Eric Zang, you are the CTO of a company called Scalable Press.
Welcome to the Adakris podcast.
Thanks, Kordland.
Glad to have you on here.
So Scalable Press, super impressive company.
You guys are entirely bootstrapped,
and you're doing over $100 million in revenue.
Is that right?
That's right.
Tell us about the company.
What is Scalable Press?
What do you guys do, and who uses you,
and why do they use you?
Sure, absolutely.
So Scalable Press is a printing company,
and we started off in apparel.
So think about your screen-printed t-shirts,
garments, that sort of thing, like your local t-shirt shop.
And since then, we've expanded to a lot more print types.
We actually do all the printing ourselves
in our facilities in the US, and we build e-commerce websites
on top of that.
So our customers are actually across the board
different markets in B2C, B2B, whoever needs printing.
And I think they use us because we develop technology that
makes that printing more efficient, which
means lower cost for our customers, better quality,
and better turnaround times.
This sounds like a super complex company.
On one hand, you guys are a t-shirt shop.
But on the other hand, you have a bunch of e-commerce sites
and an API and different actual physical processes
for printing stuff.
Give me a sense of your role at the company as the CTO.
What does that entail on a day-to-day basis?
Sure.
So I'm in charge of the engineering team
first and foremost.
We are building all of the software
that powers our actual facilities,
the software that's integrating with the printers
and other equipment.
And on top of that, we build, of course,
the API, which is how you get orders and volume
into the facilities.
And then on top of that, the engineering team
builds a bunch of different e-commerce products,
different brands that target different markets.
How big is your engineering team?
So we have about 50 in a couple offices right now.
Wow.
And how big is the entire company?
If you look at the offices, we have maybe close to 150 people
now.
And then we have a couple hundred more
that work in our facilities.
OK, so you're one of the biggest bootstrapped companies
that I've ever had on the podcast.
I really want to dive into all sorts of specifics here,
including how did you get so big,
and also how does a t-shirt company ramp up
to over $100 million in revenue.
But first, I want to talk about your backstory, Eric,
because we have kind of similar backstories.
We both came from, I guess, a high-growth, venture-funded
Silicon Valley mindset.
And now we're both here working on bootstrapped companies
promoting and evangelizing the bootstrapped business
lifestyle.
We actually were in Y Combinator together in 2011,
as I'm sure you remember.
But I want to go back even further than that.
What got you into tech to begin with,
and what got you into entrepreneurship?
When I was in college, I was studying computer science.
And a couple of friends of mine, we got together,
and we would basically build apps and websites
after we finish our problem sets.
I guess at that point, I already knew
that I wanted to be in tech startups just growing up
in the Bay Area.
It was always in the air, I suppose.
And we applied to Y Combinator for the winter 2011 batch,
and we got in.
And that was a really amazing experience for somebody
that was dropping out of college at 19 years old.
We raised a seed round.
We did that whole Silicon Valley thing.
And that was super cool.
But I was never really satisfied.
And I remember distinctly about two years after Y Combinator,
there was a day when I just woke up,
and I felt like I don't want to go to work today.
I just didn't feel right.
And I went on vacation for two weeks
to relax a bit and deal with that burnout.
And I realized what was causing me
to feel so depressed about things.
And this is where I had to look back to my history
to understand.
So to give you guys all some context,
I started doing entrepreneurship when I was in high school.
So the first thing I did was I used
to build a lot of freelance websites.
So I would literally go on Craigslist, and I'd say,
here, I'll build your website for $100.
And I built a lot of websites until school got busy.
And I was studying for the SATs and whatnot.
And at that point, I actually started
contracting out my work.
So I found these guys in China who could build websites.
And I kind of managed them while I was in high school.
So they started doing the freelance work.
And I just was the guy that fixed the English and stuff
like that.
So as I continued in high school, at some point,
I realized, well, now that I have more time,
I started building other businesses.
It was very empowering knowing that I could make my own money.
And at one point, I was one of the largest dropshippers
on eBay of fake mustaches, of all things.
And later, I discovered that, oh, you
could fix Blackberry's real easily.
You remember, back then, they had the Blackberries
with the trackball.
So I bought all these Blackberry parts.
And I would buy all the broken Blackberries I could find.
And I would get together with my classmates.
And I trained them to just swap out the parts.
Then resell them as refurbished.
So I did all these little small businesses
when I was in high school.
And fast forward, again, to my Y Combinator startup.
We raised $1.4 million from SVA and Joe Andreessen
and all of the brand names.
We had our TechCrunch article.
All of that was done.
And I woke up depressed because I realized
that I made more money in high school selling fake mustaches
and training a bunch of kids to fix phones
than we had as this properly built Silicon Valley
type of startup.
And that just felt wrong to me.
We were at a point where I guess we
could have raised a Series A because we had some traction
in the open source community.
But it just didn't feel right because we never really
figured out the actual business model.
So I actually ended up leaving that startup.
In a lot of ways, I see that as the start of my current career.
How much money were you making as a high school kid selling
fake mustaches and repairing blackberries,
if you remember?
It wasn't a time.
I did some other stuff on the side, too.
I was also fixing computers locally.
I trained my classmates to just literally go door to door.
And we'd see who had computer problems, like pop-up bat
and spyware and things.
And we'd fix that.
So I think in total, I was making somewhere
in the mid-five figures.
So nothing crazy.
But for a high school kid, it was
enough to have a lot of fun.
Yeah, it's a lot.
I don't know any of you high school kids, at least
in my high school, who had this kind of entrepreneurial drive.
Did you come from a family of business owners?
Or were you inspired by anything in particular?
Or was it just all internal?
I've thought about this a lot.
And there were two things that I think really
formed my entrepreneurial spirit, if you will.
The first one happened when I was very young.
When I was like eight years old, the internet
was just beginning to become a thing.
And everybody was still on dial-up.
And I remember one day, I was looking for an internet service
provider, because our previous one through my dad's
university, where he was studying at the time,
had been shut down.
And I found a free dial-up ISP.
And I was so excited.
So I got this set up on our family computer.
And it was great.
It was free dial-up internet.
So I used it for a month.
And that one day, the phone bill came.
And turns out, this ISP was free, but it was in the UK.
And I was in Canada at the time.
So every minute I was on the internet
was an international phone call from Canada to the UK.
And we ended up with a $1,200 phone bill.
My dad was furious.
This was when I was eight years old.
So I actually felt a lot of guilt from that.
And basically, after that, I never had an allowance.
My parents didn't buy me a lot of stuff.
There was definitely a lot of, I don't know,
I just didn't have access to the things I wanted.
I remember, distinctly, I wanted to buy some video games.
There was a girl I liked.
That's what it was.
There was a girl I liked.
This was actually in middle school.
There was a girl I liked.
And she said she wanted some video game.
I was like, I'm going to buy her this video game.
I had no money.
And that's when I started going on Craigslist
to do freelance work.
That didn't work out.
Turns out, you can't just buy people's stuff
to get them to like you.
But I did discover that I could do work.
I can make my own money.
And I could do what I wanted with that money.
Well, that's a great way to discover it.
And it seems to have set you on a path
that led to where you are today.
One of the things you mentioned, and you just
sort of brushed right over it, was
that you dropped out of college to pursue your first startup
idea with your friends from college.
And you got into Y Combinator.
What was that decision like?
Because I considered making the same decision probably
a dozen times in college.
And I never pulled the trigger.
I never actually dropped out, even
though I knew that I had the skill set needed
to really build my own thing.
What was going through your head when you made that decision?
And why were you so confident that it was going to be OK?
So I think because of all that stuff I did in high school,
going into college, I knew I wanted
to do entrepreneurship in some form.
And I thought maybe this is something
that I can do after I graduate.
But especially being in Silicon Valley,
it's just difficult to say no to things like Y Combinator
and say no to things like term sheets for seed rounds.
It really feels like you've accomplished something
just getting to that point.
So I was excited.
I was super excited to drop out of college.
My parents were definitely less excited, but at least it
wasn't dropping out to pursue just a passion.
It seemed like a textbook, correct way
to build a startup.
OK, and so tell us about the startup
that you were confident about enough
to drop out of school for.
Yeah, so the company was called Flowtype.
And I wouldn't say I was confident enough in it
because we pivoted immediately.
Paul Graham, right before we got into Y Combinator,
actually sent us a message saying,
we'll accept you guys in a YC if you change your idea.
And so I definitely wasn't confident, per se.
But what we ended up building, which I think
was the right choice, was basically
networking software that optimized the network
connections between different clients and servers.
And we released it open source.
And we got a lot of open source traction, Twitter,
and we were speaking at conferences
and that whole type of thing.
But open source traction, unfortunately,
did not equal business.
Basically, they liked you.
They didn't like your idea.
And you pivoted to another idea that
didn't have any sort of business model, which basically
was the norm back then.
Like, 2011, I also was working on a company that
didn't have a business model.
And I remember people coming to talk to us at YC.
And they were always founders of companies
that basically didn't generate any revenue whatsoever.
And that was just kind of how you did things back then.
Nowadays, it's different.
There are a lot of VC-funded companies
that make money from day one.
But back then, it was kind of the norm
to just grow as big as you possibly could.
And then revenue would appear later.
Why do you think it bothers you so much later on to the point
where you actually quit?
But it didn't bother you upfront when you first
got started with Flowtype.
I think being young and a college dropout,
as much as I think entrepreneurs are expected to be visionaries,
in reality, we were just kids.
I mean, sure, we were smart.
And we knew our way around computers and programming.
But I don't think we were able to see beyond.
We couldn't argue against what seemed so correct,
the TechCrunch article, the 30 under 30, what the seed
investors were telling us.
Everybody was telling us, look, all you have to worry about
is building crazy new technology.
Don't think about anything else.
And we're going to give you money to do it.
And you're great.
And you guys are smart because you're doing it that way.
And it's hard to say no to that.
It's hard to argue against that.
Yeah, it's pretty powerful.
I mean, that's kind of the stuff that makes us human, right?
Getting status and respect from the leaders in your community.
They're investors who have the money, who've
been around the block a few times,
telling you that you're on the right path.
It's pretty hard to argue against.
But in the world of business, anyone
who's not a customer giving you money,
does their vote really count?
Absolutely.
I mean, in the end, the consumer doesn't care.
Like you said, the customer that will make or break your business,
they don't necessarily care about that status
or they may not even know about it.
And either you've created a product
that can create a profitable business or you haven't.
So what was it like burning out from your business
prototype and deciding to quit?
I imagine that can't have been an easy bit of news
to deliver to your co-founders.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it is hard because these were my best friends.
These are the guys that I had been working close with,
living together with for years.
There was a moment when I really knew
that something was very wrong.
And this is going to sound so ridiculous in retrospect.
But I remember going to work and we had a nice office.
We had fancy monitors and MacBooks
and all of that good stuff.
And all of us were basically watching Netflix at work.
Not every minute, just we ended up
watching hours of Netflix at work.
And I remember thinking, what are we doing?
Like why? Sure, maybe we're all a little bit burned out.
We're all working very long hours.
But we're just here watching Netflix at work.
Our business is not making money.
It just seemed fundamentally wrong.
And I think that's the moment when I really
started questioning whether this was the right direction
to keep going in.
And the benefit of hindsight, this
is I think five, six years ago that all of this happened.
Is there anything you would do differently
if you could go back in time to kind of save the company
or set it in the right direction?
Yeah, and I think the biggest thing
I realized after years had passed
and thinking about the whole situation,
I think the reason why none of us really stopped and said,
hey, are we doing this the right way?
Maybe we need to be pivoting.
Maybe we need to rethink our business plan.
Was we were still moving in the right direction,
at least according to the Silicon Valley standard,
meaning our traction open source was there.
We were building an interesting technical product.
And we were getting to the point where
if you wanted to go back to investors and say,
hey, let's get an A. Look at all this traction.
People love what we're building.
Maybe we could have gotten something.
But it just seemed like nobody cared.
Nobody outside our three founders
really cared that we would be making money.
And that way, there was no pressure to do so.
OK, so you quit and make a clean break.
You're now Eric saying a free man, no job, no responsibilities.
How did you figure out where to go from there?
Because you could really go in any direction.
Yeah, no, it was crazy.
I had no idea where to go.
I did nothing.
So I quit in like May.
And that whole summer, I really didn't do much of anything.
I just worked out and read stuff, read books.
That's basically all I did that summer.
It's I think for a lot of, one thing
that doesn't get talked about enough
is what happens when your startup fails.
And it's depressing because it's your identity.
For a lot of people, a lot of their network maybe
or their friends that they see frequently
may just know them then as the guy who did whichever startup
and suddenly removed from that.
So I actually ended up going back to school.
I finished my degree.
And after I finished my degree, funny enough,
I started building more open source software.
And I actually got a bunch of smart friends together.
And we were developing this open source software.
And it got to the point where I was about to raise.
I had talked with some old angels
that I had contact with before.
And it felt like I was about to raise a seed round.
And I remember talking with them about that.
And then suddenly, I realized, holy crap,
I'm about to make the same mistake where
I built some cool technology with no particular market.
So I actually had a second reckoning of, what am I doing?
Why do I keep going back to doing this?
Why do you think you keep going back to doing that?
Just like networking software, I still do today.
Even today, being at Scalable Press,
I think one of the reasons I'm here
is because I got to build really cool networking technology
to power our facility.
So it's really just a matter of doing the thing that you like
and following into the thing that you like doing.
Which is funny as a founder and a developer
because that's the most common story in the world.
Built this thing, really fun to build, look up.
Six months later, it turns out nobody wants it.
Nobody wants to pay for it.
So it's a hard lesson that I've learned myself as well
through the school of hard knocks.
Yeah, absolutely.
So at the same time you're going through this whole learning
process, Scalable Press already existed as a business.
The original founder, Raymond, had gotten started.
What's the story of what he was sort of up to
while you were in Silicon Valley making these mistakes
and learning from them?
Raymond, actually, both of us went to Cal,
and we actually knew each other while we were in school.
When I was working on these side projects,
getting ready to apply to Y Combinator,
Raymond was building out Scalable Press.
And we actually dropped out at the same time.
So he dropped out to keep working on the business,
which we called Oh, Shirts at the time.
And I dropped out to work on my startup.
We ended up in the same office building,
so we grabbed sushi and stuff for dinner.
So that's how I met Raymond, actually.
What was he doing with Oh, Oh, Shirts
and what kind of business was it?
Yeah, so Oh, Shirts, which is still there today,
we're actually working on rebuilding it finally today.
But Oh, Oh, Shirts is a t-shirt website.
It's the type of website you might go to to buy shirts
for your club or for your family reunion or team.
And he was scaling it up gradually.
So Raymond, when he started Oh, Shirts,
was actually building the website himself.
So he taught himself PHP and built out this website.
And he had contract printers
doing the actual printing work.
Did you ever consider joining him at any point
in this process before you actually joined
where you were working on these venture-funded companies
and this open source software?
No, it's like the opposite
because it's like, oh, here's a guy
who's building a dinky-looking website,
selling t-shirts.
But here I am at the SV Angel box suite at AT&T Park
and eating Tuesday dinners at YC.
So I thought I was doing things right.
Do you know how well Raymond was doing
while you were eating at these box suites
and he was working on his dinky website?
Yeah, so we drop out at the same time.
And at that point,
when I was enjoying my Silicon Valley persona,
he dropped out because Oh, Shirts
had hit a $1 million run rate.
Geez, selling t-shirts online.
Yup.
What are the margins like in the t-shirt business anyway?
Because a million dollars is a ton of revenue.
But unlike a pure SaaS company,
I mean, it's not like you're selling code here.
You're selling actual physical goods.
What kind of margins can you expect
on like a million dollars of revenue?
Yeah, you're definitely right.
It's not the same as SaaS.
So it really depends on the market
and where you position the product.
But oh, Shirts at the time was somewhere like 30% margin,
which is I guess more typical for e-commerce business.
It's interesting because you can have products
that are more premium,
that deliver a very high end customer experience
and have more margin.
And you can also have say B2B products
where it's very low margin.
And that's what we look more like today at Scalable Press.
We have a diversity of products
that have higher and lower margins
to accommodate different markets.
So walk me through some of the early milestones
of Oh, Shirts and how it turned into Scalable Press
up until the point that you joined.
Sure.
So Raymond actually founded the business
I think in 2008 when he was in high school.
So this guy's also a high school entrepreneur.
He founded the business basically to get shirts printed
for his high school tennis club.
He saw what was available out there.
He saw the local stores and they weren't good options.
They were either slow or expensive or both.
And he decided to go about it himself.
And he actually found contract printers in China
who would do shirt printing for just an incredibly low price
as you would imagine.
So he started selling that to local high school clubs.
And that's how Oh, Shirts got started.
And he gradually built more and more features on the website
and one more and more customers.
So when he got close to that $1 million mark
when Raymond was dropping out of school,
there was a moment when he realized,
hey, we can't keep using these Chinese contract printers.
The quality is not there.
The speed is not really there.
He wanted to make the experience better,
but he didn't want to raise the prices.
So this is actually a really kind of pivotal moment
in company history when he decided, look, we have to,
we have to do better than what these contractors
can deliver us.
And at the time, the company didn't really have the capital
of their own facilities.
Any sort of manufacturing is very capital intensive.
And being a bootstrap business just meant
that we had to take more steps in between.
So Raymond went down a phone book
and he just called every local small screen print shop
in the US that you could get the phone number for.
And he basically took his price sheet from China
and said, look, these are the prices I'm paying now.
If you can match these prices, the business is yours.
Most of the people were like, no, that's ridiculous.
This is an insulting price.
Slam the phone on him.
But there were a few printers after much effort
that would match those prices.
And that's how we were able to,
or how O'Shirts finally got the printing to be done
at US printers.
And we were still doing contract at that time.
So that's what it was looking like up until 2013,
which is near when I joined
and when we started building out our own manufacturing.
So that's pretty cool.
It was just nothing but pure hustle
and hoping that people I guess would take a chance on you
to get from outsourcing the labor basically
to having kind of low quality products from overseas
to having the same prices
but higher quality items shipped from the US.
You can never underestimate the power
of asking a lot of people
and accepting that many will say no,
but you just need a couple to say yes.
I'm curious about how the business even got to the point
where a lot of people were buying T-shirts from O'Shirts
because as far as I can remember,
the online T-shirt selling industry
has always been super competitive.
And I'm sure this is a topic
we're gonna come back to later on in the episode,
but there are a lot of people selling T-shirts online.
How does somebody go from, especially an 18-year-old,
from nothing to having a business
that people are paying millions of dollars a year
to get T-shirts?
Yeah, I have an anecdote that offers some insight to this.
So when I was in, going back again,
when I was in high school,
I actually did screen printing for a while.
One of the reasons why Raymond and I clicked in printing,
but I was doing screen printing myself
and I realized very quickly
that the cost of screen printing does not have to be high.
Really, you could get something down
to just a few dollars per shirt
and you could still be profitable that way.
A lot of what people saw as the normal prices
were actually very high.
This is what got Raymond into O'Shirts in the first place.
And when O'Shirts started becoming
a larger e-commerce website,
we were the price leader in that space.
In a lot of ways, we still are now
through our different brands,
but if you look at, especially in the late 2010s,
the pricing, it was not even close.
We were consistently 40% cheaper
than the next real competitor.
And even when we were able to bring that printing
to the US, the reason why so many people were insulted
is the pricing that we were offering our customers,
the pricing that we were paying our contract printers
is something that made sense in China,
but really didn't make sense for the US.
And I suspect that the real reason
that we got any contract printers in the US
at that price level was because it was barely any margin
for those contract printers, but it was still business
and some of them just were happy to have any volume.
And so purely through just low prices,
you think that was enough for consumers
to kind of discover O'Shirts and say,
this is where I'm gonna buy from
as opposed to the other sites?
Yeah, I mean, that was the beginning of it.
And as with any market, it gets competitive over time.
If you lead in any area, somebody will catch up.
So that's what we've been up to for the last five years.
So tell me about what kind of conversations led
to you joining the team after you decided
not to sort of repeat your first mistake
in Silicon Valley and fundraise
for these new open source tools you're working on.
Yeah, so I realized that I can't keep building
open source software because that does not a startup make,
not automatically.
So I kind of went in the opposite direction
and going back to how I had done screen printing
in high school, I realized, oh, printing is a business
where I know that the costs online are high,
but the cost to produce can be low.
So I was trying to go back into building
a printing business and then I remembered, okay,
back when I was doing Flowtype in the same office building,
there was this guy Raymond and he ran a T-shirt startup.
So he's in this space and I kind of seeked him out
for mentorship and I went out to his office,
to Raymond's office and I took him out to McDonald's.
And at first he was like, Eric, why are you bringing me
to McDonald's, this is not a good restaurant.
And then I explained to him, look,
this is not the best burger you could have today,
but if you look at the fact that McDonald's
and it's hundreds of thousands of restaurants
can deliver this exact same burger experience
at this extremely low price very quickly,
millions and millions of times,
that is something admirable.
And that is what I really wanted to do
to the printing industry.
I wanted to make printing something more accessible,
lower cost and efficient.
And that's when Raymond realized
that we had pretty much exact same vision
for what we wanted to happen.
And that's kind of how we got started working together.
So what was the state of scalable press at that time?
Like how big was the company?
Did you come in immediately as CTO?
Was there sort of a game plan
for what you would do once you joined?
Yeah, so it's something I give Raymond a lot of credit for
and a lot of entrepreneurs may not have taken this step.
When I joined, this was in early 2014,
O-Shirts, it was still O-Shirts,
scalable press didn't exist yet.
And the company was just the O-Shirts website.
It was doing very well, it had to continue to grow.
We were in the low teens in revenue.
And Raymond paid himself a very low salary
and he was dead set on reinvesting
the company's profits into the business.
And that was the point when the company
really had enough profits to reinvest
that we could start our own facilities
and build a real engineering team.
Before that, all of the website development
and technical stuff was done by a series of contractors.
So the quality was low.
And Raymond realized it too.
He had taught himself PHP, which, you know,
I give him a grief about this all the time,
does not lead to high quality code.
And he knew that the business's potential
was being limited by its ability
to build higher quality software faster.
So I joined and I started building out the engineering team,
hired my friends, and that was the first step.
I was just talking to a buddy of mine last night
who was talking about starting a company.
And we got onto this topic of how the way
that you get started, something doesn't necessarily
need to be the way that it ends up.
And I realized there's a consistent theme
of people who have taught themselves the code
or have outsourced a lot of the code to contractors
for their startups where, of course,
the initial product is pretty crappy.
You know, it's very low quality.
It doesn't do all the things you'd like it to do.
And even the things that it does do,
it doesn't do very well.
And yet, the people I talked to who've had these situations
have still built really successful companies.
I mean, Scalable Press, like we said earlier,
over $100 million a year in revenue.
I talked to Christy Lawrence.
She's got a company called Plan.
She basically contracted out her initial app.
It got to the point where it literally didn't even work.
It fell over and she was super stressed about it
until she got another team to rebuild it.
But she still built a million dollar business.
What are your thoughts on this?
Do you think it's important to start
with a really high quality code base?
Or do you think it's better to just start scrappy
without really paying that much attention
and get the fundamentals down?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And my smartest friends, the best engineers,
my friends that are working on the self-driving cars,
they come to me sometimes and they're like, Eric,
how can you live with a crappy code base?
How can you live with any technical debt?
And I'm completely with you.
I have the opposite view that I think it's very important
that people recognize when a code base needs
to be high quality and when it doesn't.
Especially for us as engineers,
it's very tempting to just discount any low quality code base
as just being a problem or being bad.
But that's just not true.
I think it's pivotal that software is developed quickly,
at least until you have product market film,
at least until you have some real traction.
Especially for bootstrap businesses,
building software is expensive.
If Raymond, day one, when he was starting O-Shirts,
tried to hire a software engineering team,
he never would have made it anywhere
because all of the money would have gone into payroll.
It's just a fact of what the market looks like today.
Which means you have to figure out another way
to build out that MVP and build out that for success.
Yeah, totally agree.
And it's difficult to see as sort of
an individual contributor to a company.
Whether you're a software engineer or a marketer,
you're in sales or customer service or whatever.
Like your world is your world.
Whatever you're spending your time on, that's everything.
And it's hard to kind of step back and realize that
it's just one part of what makes the company work.
And you can't over focus on any one part of it
and try to take it to perfection
because you're very quickly going to run into
the point of diminishing returns
or run into the point where whatever you're working on
is coming at the sacrifice of other parts of your business.
And you're probably not going to grow quite as quickly
if you over focus on the code or you over focus on
whatever part it is that you're sort of competent in.
Yeah, and the idea that doing things one way
is somehow better I think is overblown
because especially as a bootstrap startup,
as a product that's new, I mean the only thing that matters
is are you getting traction?
Are you able to make it profitable
or at least a fundamentally sound business in some way?
And even today, right, at the scale we're at today,
which is much larger and we have all these resources,
when we start a new experiment or a new project,
the first thing we ask is, okay,
what part of this project needs to be high quality
and what part just needs to be cranked out quickly
because chances are we're going to throw it away
once we learn more about our customer.
Okay, so you have joined OO Shirts at this point
and you guys are going to turn it into scalable press.
You're going to start reinvesting your resources
and your profits into actually growing the company
more ambitiously and actually build up the software team.
What's the first thing that you do?
So I actually started off at building an API,
which may sound like a very engineering thing to do,
but at that point, I was looking at, okay,
how we're going to look three years from now,
five years from now, and I knew that we had to expand
beyond OO Shirts and the API was the platform
upon which we were going to build.
So that's when ScablePress was born.
ScablePress originally was just the name of the API.
Was this an API that you guys are going to use
for internal purposes?
It sounds like something you planned on using
to sort of extend your business into the future.
What was the purpose of the API?
Who was using it and what were they using it for?
It's pretty interesting.
We actually got customers for the API
before we built anything internal on top of it.
We built it almost immediately.
We had people asking us to use it.
One of the fun things we did during those early days,
we had a hackathon where I built the prototype of API.
It did not work as in you could connect to it
and it responded to requests.
However, it didn't actually get your shirts printed.
But we pretended that it did
and did a little bit of growth hacking in that sense.
We had a hackathon and that's where we got
our first customers.
People showed up and they were like,
wow, a printing API.
And that holiday season,
so this was about six months into my time at SP,
people started sending us tons of volume.
So give me a sense of some of the things this API can do.
Like I send, what kind of requests can I send,
what kind of things can I cap on the other side?
It allows you to do anything that our facilities
are capable of doing.
Basically, you give us a piece of artwork,
like a PNG file, you choose a blank garment
from our catalog, give us a shipping address,
send a post request and we will print and ship it to you
very quickly.
Cool.
At the same time, you talked about
how the other part of your profit you were reinvesting,
we're going into the manufacturing process.
What was going on on that side of things?
Yeah, so during this same time,
we were trying to move away from those contract printers
into our facility.
So we started leasing these facilities
and started buying equipment
and getting our own printing presses set up.
And the goal there was, okay,
we know we're getting these very low prices
from these contract printers.
Let's hold ourselves to that standard.
Let's see if we can do better.
So we started building a lot of software,
a lot of integration for the workstations
that power these facilities.
And honestly, every step of the decision
was made very frugally and we had to
because we just didn't have that much capital to work with
compared to a company that might've raised a ton of money.
How do you even know how to build
a screen printing facility?
Good question.
Many would argue that we didn't.
So we hired people who had run small shops to help us,
but it's bizarre because in the custom printing world,
there's not a lot of technology,
like what is standard,
what most of the graphic keys being printed today
is not done with automation and technology
that you would imagine.
So it was this world where I came in
knowing how to build software
and we were working with operations people
who had experience running screen print shops
and we kind of had to educate each other as we went along
and we made tons of mistakes along the way.
But through that experimentation,
that's where I think we got
a lot of our most interesting innovations.
Give me a sense of some of these innovations
because I'm intensely curious,
like what does it look like
to actually build a screen printing facility
and what kinds of modifications are you making
through the power of software?
Absolutely.
So I'll give you one of the most fundamental ones
that I think is a huge part of what the industry is today.
If you go into a local screen print shop
or a printing shop of any sort,
what often happens is the person
who's gonna do the printing
is also processing the artwork in some way.
They're prepping it for press.
And oftentimes what that means is there's a computer
and they load the customer's artwork file
and they might tweak it a little bit in Photoshop or something
and then they send it to the press.
This is great, but in an efficient, it doesn't scale.
In an efficient manufacturing pipeline,
you can't have somebody who both
is gonna be at the computer interacting with the screen
and downloading the customer artwork from the emails
and then also operating the press.
So one of the first things we did
is we set up cloud servers
that handled all of the artwork pre-processing,
which meant that in the facility,
the press operator didn't have to do anything
other than operate the press.
So very fundamental principle,
but the technology to do that in the cloud
as opposed to in a computer next to the press
was something new at the time.
How much were you learning from your competitors?
Because other people have built, I'm sure,
automated printing facilities before.
How much of this was you guys innovating?
How much of it was you guys figuring out
while others were doing what you aimed to do?
Yeah, so I think the interesting thing is
at the same time we were building
our manufacturing facilities,
the actual printing technology was changing a ton.
So one thing that's interesting to know
about Scable Press today is that
all of our printing processes
allow a minimum quantity of one,
and we've designed it that way.
And right around this time in 2014, printers themselves,
and we're talking about printers made by companies
like Epson, Brother, et cetera,
we're getting to the point where you could do
apparel printing one-off at a reasonable cost
without a huge amount of setup.
And a lot of what we were doing on the e-commerce side
and in the facility was enabling this.
How can we make a profit selling one t-shirt at a time,
one custom t-shirt?
And I think that's what was really new,
and that's what's really changed the market since.
So there really weren't many companies
doing that type of printing.
We're talking a lot about the product side of things,
what you guys are doing to build
kind of a product that sounds like no one else
really had at the time, or at least wasn't very common.
How did you go to market with this?
How did you convince customers to use this printing API,
which I'm gonna assume didn't exist
before you guys built one?
They signed up for it.
The printing API idea was new.
We actually had a brand called Shirts.io
that we long sunsetted that we tried to build
before ScalablePress with contractors.
And basically the technology never worked.
So we actually got a budget following was on Hacker News.
It was pretty much the first printing API.
Didn't work very well.
And that's what ScalablePress was a evolution of.
And from that kind of early set of contacts that we made,
we had a lot of customers.
And to be honest, even to this day,
I don't know where some of those people
were getting their sales.
I don't know what they were doing.
But the point is, they needed shirts printed
and they were willing to pay for it.
So we were happy to do it.
That's very cool.
How do you recover from a failure
and then go on to do essentially the same thing,
but a little bit better?
You said you started Shirts.io and it wasn't the best API
and you guys sunsetted it.
What did you do differently to make it better?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think a lot of it is, again,
going into the investment in doing things the right way.
Because when you're making things that are different,
for us, that was we're building an API
that allows you to print things.
And we have to make sure that it integrates well
with how you actually get it printed,
whether it's through a contractor or a manufacturer.
It takes a lot of, it takes investment and it took time.
That's really what it was.
For us as a bootstrap company,
that meant we had to kind of wait patiently
till we could grow the business
to the point where we had the capital
to build these things the right way,
to actually enable us to achieve the vision.
Okay, so you guys are reinvesting in profits.
You're building this API, rebuilding it, it works.
People are using it.
You don't know where they're selling their T-shirts,
but they're certainly paying you to make these T-shirts.
What do you guys do with this newfound success
and this breakthrough of having an API?
Yeah, so of course, everything we build
and every sale we make helps add to the coffers
of you over the war chest.
And we realize, okay, well, the logical next step
is to build our own e-commerce products on the,
on top of the API.
And we actually saw one of our, I guess, competitors.
By the time they were also customers of us,
they were using us for printing.
Teespring have a lot of success in the custom T-shirt market.
And we realized, okay,
I think we can do a better job than them.
And we went after that.
That's an interesting transition to make
because you guys are a bootstrapped company.
You have to fund everything you do with your profits,
basically, literally pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.
And the next step you identify was,
okay, we don't just want to make T-shirts,
we want to actually sell T-shirts directly to consumers.
Were there any other options that you guys considered?
Like, why was that the obvious,
most profitable thing you could do?
I think it all comes down to the company's vision.
Our goal is not just to print T-shirts.
Our goal really is to make printing more accessible.
And it all goes back to that first feeling
that Raymond had that I had of,
why are these T-shirts so expensive?
Why can't it be done more efficiently, more quickly,
and still have a high quality?
Why does it have to be that way?
And we knew that it wouldn't be enough
just to make money as a business.
If the goal was just to build
a reasonably profitable business,
Raymond could have taken the profits
when the company was at just $1 million
and had an excellent lifestyle business.
The goal was to change what custom printing meant to people.
We didn't want custom printing to be a big deal.
We wanted it to just be normal E-commerce.
And to achieve that vision,
we have to build the E-commerce experience
that will allow people access to the low cost
and to the speed that will make printing more accessible.
Second question as part of this transition,
you're going up against Teespring
and your core competency was basically printing T-shirts.
I guess with O-shirts, you've done a little bit
of a direct to consumer type stuff.
But Teespring, that was their core competency.
And they were venture funded.
What made you so confident that you could do a better job
selling T-shirts to consumers than they could?
I was absolutely not confident.
And Teespring is a YC company.
I had been a YC founder.
I knew how much support that they had,
how many smart people that they could work with.
And here we are, Raymond and I sitting in our dinky office
and not having that millions and millions of dollars
of venture funding.
I remember thinking very distinctly like Raymond,
I don't know if this is gonna work.
I mean, we'll build it, we'll try,
but this is gonna be a big challenge.
But Raymond convinced me and he was resolute in one fact.
And the fact was very simple.
I guess what Raymond realized was at least for that market,
the customer was the creator of the T-shirt
being offered for sale.
And by making them happy,
Raymond felt that we could really capture the creators.
And if we capture the creators,
then the customers will come along with them.
That was the, I think, real insight.
And beyond that, what we could offer the creators
that Teespring was not offering
was better printing at a lower cost
so that the creators would be able to earn more
of a commission against their art
than they would on other platforms.
And that's really always been fundamental.
O'Shirts was first successful
because it offered lower prices.
And what we were doing was using
the manufacturing capability we were starting
to develop in house, pass on those savings
to the actual customers.
So explain to me and to the audience
what your business model was,
what Teespring's business model was
and how it actually worked.
Because this wasn't just like a very simple,
hey, come to this website and buy a T-shirt type thing.
You actually had different parties involved
as you're saying the creators, the customers,
the manufacturers.
What's the bigger picture you're added to work?
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is very interesting.
And I give Teespring a lot of credit for,
in my mind, founding this market.
The idea is kind of like Kickstarter for T-shirts.
If enough people are interested in some design,
they actually get printed and shipped to the customer.
So somebody's an artist or a creator
would create the design, upload it to the website
and then share the link or pay for ads for the link
in order to attract customers.
And if people bought it, it would get printed and shipped.
But that's the fundamental idea.
And I think the key realization was the customer,
in this case, in this scenario,
was the person who has created the T-shirt design,
not the person actually buying it.
So a good example is I do this exact same thing
for IndieHackers.
I worked with some artists to get a couple of T-shirts
designed.
And then I use my own distribution channels,
the IndieHackers podcast, IndieHackers website and mailing
list, to sell these T-shirts to IndieHackers users who
want to wear IndieHackers.
And what you're saying is that basically, I'm your customer.
It's not the people that I'm selling my T-shirts to,
but I'm the person that you need to serve and make happy
because I'm the one who chooses to use your business.
Exactly.
What are some of the things that you
did to serve your customers better than Teespring was
doing?
Yeah.
As with any time when you're trying
to find product market fit, it's about giving your customer
that you've identified everything they could want.
And it's counterintuitive because if you're
the creator of the design, we're paying you.
You're not paying us.
And the customers who are entering their credit card
number, we're saying that, oh, we're
going to pay a little bit less attention to them
and we're going to pay more attention to the person
we're paying commissions to.
And that really informed how we built the software.
So the functionality, the feature set
was much more rich on the creator side.
We hired marketing people that just focused
on community and social media for the creator side.
And we really focused on making sure
that the creator has got as much of a cut of the sale
as possible at all.
So how did all of this turn out?
Sounds like you're doing everything right.
You're going up against this 200-pound gorilla
who owns the room.
What was the result?
It's crazy.
So the first thing that happened was
Teespring stopped using us for contract printing.
I think they realized pretty quickly
that we should become a competitor.
And over the next three to four years,
an amazing thing happened.
So the first thing was when this whole on-demand t-shirt market
started existing, it was a lot of US creators.
So US stay-at-home parents and stuff,
just uploading cool designs, doing a little bit of graphics,
and trying to sell it.
But over time, it became an international thing.
And you started seeing just all over the world internet users
just uploading designs and offering them up for sale.
And a lot of them were terrible designs that nobody would buy.
But they were uploading them by the millions.
And some of them were amazing designs
that turned out to become viral or got
tons of interest.
That's really where we are today.
We now have a large international community.
And a lot of that is in Southeast Asia.
A lot of that is in the Middle East.
And they will upload millions of designs.
And some of it is generated.
Some of it is actually done by artists.
It's just anything you can imagine
exists somewhere in our database.
They try to get it to sell.
And 95% of the things get zero sales.
But 5% of them get tons of sales.
So that's where we're at today with the T-shirt market.
And I think our strategy with our website,
Teachip, to really target those creators
and provide tooling for them to be successful
and to allow them to experiment is what made us very successful.
So it's ridiculous, because we started
Teachip with one engineer assigned to that project.
And this is when Teespring was already at its heyday.
But I think with the correct identification of the customer,
we were able to get very far, very quickly.
So this is a cool model overall.
You've got basically one business,
but you've really got multiple businesses.
And I talk to a lot of founders who
just dream it is to own a whole constellation
of different businesses, because they
don't want to work on just one thing.
They want to work on a bunch of different things.
And at this point, you've got your API
that anybody who's a developer can send requests to
and pay some money and get T-shirts coming
at the other end.
You've got OO Shirts, which is your original T-shirt website,
where I guess you're just selling
T-shirts directly to customers and all sorts of other apparel.
And now you've got Teachip, which
is a sort of Kickstarter for T-shirts thing,
where people will design T-shirts.
And then if they get enough orders,
you'll actually print them and ship them.
What else did you design, or what other businesses
did you create besides SRE?
Yeah, we tried a lot of different things.
And some of them got more traction,
some of them got less traction.
But I think you hit the nail on the head.
The idea is we want to create multiple businesses,
because it's aligned with our vision.
So one of the things that has done well for us
is we created a Shopify app.
So Shopify store owners can get their merch
printed through our facilities.
We've done some licensing deals, basically,
to help other businesses who have licensed merch
that they want printed at a low cost.
We've done that.
Oh, I guess one of the more different ones
is SkablePress itself.
So SkablePress, although it was just the name of the API,
also became the name of our B2B business.
So we do B2B printing for all sorts of odd things.
There was a gas station in the Midwest,
like a gas station chain, that one of their uniforms
embroidered.
We do embroidery now, one of our newer processes.
And we did a couple hundred thousand embroidered polos
for them.
We had a partnership with Adidas for a while.
They basically, anything they didn't
want to print because the unit quantity was
too low for that design.
So think smaller schools and sports teams
that maybe had less of a following,
they would send our way, because we
had gone so efficient at doing those low quantity runs,
because we designed our process to have a minimum quantity
as one.
So we take up a lot of, we suck up
a lot of that B2B business as well.
And in the end, it's all about creating that more efficient
manufacturing pipeline so we can fill that need for as many
markets as possible.
Do you ever worry about losing focus as a company?
Because there's an argument to be made that one or two
of your businesses are extremely efficient, at least
in comparison to the others.
And maybe if you double down there,
then things will be better for you overall.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think that's something Raymond and I actually
speak about a lot.
And the challenge there is, can you effectively delegate?
I think the dream for a lot of, as you said,
for a lot of business owners, this
is kind of what Jeff Bezos has created at Amazon,
is create a bunch of general managers, basically
many CEOs who can execute on their own business.
Yes, I worry about focus all the time,
but I think we're trying to figure that out now.
We're trying to see, OK, who can take ownership
and be delegated the growth of a business,
because we want to create a system where, if it's
a business in the custom printing area,
we have the resources and the people to give it a good shot.
It's a hard thing to do.
I mean, you're basically hiring miniature CEOs.
It is very difficult. You have to consider it
both from the product standpoint, marketing, engineering,
and all of it.
And it goes back to the early decisions we made.
We knew this was what was going to happen,
or what we wanted to happen, and that's
why the API was the first thing we built.
It's about creating platforms.
So even today, the credit card processing module,
the accounting reporting module that we
use across our different e-commerce products,
is shared code.
It's kind of an internal API for building e-commerce products.
You guys are located in San Francisco still, right?
Yes, our headquarters is right here in SF.
It's not common to hear such a huge bootstrapped business
in SF.
I'm sure most of the people you talk to, the other founders,
you know around here, have all raised money.
So let's talk about the bootstrapping angle
a little bit, because I'm curious how this changes
the equation for you guys.
Broadly speaking, what are some of the different decisions
you've had to make because you're a bootstrapped company?
Yeah, it's really pervasive.
It has been there every step of the way.
I think a lot of people might look at us and think, oh, well,
you guys are profitable, and you're doing over $100 million.
You're fine.
You're past the hump.
The reality is that's just not the case.
The way we spend money today still is 100%
influenced by our bootstrapping, by the fact
that this money is from the sale of a t-shirt.
Every single cent you can trace down
to some customer who decided to buy a t-shirt or mug
or whatever we print now.
It just makes it that much harder
to spend money in a way that may not help deliver growth
with the business.
I got so many examples of things that I guess were uncommon.
And I remember when we were setting up
our manufacturing facilities, I actually
took some of the engineers on the team
and we would go run the ethernet wiring in the facility
because the cost of paying somebody to install ethernet
is really expensive.
And because all of our software was networked in the cloud,
we had to make sure we had good networking.
So we were installing Wi-Fi access points
with screwdrivers and everything.
It was really about everybody understanding that, look,
we have to get these things done.
And we cannot default to just paying somebody.
We have to look at the trade-off of if we spend some time on it
and get it done, maybe that's worth the savings.
Are there any unique advantages you
think that you have because you're bootstrapped,
that a well-funded competitor might not have?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I actually get asked this by engineers on my team
because a lot of them worked at venture-funded companies
being an SF.
And they're like, well, Eric, why don't we just raise money?
I want a TechCrunch article.
I want to be cool.
But first, I tell them, no, we are cool.
But I think what is interesting is
when you're a bootstrap company at scale,
it gives you the ability to work with autonomy and speed
in a way that is, I think, very unique.
Even when I was at Flowtype, when we were just
a C-stage company or at the startups
I've worked at, just as a software engineer before,
the need to raise funding, first your C, then your Series A,
then your Series B, et cetera, really
controls, to an extent, how much ownership you
have of the product vision.
It controls how fast you can move.
It controls the direction you have to go in.
And that's something we don't have to do.
It sounds like a scary thing, but also
a kind of incredible thing.
There are times when Raymond and I are in the room
and we decide, hey, you know what?
This will be a really cool idea.
And then a week later, it's fully in action.
And the ability to be, I think, bigger but also move
that quickly is definitely one of the distinct advantages.
I think another one of the advantages
that a lot of people don't realize
is our number one duty is to our employees as opposed
to investors, if that makes sense.
There is no investor we have to satisfy with our decision
making, which means, really, it is ourselves
and our employees that need to be happy with what
happens with the business.
And I think that's also influenced a lot of our thinking.
Give me some examples of how that's
led to you making different decisions.
Because I think it's a really good point.
I think any company, you have to prioritize your employees.
But if you have investors, it suddenly
kicks your employees down a notch.
They're number two on your priority list.
Yeah, and that's kind of the unspoken thing of Silicon
Valley that, hey, well, everybody is secondary
to your VCs on your board because if they don't give you
that money for the next round, I mean.
Everyone's fired.
Yeah, that's the end.
So good luck.
I think it's something that is subtle,
but it touches a lot of different decisions.
I mean, I guess one example to give you something basic.
Let's say we wanted to create a product roadmap.
We can really create the timeline
for the development of a product based
on what we think is the best long-term vision
or what our product owner for that product
believes is the best thing in the long term.
There is no results that we must demonstrate
by a certain timeline so that we can raise our series whatever.
That's not a consideration we have to make.
We can truly think at the time scale that we choose to.
And that both allows our employees
to deliver on the vision that they may have for a product
as well as let the business ultimately
make a more independent, better decision.
So there's a lot of stuff you can innovate on in a business.
There's no different directions you can go in.
There's also a lot of accepted wisdom best practices
that you can just follow.
What do you think the line is that you guys draw?
What are some of the areas you guys innovate and do things
differently?
What are some of the areas where you guys just
stick to the best practices?
Sure, yeah.
So I think in going, one of the innovations
that I think is interesting, and this
is innovative in some circles and not
innovative in other circles, is trying
to create that platform early and trying
to scale the business horizontally early.
When we had success with our shirts,
when we had success with the API, success with T-Chip,
I think we absolutely could have just
chosen to focus on one of those products
and make that continue to grow.
And we do try and do that.
However, really the overall vision of the company
is more towards let's go horizontally.
Let's cover more markets.
And that's another example of the type of decision
that a VC may disagree with.
A VC might say, you know what?
Why don't you make this one product completely
dominant in its market so that we can have our nice exit
and call it a day?
So I think that's something that we try and do differently.
And I guess to answer the other part of your question,
the side on which we make decisions,
perhaps more conventionally, is there is no conventional side.
Yeah, I mean, gosh, every business is very different.
So there's always some.
No, I only have even more answers on the different side.
Give me some more of the different answers.
OK, so I think a lot of the actions we've already
taken to grow our e-commerce properties like T-Chip
are quite different and unexpected,
especially when I explain it even to some of our own employees
who don't work on T-Chip.
So much of our creator base is in Asia.
We've even opened co-working spaces in Vietnam.
So we own two co-working spaces where our creators
can come, attend classes, grab drinks, and hang out,
basically.
It's just one of those things that is just very unexpected,
how international some of the products are.
One of the things that I strongly believe in
is don't build products just for Silicon Valley.
I think this is something, overall, companies
are getting better at.
But even today, I use a Windows laptop.
Everyone else on the team uses Macs.
But I go to a lot of websites.
And they look terrible on Windows
because every designer is on Mac.
And it's like they're not thinking
about the rest of the world that's still on Windows.
That's something that I really work with the team
to make sure we avoid.
Another big decision that I had made early on
was I didn't want our engineering team to just
be in San Francisco.
So our headquarters is here.
We have a bit of every team here.
But we also have our engineering team
in Annapolis, Dallas, where we have facilities,
and also in Guadalajara, Mexico.
I really believe that today, if you're
going to be building a product and you need a higher
engineer, you need to start with a distributed team
because the cost of building just in San Francisco
is just not something that you can easily
handle unless you have those millions of dollars from VCs.
If you're a bootstrap like us, the reality
is it's just not the right financial decision
to only have engineers in one place.
You have to take advantage of that international talent.
So in the same way that we do so for our product teach ship
and we look for customers everywhere for our engineering
team itself, we look for engineers everywhere.
What do you think the future holds for you
and for scalable press as a business?
You've made it so far, and you still
have a lot of room to grow.
But do you see yourself ever starting another startup?
Do you see scalable press ever becoming something extremely
different than it is today?
I do.
I do.
I have a very...
I know exactly what I want to do.
People view printing.
One thing people tell me all the time is, oh, you're in printing.
Printing is dying.
Newspapers, blah, blah, blah, which is true.
I mean, newspapers may be dying, but the thing about printing
is a lot of our customers today don't even
know they're getting a custom printed product.
It's less about, oh, let's get a custom printed phone
case or whatever.
And it's much more about manufacturing on demand.
So step one, we want to build efficient manufacturing
in the print types we do today.
T-shirts, phone cases, mugs, embroidery, et cetera.
Step two is to continue expanding that
until much of the custom printed market
is something that is happening efficiently,
where technology has truly arrived for the manufacturing
process.
Step three is to go beyond printing
and really look at manufacturing.
My overall belief, whether this is scalable press
in the next couple of years or 10 years or another business,
my overall belief is that the idea of let's
manufacture things by building a million of them in Asia,
putting them in a cargo container,
sending them in a boat to the US,
putting them in a warehouse, and then picking and shipping them
when somebody buys it is a ridiculous idea
that one day we'll look back on and think,
I can't believe people used to do things that way.
It took that many steps.
I think there will be a day when a lot of what we purchase
on a day-to-day basis is created on demand
from the raw materials.
And it will be done quickly and at a low cost.
That's what scalable press is going towards,
starting with custom printing.
And that's really what I'm passionate about.
What do you think people listening in who
want to start their own companies should take away
from your story and your experiences, especially
people who want to bootstrap, who
aren't interested in raising money,
and who really want to build a business to help
make their lives better?
I think the biggest lesson that I've
learned about bootstrapping working here
is you cannot compare yourself to the same timelines
as your traditional venture-funded business.
We all know the stories of the Facebooks
and the Twitters of the world who grew extremely quickly,
raised round after round in an IPO, and then everybody's
happy more or less.
Scooter companies worth a billion dollars
after a year and a half.
Exactly.
If you look back in the history of scalable press,
Raymond took a very long time by our tech entrepreneurship
standards to build the business.
He was very patient.
It took him basically six years before it got to the point
where he was ready to build an engineering team.
That's crazy.
Who even runs a company for six years anymore?
But that patience is what allows us
to be large and successful and bootstrapped to this day.
And that's still affected us today.
When we look at our product growth,
we don't always look at it as, unless it's
a rocket ship trajectory, this product is not working,
and we need to nix it.
Instead, we really think long-term
and think about strategically, are we doing the right thing?
And as long as long-term, we're making the right decision
and we believe in it, we'll keep doing it,
even when the growth is not there.
We have dips.
And that's OK, because there's no VC telling us
that it's game over because something dips.
And I think that's what's really magical about bootstrapping.
You get to make those decisions for yourself.
But that can mean the timeline is long, and that's OK too.
That's great advice.
I think one of the biggest pitfalls for people
bootstrapping their own business is that 98% of the information
out there is intended at high-growth, venture-funded
startups, and it will lead you down the wrong path
if you're not careful who you're getting advice from.
Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It's been great listening to your story,
listening to how Scalable Press got started and your role in it.
Can you tell listeners where they
can go to learn more about what you guys are up to
and about what you're up to personally
if you share that sort of thing online as well?
Yeah, absolutely.
So check out ScalablePress.com.
That gives you a little bit more information about the company.
I have very little social media presence these days, man.
Not enough time, I suppose, where I'm just lazy.
But yeah, definitely learn more about ScalablePress.
If anybody's in the market for a job
or hiring across just tons of roles,
so there's a nice careers page on our website.
So do check us out.
And if you want an API for printing,
feel free to reach out to me, and I'll
throw some credits your way.
You can always email me at ericatscalablepress.com.
Thanks so much, Eric.
Thank you, Corlan.
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