Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Before you raised the next million dollars, what milestones did you achieve in terms of validation?

Andrew Witkin: We showed that from a technical perspective, you could go on to a website, upload an image, type text, and work with various images, and both the image and an automated die-cut could be created. You can then checkout with that image. It was actually a page of stickers. You would have multiple stickers on a page. They were all uniquely die-cut. That would get saved to a server and could eventually get downloaded to a digital printer that would print and then cut that page. We proved that it could be done automatically.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have any customers using this yet?

Andrew Witkin: No, it was all in beta stage. It was not live. It was more of a proof of concept, albeit it was a working website. We could have gone live but we knew that the user experience probably needed some time to get refined. We wanted to have people test it out and work with it before we made a formal live launch. On the business end, the model that I had first conceived was based on my experiences which was how anyone between 10 and 24 years old loved custom stickers.

If you think of Hurley and Quicksilver, that’s that youth culture that loves die-cut stickers. We said this would be a platform where they, in particular, would find this to be really attractive. Part of what made the business side attractive to investors was saying, “We will go after licensed brands like skateboard brands and entertainment companies who I knew a lot of. We would get licenses so people can make a page of stickers with different content.”

I went out and got licenses with these companies and we also got the ability to put our technology as an iframe onto their websites so their visitors could instantly make stickers and order them. A lot of them felt that it was a cool concept. By signing up companies to this, everyone felt that there was a way to scale the awareness. If you had batman.com with our sticker maker on it, that was hundreds of thousands of uniques a month in addition to our core website. That was the business side that I think people had to see and feel excited about. On the technology side, they thought that this actually could be produced automatically.

Sramana Mitra: Then you raised a million dollars from the same investors?

Andrew Witkin: All the same investors came back in. Some of the names on the investor profile became a little bit more intriguing. We also had an investor from the UK who had run a massive website called miniclip.com. We had an integration that we wanted to do with them to allow people to order stickers for the avatar that they’d created on their website. That was the first strategic investor outside of all the angels we had. We went live in February 2010.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
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