Minted

“We decided we were not going to pursue an investment in Minted.”

“This time I was, I said to myself, let's not bring in all the VCs at the beginning. I know what I'm doing this time. So I chose no co-founder this time, no VC at this time. Let's figure out how to build perhaps a sustainable lifestyle business, cash flow busin…”

“I opened the doors. There's not a sale for an entire month. Nobody wants the branded stationery products that we'd spent most of our two and a half million Launching, because again, being conservative, I'd said, I know, I'll do an eve.com, I'll put all these b…”

“And we raised our venture around two weeks before Lehman failed because this investor of mine had said to me, I feel something really bad is going to happen. You should go raise. So we just went out August. Who's in town? Anybody? Is anyone in town in August? …”

“Making prices all equal for different kinds of paper and realizing the analysis paralysis people went through, you like almost had to give them a reason to make a decision just by changing the price.”

“Millennial men like to be involved in the wedding decision with the millennial woman. They're more involved dads, and they're more involved husbands, actually, it turns out. So, we learned that our designs were too feminine in weddings, and you wouldn't necess…”

“Things are always more expensive than you think they are, and they're always going to take more time to prove out, and you're going to need more optimizations and more loops to correct things than you think you will. That's why we just say, roughly speaking, i…”

“If you're like me, and you're, you move around a lot, and you're of mixed cultures, you're never really going to feel like you belong to one place or one culture, right? You're always going to feel a little bit like the outsider who's traveling through time an…”

“So the idea was focused around stationery retail, and it had fantastic economics associated with it, good margins, it was an inherently viral product, because your name is on the back of the card, your company name, but the shopping experience offline was pret…”

“On the other hand, I was a little bit, honestly, a little bit risk-averse, and I thought that I did not want to raise venture capital again because I Had had some bumpy experiences in the first go round. So I thought I need to find a business model to apply th…”

“I was actually able to raise a pretty big angel around of two and a half million dollars, which is big for an angel around.”

“The key challenge was how to render the customization of your stationery online. That was, and that was, that wasn't something we could buy off the shelf from anyone, so we had to build it ourselves.”

“Here, there was not one thing sold in the first 30 days, not one sale.”

“And then when they did come, what they were buying were the, it was a tiny little crowdsource selection that I mentioned to you that was my little personal secret hobby passion.”

“Our conversion rate, which is a critical metric that e-commerce companies use to determine success, was something like .one percent.”

“And we have, you know, a couple 100,000 dollars left in the bank.”

“This one brave investor from IDG, now Ridge Ventures, Alex Rosen, decided to take a chance on me. And that's it. That's the only reason. And nobody else was interested.”

“The only thing that sold was the crowdsourced product, and not what we spent the entire year launching, which was all the stationary brands. We actually made a hard cut over, and by Christmas of that year, we went 100% crowdsourcing.”

“We actually decided to move into the holiday cards business against the advice of all of our investors who probably rightly said you should focus on what you started, which was wedding. We decided to ignore the advice, launch into holiday cards, and we were, w…”

“The first week of October, my cell phone rings at about five o'clock. It's the CEO of a much, much larger competitor. And they basically say, we want you to hear the news from us. We have bought this printing company of yours that, that you use You know, this …”

“So I went in for the meeting, and after a little bit of chatter he said, we'd like to buy you. We'd like to buy your business. And I realized in that moment that that whole thing had been constructed to basically force us to sell our business.”

“Yes, so we are in the low hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and we are EBITDA, we're cash flow positive.”

“There was not a single order for probably three weeks, four weeks after the site was live”

“I mean, I've retained a much larger ownership stake in the company, which is what I wanted to do. Then I think I would have had I taken money early, bigger money earlier.”

“So I think a healthy ratio for us, we have a very high bar, I would say, would be under 30% paid as a percentage of our acquisition mix.”

“They transform within 18 months of continuous feedback and critique from their peers, and they become unrecognizable from where they started.”

“We're not a company that says we must have this level of diversity at all levels. We are a company that says we must have a bias free and meritocratic process to evaluating sourcing talent and evaluating it.”

“Every year for the first four or five years when Minted was constantly almost going out of business. Because we were almost all, almost always out of cash. It was brutal the first couple of years of building this business.”