Company profile · 4 min read
Donkey: one delivered import price for small businesses
Donkey combines factory sourcing, container packing, duties, quality checks and delivered pricing for businesses buying imported inventory.
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
Published · Updated
Donkey is an import-buying service for small businesses that are too large for parcel pricing and too small to fill a container alone. Its decision is simple: give Donkey a buying list, and it returns one delivered number that includes factory sourcing, packing, duties and freight.
What it does
The current Donkey site says buyers upload SKUs, quantities and specifications, then see a landed price for the whole container. Donkey says it buys from the factory, checks cartons before the factory is paid, stacks duty line by line and holds the price after signature. The site describes shared containers for buyers that cannot fill a full box and says its pricing math is deterministic rather than generated by AI.
The company is selling a managed import contract, not merely a supplier-search tool. Its YC launch says Donkey is starting with people who build, and the homepage shows an anonymized home-builder example claiming 38% savings versus buying piecemeal from distributors. That is a company-reported example, not a guaranteed saving or an independent landed-cost comparison.
Why I’d look closer
The buyer fit is unusually concrete: builders, manufacturers and other businesses buying pallet-scale inventory with enough repeat volume for container economics to matter. The founders’ public context fits the lane. The YC profile says Benjamin Martindale grew up in an importing business and ran a Wuhan office in Mandarin; Minghao Tan describes the customs-record and factory-data side of the product.
The advantage is accountability. One contract and one delivered number can be easier to budget than coordinating a factory, forwarder, customs broker and distributor. The tradeoff is that the buyer is trusting Donkey with supplier choice, specifications, inspection and the boundary between a locked quote and an unexpected exception. Import duties, quality, delays and working capital do not disappear because the quote is tidy.
What I’d ask
Who is the importer of record? What happens when a specification is ambiguous or a shipment is late, damaged or nonconforming? Which duties, taxes, insurance and port charges are included in the locked price? How are shared-container ownership, payment milestones, inspection evidence and remedies documented before signing?
My editorial take
Shortlist Donkey if your business already buys repeatable inventory by the pallet and your team is paying a middleman premium for a job it cannot reliably run itself. Treat the first order as a supply-chain diligence exercise: start with a small, well-specified SKU set and make the acceptance, quality and landed-cost assumptions explicit before committing to a container.
Quick facts
| Field | Sourced detail |
|---|---|
| Product | Factory-direct sourcing, container packing and delivered import pricing |
| Buyer | Small businesses buying imported inventory at pallet or container scale |
| Published example | Company homepage claims 38% savings for one anonymized home-builder order |
| Pricing | Quote-based; no software subscription price published |
| Main question | Does one accountable contract reduce total landed cost without hiding supply risk? |
Sources checked
| Source | Checked |
|---|---|
| YC company profile | 2026-09-19 |
| Donkey homepage | 2026-09-19 |
| Donkey YC launch | 2026-09-19 |
Cohort context
Donkey is listed in Summer 2026. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 119 of 232 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (51.3%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.
Public website snapshot
Observed 2026-09-19T16:18:44.735Z in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.
| Signal | Homepage observation |
|---|---|
| Product description metadata | Observed |
| Canonical link | Observed |
| H1 or H2 heading | Observed |
| Typed structured data | Observed |
| Docs/developer link | Not observed in this response |
| Pricing link | Not observed in this response |
| llms.txt link | Not observed in this response |
| Markdown alternate | Not observed in this response |
Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.
About the author
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
I cofound Lazyweb and publish Mudpie. This is an owner-written publication, not an independent testing organization. Research notes distinguish observations, sourced reporting and editorial judgment.
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