Morninghead

“I tell any new entrepreneur how easy it is to start a company with a hosted shopping cart, ShipStation, and a thermal label printer.” Max Valverde Founder

Once someone sees your product it makes absolute sense, but how did it come into being?

I pretty much always shower at night after mountain biking or working out. Every morning before work I had this little stress moment where I had to quickly decide how to fix my hair… take another shower, or wet my hair in the sink. Both options sucked. Showering again was a waste of time and energy. Wetting my hair in the sink is what I did most days, but you never really get the back of your head and my wife was never happy about the mess it made leaving water all over the bathroom. Honestly, wetting my hair in the sink was one of the worst part of my days. Not only did it not really work, I felt like a dog or something bent over in the sink. Never again. I thought of the product, got it up on Kickstarter, and the rest is history. We’ve been growing ever since. People. Love. Morninghead.

Have there been any particular struggles in building your business to where it is today? Likewise, do you have any advice for other startups?

No particular struggles other than the fact that “it takes years to become an overnight success.” In your mind, everything seems so easy. In practice, everything take hard work and dedication. I say this a lot to other people like myself… burgeoning entrepreneurs or “people with ideas who are thinking about taking the jump,” and leaving their day job. I heard somewhere that “If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have the be willing to put in 80-90 hour weeks – at least at the beginning.” So I figured, since I was working a 40-50 hr/week day job, I had 40 hrs/week to start a company on the side. When you get serious and cut the fat, you realize there is a TON of time in every week to devote to your dream. Oh, and read 4-Hour Workweek if you haven’t already.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?

It’s been awesome. We’ve been using ShipStation for over two years now. We have orders coming in from our website and Amazon so it’s nice to have them aggregated in one place. Once (or twice) a day, we just click print, and boom, the labels print and the shipments go out. The labels are professional and come at the USPS Commercial Rate so we get that discount which is nice. Also, when we switched from Bigcommerce to Squarespace for our hosted shopping cart, ShipStation made the switch seamless. It took under 5 minutes to make the switch to let ShipStation know where the new orders would be coming from and we never missed a beat.

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?

I just love ShipStation as a whole really. I tell any new entrepreneur how easy it is to start a company with a hosted shopping cart, ShipStation, and a thermal label printer. But my favorite feature… would have to be how it stores/saves who we’ve shipped to… so if an old customer calls up with an issue, or great feedback, or whatever, we can easily send them another Morninghead cap in about 5 seconds. The other cool thing is, because it’s hosted on the web, I could be at a Starbucks on the phone with someone and decide I want to send them a sample. Boom, I input it in ShipStation, and forget about it. I can be certain that it’s aggregated with all the Morninghead.com and Amazon orders so it’ll go out with that day’s shipments.