Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We haven’t really talked about the ramp curve. You launched the business in 2010?

Andrew Witkin: Yes, in February 2010. By the fall of 2010, we made it a little more accessible for do-it-yourselfers. We allowed people to do templates so they can make a page of circle stickers only and not have to have die cut shapes. After we did that, about a year and three months later, we released the business version in 2012.

That’s when we started to see not only some incremental growth, but also some more substantial growth in terms of average order value and customer retention. All of a sudden, we had to revise our business plan. At the end of 2012, we were starting to hit very different types of forecasts which we hadn’t been able to do up until that point.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us a range on where you are today?

Andrew Witkin: We’ve got about 200,000 customers.

Sramana Mitra: Are these mostly small business customers?

Andrew Witkin: I would say a lot of them are.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage is small business?

Andrew Witkin: From a revenue perspective, we’re looking at over 70% to 75%. The other 25% is consumer. You run into certain gray areas. If you’re doing a charitable run for a cause, that can be a consumer or a charity. We’re probably in that 75%/25% range. In terms of number of customers, it probably is closer to 50%/50%.

Sramana Mitra: The briefing I got is you’re above $5 million in revenue. Do you want to give further color on that?

Andrew Witkin: We’re at a good growth clip. We’re growing anywhere between 50% to 60% a year.

Sramana Mitra: You raised that $1.5 million in funding. Have you raised more than that?

Andrew Witkin: We got that $1.5 million by June 2009. Then every other year, we raised another half a million to a million predominantly from the same investors but sometimes the pool kept expanding a bit. Each round we might attract one or two new investors to the point where we had 20 angel investors. The total funds raised to date are about $4.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story? What else have you done strategically that is worth discussing?

Andrew Witkin: From a strategic standpoint like anything in business, once you see product-market fit, the types of people you look for change as the business  grows. Strategically, we’ve started to focus on good marketing and sales hires. That’s predominantly because, up until then, you really just want to make the whole online product experience tremendous.

A lot of that involves development, user experience, and design. In the more traditional sense of going out and trying to attract customers, we hadn’t spent as much effort there. We really loved what we were seeing in the day-to-day business. Now that we do, we spend much more energy on the marketing side.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
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