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The Empty Box That Started GrowthJet

The Story

GrowthJet, a climate-neutral certified third-party logistics company, was founded in 2019 — but the precipitating incident was a single customer email. “We would get an email from a customer saying, hey, is this a joke? You literally shipped us an empty box. And so, I’m like, what? You got an empty box? And he said, yeah, I opened the box, I opened the actual product inside and there’s nothing inside. And I’m like, that’s really weird. And so, I was like, what’s going on here? And it turns out like one of the people that, the 3PL that I was using, had stolen the knife from the item from the box and shipped an empty box” (Source 1).

It wasn’t an outlier. “I did a lot of research before picking this 3PL and this is the level of quality for the highest rated 3PL. And I was like, the bar is so low, I can definitely do better than this” (Source 1). The same story appears in the Streamlined Solopreneur interview with slightly different framing: “a customer would email me and say, ‘Hey, is this a joke? You shipped me an empty box.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ So it turns out that the fulfillment partner that I was using had taken the item out. And these are expensive collectible items. It’s like $1,000 custom pocketknife for example” (Source 2). On The New Warehouse podcast he summed up the era flatly: “Back then (2015), the standard was so low, I couldn’t reach anyone… and the last straw was when one of my customers received an empty box” (Source 3).

Demand validation came inbound. “Right around the time we actually got people like asking us, who’s doing your fulfillment? Because my fulfillment is terrible. And the company actually launched with no name and no website. We already had paying clients. And so, at a certain point we’re like, all right, we should just make this an official thing. And so that’s when Growth Jet was born” (Source 1).

The climate-neutral angle wasn’t a marketing afterthought either. “Climate neutral, we are actually the first 3PL that is climate neutral certified. And it just, it was born out of the observation I made, which is like, there was so much trash and waste in the industry… I always believe that value-driven businesses are more powerful. The way I put it is, I see sales as like oxygen, and so obviously you need sales and cash flow to survive, but that’s not the reason why you are doing your business” (Source 1). On The New Warehouse: “The first thing I realized was there’s a lot of waste in the industry, and in a way, it’s inevitable… We became climate neutral certified… it became an advantage because people were like, ‘This 3PL cares about other things aside from the bottom line’” (Source 3).

The timing turned into a tailwind. “We didn’t really plan on that this way, but it got a lot of a lot of brands thinking about their sustainable strategy and, it became a, like an advantage for us to be climate neutral certified. So, it worked out for us, but it was definitely not planned like that. It was just, okay we should do this for the planet. And then it helped us” (Source 1).

Positioning at the boutique end of the market was deliberate too: “GrowthJet, a boutique 3PL, focuses on delivering the highest quality and service level rather than competing on price. ‘The best clients for us are the ones that have experienced the other end of the spectrum where it’s cheap but also a nightmare’” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

The most reliable source of a new business is an internal pain point your own customers also have. GrowthJet didn’t get built because Yong-Soo wanted to be in logistics — it got built because his existing e-commerce business kept getting burned by 3PLs, and once he heard other founders complaining about the same thing, the supply-and-demand was already proven. The product launched with paying clients and no website. That’s the cleanest possible validation: stop solving the problem internally and start charging people who were going to ask you for it anyway. The sustainability layer is a separate lesson — when a values-driven differentiator coincides with a category that’s about to be reweighted by the market, the timing premium can be enormous, even if you weren’t optimizing for it.

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