Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened when you went live? What was the market telling you?

Andrew Witkin: This is always the fun part, right? You get so excited thinking that you know what the market is. I think the irony or the quick learning for us was that skateboarders don’t have a ton of money. When you charge even $10 for a custom die cut sticker, it wasn’t in the kind of volume that we had in our business plans. We realized that this was going to be a bit of a problem.

Luckily, seeing other types of customers like small businesses and brides, they also started ordering from us in fairly good quantities. We realized that we needed to pivot the website in terms of user interface and some of the branding to make it a little bit more inclusive to many different types of segments, and not let it be just a fun site.

Sramana Mitra: You started looking for use cases that are business use cases – more white labels and stuff like that.

Andrew Witkin: Yes. Startups were ordering a few custom stickers from us. We had a really good value proposition. Now they could order for as low as $10 and order just the exact amount of stickers that they needed as opposed to being filtered into minimum order runs. That was more of an old school manufacturing that they were forced into.

That customer base was growing. Ever since, we’ve been refining the technology to better meet the needs of small businesses. They are what I would call do-it-yourselfers. That includes young people but also brides. For example, in the beginning you would make a sticker page and you’d have various random stickers on that page.

We realized that businesses don’t really tlike o make an entire page. They don’t need all these creative tools like you have in Photoshop. They just want to upload a logo, choose the size, and then checkout. They have better things to do than get all creative on our website. We refined the interface to do that. It took another year before we got the interface to a place where we started to see, at least, the first version of that business interface come out. We started to see our conversion rates and our average order value rates went up a lot.

Our business plan got tempered. This licensing site and third-party websites being the driver of our revenue, that didn’t really come to fold. It was more about making a platform that was accessible to small businesses and do-it-yourselfers according to what they really wanted. We added more materials. People were asking for clear stickers. People were asking for large wall decals. We started to listen. Our product roadmap became a lot smarter because it wasn’t just based on gut. It finally was based on real customer data.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
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