Digitizing the Post Office

Long before e-commerce was a household word, Amine Khechfé and two partners were figuring out how to print postage from a personal computer. It took them 13 years of pivots, seven years to get the Postal Service to approve the concept, and several near-death moments, including seven-figure bills from the Postal Service itself. Then eBay came along, and the business grew more than 50 percent a year for eight straight years. Khechfé co-founded Endicia, ran it through its acquisition by Newell in 2007 and by Stamps.com in 2015, served as Chief Strategy Officer through the Thoma Bravo take-private, and retired in 2023. He now advises and sits on the boards of shipping and logistics companies. His story is a reminder that the tools shippers take for granted today were once considered impossible, even laughable.

Thirteen years of pivots before the product

Khechfé did not set out to work in shipping. He studied mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Stanford, where he met his co-founder, his professor Harry Whitehouse. After ten months at AT&T, he joined Whitehouse’s small consulting firm, PSI, to do energy analysis. That lasted about a year. The firm pivoted to management consulting, building project management and accounting software for the Postal Service’s facilities department, which handled 40,000 post offices on a $5 billion annual budget, plus work for the Navy and court systems. That phase ran five or six years. The shipping idea came from curiosity. The team helped the Postal Service lay out post offices with an early CAD system and noticed a big barcode reader being installed. They built a dial-up system to look up ZIP codes, patented it, then created one of the first downloadable soft fonts so a regular HP printer could print the barcode. That became Envelope Manager, their first software product. Then came the obvious question: if we can print the barcode and the address, why not print the postage?

Printing money (almost literally)

Printing postage meant printing currency, so it took patents and about seven years to get the Postal Service to approve the concept. By 1999, the service signed off, several companies were working on it, and everyone was thinking about envelopes. Then the team looked at eBay, twenty minutes from Khechfé’s house, and saw the real problem. Sellers stood in line at the post office to weigh packages, buy postage, buy tracking numbers on green labels they taped to boxes, and fill out customs forms. Khechfé says the team solved that in three months and launched at four times the price of the next competitor. It took off anyway. The Postal Service pushed back hard. Khechfé describes receiving official “nasty grams” saying PC postage was approved for letters, not parcels, and that Endicia had to stop printing shipping labels. The company had to argue its case while growing fast. Worse, the Postal Service started sending seven-figure bills for the credit card fees on postage purchases: merchants paid by Visa, the fees ran 2 to 3 percent, and on hundreds of millions in postage that dwarfed Endicia’s $10 to $16 a month SaaS fees. Khechfé calls that stretch, about four contentious years, the most dangerous in the company’s history, the one that nearly shut them down.

The eBay wave and 50 percent growth

What saved them was product-market fit. Khechfé says the first year was pure enthusiasm: eBay sellers giving demos of Endicia’s software to each other in the aisles of the first eBay conference, where the company could not even afford a booth. Customers said it saved them an hour a day and let them drop packages at the back of the post office without standing in line. From year one, the company never grew less than 50 percent a year for eight years. Khechfé credits relentless customer listening: answering questions in eBay’s shipping forums, getting included in eBay University classes, and walking into customers’ homes and warehouses unannounced to watch how they worked. He loaded boxes into his rental car for a customer who missed a pickup and drove them to the post office himself. The product kept expanding with the market: stealth postage that hid the postage amount (sellers then marked up shipping), automated customs forms by 2001, 4x6 label formats to match what UPS and FedEx used, a poor man’s API that became a real one, and a Mac version through a partnership.

The Brazil fix: when data finds the problem

Years later, with a more professional operation, the team hired Shay Felix from the Postal Service to focus on international. He dug into the data and found Brazil volumes down 50 percent over three years, hidden by overall growth. Parcels took 35 days from the US to Brazil, with 12 to 15 days sitting in customs. The fix, built with AJ Hernandez’s SkyPostal, was elegant: a US seller printing a label to Brazil would instead print a domestic label to SkyPostal’s Miami warehouse, with all the customs data transmitted electronically. SkyPostal scanned the label, pre-cleared the shipment, and manifested it into Brazil, clearing customs in about six hours. Transit dropped to 10 to 12 days, cost fell from roughly $30 to roughly $18, and buyers in Brazil got notified to pay duties while the package was still in Miami. Khechfé calls it a win for everyone: merchants saved about $10, both companies took a cut, and 92 percent of parcels flowed through Brazil’s Correios.

Selling the company without leaving it

Endicia was approached by acquirers almost annually and always said no: three co-founders, no outside investors, profitable, in control. What changed was scale. Big partners said working with Endicia would double its business, which was too much risk for them, and the company lost European bids it was qualified to win simply for being small. Dymo, a big partner, was acquired by Newell, which came back with a strong offer and a promise the team could keep running and growing the business. They sold in mid-2007, and Khechfé ran it for eight more years, growing it more than sixfold. When Newell’s strategy shifted, he was given 90 days to buy the company back or run a sale process. The process ended with Stamps.com, a team they had known since the late 1990s. Khechfé jokes it was the sixth time one side had tried to buy the other. Seven months in, the subsidiaries merged, and he became Chief Strategy Officer, adding M&A to his remit. He stayed through the Thoma Bravo take-private in October 2021 and two years beyond, spending his last six months hiring and training his replacements. His operating principle, he says, was always “how do you obsolete me,” and he applied it to his own exit.

Advice that survives every decade

Asked for one recurring piece of advice, Khechfé offers several he uses even with his kids. Do not get a case of the greeds and the stupids. Keep the customer point of view: five people in a room with a spreadsheet are not the customer, so go talk to the customer. Communicate; he is amazed how hard people find it. And work with people you like, because life is too short. On AI, he sees another step function like the internet: a chance to remove the next layer of friction, whether that is finding a lost package, simplifying a claim, or dynamically routing warehouse picks. His test for any technology, from drones to agentic shopping, is the same one he has always used. The package still has to get there.

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This post is based on the Logistics Remix episode “Digitizing the Post Office” with Amine Khechfé, Co-founder and President at Endicia. The views are the guest’s and the host’s own.