Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 2)

Andrew Witkin: I was fascinated with the experience of building blocks and observing the behavior of children. I was fascinated with digital marketing because of all the customization that you could do. Facebook had just started to come. This was 2007. We also owned a craft company that did coloring crayons, markers, and stickers.

I was walking along the beach and noticing the cool surf culture. I was taken back by all the stickers that I saw everywhere. I looked around and said, “How do people make custom stickers?” It was after that when I started doing research on my own. Personalization was becoming big. People were starting to do their own custom calendars and custom t-shirts. I realized that you couldn’t make die-cut stickers – the one that contoured around the image as opposed to just a one by two inch rectangle.

That was the inspiration wherein I just started to spend a lot of my spare time researching and trying to figure out if there could be a business around allowing people to make their own customer die-cut stickers online. It was either a traditional printer that would take a minimum order of, say, 500 stickers, or there were more template-based stuff out there. I researched it and then finally came to a nirvana that this is something that I wanted to pursue. I wrote a business plan. I travelled to Germany and learned about the latest in digital printing at a trade show. It was pretty scary and exciting.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Andrew Witkin: 2008.

Sramana Mitra: Before the crash of after the crash?

Andrew Witkin: It was basically through the summer of 2008 that I was putting all this together. I went to the trade show in Germany in June. I had written a business plan by the beginning of August. I met some initial friends, family, and angel investors by mid-August, and started to have conversations. At one point, I actually travelled in the States to a trade show to test the business model concept. I met another entrepreneur there who was running an $80 million tattoo company.

He actually gave me the inspiration. He said, “Don’t keep thinking that this is part-time. Just go all in and don’t look for a job. Just see what happens. You’re going to be okay.” I got inspired and figured that when I came back, I had to go hard at this. I finalized raising capital maybe about five or six weeks after the crash. Luckily, the people who I was working with weren’t going to renege on the deals. It was about half a million dollars in angel money. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but it was certainly enough for us to build a prototype and see if the idea could be technologically created. That’s the long story of how all this began.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
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