Paperless Post

“The truth is that I think every entrepreneur knows a dollar from one place buys you the same as a dollar from another place. They're not different. You don't, there, I think if you really want to succeed and support your company, you don't need to be too picky…”

“But, you know, in 2017, we decided to Shut down the operation.”

“We noticed that, Two segments were kind of standing apart from the rest, professional events and wedding events, and we were thinking about the fact that these customers, these business customers, are really appealing. Like, they're great customers. They have …”

“And honestly, we didn't really spend much money on marketing until a few years ago. We kind of thought that marketing was like fake news. We were really onto product-led growth and kind of, you know, these viral growth dynamics very, very, you know, a lot.”

“We started with pay cuts which was, you know, everyone was a pretty good support about that. And so we kind of heard, we heard about PPP loans. We were one of the first companies to get PPP loans and we, they were pretty generous. We negotiated with our landlo…”

“The first people we brought in were a design firm in Boston that kind of helped us create wireframes in a flow. And we paid for that with the savings that, you know, my sister and I had, which was a little bit of money that our grandparents had given us or had…”

“The thing about having a lot of capital When you're a small company is that you can put it behind the wrong strategy and you don't, you lose touch with the practical reality of the business.”

“What really happened was that sales dropped by 85% in April, and then over the summer, they settled it around 50% down to the prior year, as we saw people figured out how to have parties that were outdoor parties, or drive-by parties, or virtual parties. So, s…”

“I think we did five, 500,000 dollars in sales in the first, like, 10 weeks of paper.”

“I think I should have listened to James's instinct, which was always originally to actually charge for the product itself, but the truth is that Because we were able to see the value that the users were getting, it gave us this confidence that, you know what, …”

“Our first investors came to us through the product. Our first, the lead investor of our seed financing round was This was a someone from a fund called Moose Partners and he received an invitation, and he just got it.”

“Well, at the time that we were going to, that we needed to raise money, we had like very, maybe 4000 dollars in the bank account.”

“Back in 2007, if you can remember, there really was a limit to, there were certain types of events where you could not use an online product to communicate. It was not legitimate.”

“So we raised money on the back of this revenue stream around ticketing, but the organizations that were using us for ticketed events were harder to acquire and much harder to serve.”

“I wanted it to be a premium product from the outset because the kind of incumbent competitive options were free and ad-supported, and I thought that there was, it was a really bad idea to try to monetize an invitation product, which by definition- It just look…”

“We, yeah, we raised about 800,000 the first time.”

“Those were riddled with ads and not very beautiful, and you couldn't really achieve the sort of self-expression or the design value that I was going for”

“I remember in December of 2009 that we did a 100,000 dollars in sales.”

“So, at the time, I was 23, and I understood that I would probably never have less to lose than I did then.”

“We have no advertising ever, and we don't sell people's data.”

“We're around the size we were before COVID, but we're double the size we're profitable.”

“We had had, we had always been running kind of close to profitability, and we would have court, we would always be profitable in Q four probably since 2000 and Christmas. Yeah. Since 2010, we'd have a huge surge, but we, we've been profitable since 20, 21 in t…”

“For us specifically the way that we are really focused on using AI at the moment is in taking work that users don't need to do out of the process of designing. We're working on ways of collapsing steps and taking time out of the process of customizing, but ena…”

“And I think that the goal isn't to explain everything. It's to explain just enough so that people's curiosity is, is piqued and they want to understand more.”

“I think that you probably shouldn't spend time worrying about patenting designs. You should focus on continuing to innovate and to offer this full authentic experience, which you really have. And I think copycats, they might look like your product, but I think…”

“If something defines your brand, it needs your taste, if it changes often, that's the kind of thing you should keep close. But if it is consistent and repeatable, systematize it.”

“The best way I've found to position your product is to really understand what your most beloved fans see in it and use that as the crux of the positioning, which you're aiming to express to people who don't understand it yet.”