Minted

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”