startup Of The Week