Shipping startup Shyp comes to New York and soon Miami

Shyp, the app that sends someone to your home to package and ship your goods, launches in New York today.

For $5 plus the price of postage, a Shyp “hero” will arrive at your door and retrieve an item that you want to ship. The “hero” will deposit that item in one of the many vans (called “satellites”) strategically circulating through the city. Once the van is full, it will return to Shyp’s warehouse in Brooklyn, where Shyp packages and sends the items on their way.

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Already the company is making money, though how much is anyone’s guess. Shyp ships everything at the lowest possible price and gets discounts for shipping such high volume. Co-founder Kevin Gibbon tells me he pays his drivers above average for their services. Because drivers and heroes are interacting with clients directly, sometimes at their homes, Gibbon says he needs highly personable staff.

The company opened up its pick-up and package service roughly a year ago in San Francisco. Now Shyp is ready to expand to other locales. Though the company advertises to consumers, that’s not necessarily it’s demographic. 70 percent of its users are businesses.

“The way we market towards consumers, is so that they’re bringing [Shyp] into their businesses,” said Gibbon.

One of the main reasons Shyp chose New York as it’s next destination is because of the strong community of makers and small businesses — people, who run a storefront in Brooklyn, let’s say, as well as a shop on Etsy, who aren’t big enough to have their own shipping infrastructure.

For a person who has to ship a 1,000 items, Shyp may not be the ideal solution, since it requires that you enter recipients’ addresses into an iPhone app. There is a sweet spot for a certain type of small business that sells enough to get a good discount through Shyp, but not enough to require its own shipping infrastructure.

Since its initial launch, Shyp has expanded its services to include dealing with international customs, a laborious process especially for the uninitiated.

Shyp is ramping up quickly after its first year. It has plans to launch in Miami in time for Art Basel — a huge sceney art show and party where, no doubt, lots of people will be looking for an easy way to ship purchases home.