Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Did you bootstrap it, did your raise money, or use your own money?

Andrew Witkin: I realized that I wasn’t in a position to self-fund this. I was not technically smart enough to code this. I needed to hire a development team. I wrote a business plan for it. Obviously, I showed all the business metrics and what have you to show how this could be a successful business in my mind. I was able to attract around six initial investors for about half a million dollars. That allowed us to have enough capital for about nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Who were these people? Why were they investing in your company? Did they know you before? What were the circumstances in which you were able to raise half a million dollars?

Andrew Witkin: I would consider myself to be one of the luckier entrepreneurs in that I was able to raise the money from people I had known or knew the people who I knew. They were high net worth individuals who trusted both my business plan and the other people I did know. The people I knew were my brother-in-law and my closest friend from childhood.

Both have been quite successful in business. They had a lot of things on their plate. Whether they took pity in me or they truly believed that this was something worth trying, that snowballed into getting some other fairly smart people who were willing to take a risk.

Sramana Mitra: With that half a million dollars, what did you do?

Andrew Witkin: The hardest thing was to hire a lead Director of Technology. That took approximately two months to do. I found a great individual. He was tasked with hiring the development team. We had a team of about four. Then I brought on a general business person. It was about six or seven of us. We also thought that art was going to be an important part of people making stickers. I had a designer who worked on the user interface.

I was also contracting with artists to create art for the site that people can make custom stickers with. That period lasted about five to six months. We actually bought our first machine to make stickers. They were more affordable in the digital age than in the old days. This was about a $20,000 investment. We were able to write code and see if that code can ultimately take images, die cut them, and then print them. All this started in December. In May the following year, we presented to the investors the prototype of how it would work. They were all very excited about it. That allowed to us then go to another round of raising a million dollars.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
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