Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Customer acquisition strategy-wise, what works for you the best?

Andrew Witkin: I’m in a few tech groups that are very strong SaaS businesses. For them, it’s very much that whole customer on ramping process. Of course, the sales team is very much responsible for that. They need to acquire customers when you’re a SaaS model because the value of each customer is so high. We’re more marketing-driven to send traffic to inspire people to come to the website and realize the solutions they can now afford using our platform.

Marketing is really there to drive a lot of that awareness and mid-funnel conversion whether it be through search. Our sales team is not built to go out and cold call. Once people come to the website and they want help, we built up a team to be able to, one-on-one, accommodate a customer’s unique needs. >>>

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. >>>

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 >>>

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? >>>

Bootstrapping to $23 Million: Michael Nemeroff, CEO of RushOrderTees (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of strategic moves, what were some of your moves that were driving this growth?

Michael Nemeroff: We invested in people, getting the right people in place, and learning about management, which wasn’t easy for us. We don’t have any formal education on management. We don’t have any background on that. I don’t know if I told you. Customers just keep coming back, which was a big thing. We realized that customer experience is huge.

Technology came in around 2007 to 2008 where we invested in technology where customers can self-service. You can go online, design online, and checkout online. We invested on that but it didn’t really take off until we started putting marketing dollars behind it. We hired someone to handle the marketing and focus on e- >>>

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? >>>

Bootstrapping to $23 Million: Michael Nemeroff, CEO of RushOrderTees (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did the equipment cost you?

Michael Nemeroff: I remember the bill was about $10,500 for the initial investment. Then there’s all the ancillary stuff like the inks. I couldn’t tell my friends about it because I didn’t know if you’re allowed to have that equipment inside the house. We just kept on printing and learning how to market online. We went to forums and marketed to business people. The next step was moving to a facility and starting to hire people.

Sramana Mitra: While you had the printing equipment in the dining room, did you reach the $1 million a year number?

Michael Nemeroff: No, I think we were just a solid $25,000 to $30,000. >>>

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. >>>