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Here’s the program.
Andrew: Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and the place where I’ve done 450 (I think right now) interviews with entrepreneurs who’ve shared the stories behind their businesses, told what they learned along the way, and gave it all to you so you can go out there and build your own company, and hopefully come back and do what today’s guest is doing, which is an interview about how you build your business.
So joining me today is a founder who aspires to sell one T-shirt for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. per year. He’s Marc Katz. He’s the co-founder of CustomInk, which designs T-shirts, hats, bags and so much more. CustomInk is the site you go to if you’re a startup and you need 50 T-shirts for your whole team — CustomInk.
So they’re an underdog. They’re going up against well-funded competitors but they’re profitable and they’re growing. And Marc, I invited you here because I’m curious to hear how you launched the business, how you grew it, and how you got where you are right now. Thanks for doing the interview.
Marc: Yeah, my pleasure. And first off just a little bit of correction.
Andrew: Already I got something wrong?
Marc: Just a tiny bit. But we don’t actually design the shirts. Part of the power of CustomInk.com is that our customers designed them themselves.
Andrew: I see.
Marc: We provide a set of online tools so that anyone, you don’t even have to be a designer, can create a great looking shirt. People often collaborate with the other members of their group, their company. Their friends, you know, will shoot designs back and forth. They can use our artwork; we have some of the premier designer resources available period for use in customers’ designs.
Andrew: And so I go to the website with my own logo, I put it up on a T-shirt; I adjust it, I show it to my coworkers. They say no, no, no. You’ve got to move it a little higher. You’ve got to move it a little lower, you’ve got to make it a little bit better, have a better image. Boom — you guys print it for me, send it to me, I hand it out to my people: we all feel like a team.
Marc: That’s a very common scenario. Or you can use the images and packs that we have on the site to create a design, even if you don’t have a logo. But people do both.
Andrew: All right. Let’s dig into the story of how you got here, but first I want to understand how big here really is. So, you aspire to sell about 300 million T-shirts a year. How far along are you?
Marc: So we figure that we’re about 2% of the way there.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I love those big stretch goals!
Marc: So when we first set that kind of big long-term goal, we figured we were doing, you know, probably enough shirts for everyone in a large football stadium each year. And that’s grown, and we’re headquartered outside the D.C. area, and at some point we said, “Holy cow, we do enough shirts for pretty much everyone who lives inside the district each year!”
Obviously it was spread across the country but, you know, in absolute numbers there’s enough for everyone inside the district. And now that’s grown to be enough for probably everyone who lives in the greater Washington area. You know, we figure it’s probably 6 million or 7 million shirts a year, and growing.
What’s funny is that we as far as we know, we are kind of the leader by size in our market. We think we’re also the leader in terms of having the highest standards for customer satisfaction and customer experience. Kind of being the innovator, I hope it doesn’t sound too obnoxious to say that we figure . . .
Andrew: No, don’t worry. I’m going to take you through this in a way that will make people understand the size without feeling any sense of obnoxiousness, but in fact inspiration. And in order to inspire them I gave the big stretch goal and you said, ‘Wwe’re only 2% of the way there.’ I want people to see that 2% is actually very big. And in gross sales, what does 2% mean? What are your gross sales as of last year?
Marc: So we’re around $70 million a year in revenue now.
Andrew: $70 million; and can you give us a sense of the profitability?
Marc: No.
Andrew: No, I didn’t think so. Number of people in the company; 280 people, right?
Marc: Approximately, yeah.
Andrew: Approximately, okay. So let’s go back in time, figure out how you got here. And the first thing that I’m curious about is the mindset, and I’ll tell you why, Marc. As I researched you, what people kept saying over and over is, “This is a guy who was made to be an entrepreneur.” For example, what did you do in school while other people were . . . all the newspapers are saying while other kids were mowing lawns,’ he did – but I don’t know any kid who mows lawns. But as a side business what did you launch in school; what did you do?
Marc: Okay. So I had a, well there were two things, actually. There’s one that I think you’re probably thinking of, or maybe you heard reference in some other profile, which is that I actually started my own little tutoring business when I was in school. And it was just me, I was a one-man show, but I did a lot of math tutoring, and then over the summer I actually did a little SAT math prep business. And I included in the tuition, one individual private session per week or whatever it was, but then also a group session. And the group session is where we really got some operating leverage, but that was important to kind of making that a good business.
It was rewarding and challenging and interesting. I got help from a bunch of friends to do a little mailing, you know, to local parents to try to find students, and I think I just bought everyone pizza in return for helping me stuff envelopes for a night. It was a worthwhile thing to do and, you know, could make some decent money. While I had other friends that were maybe not mowing lawns, but I remember I had at least one friend that was like doing fumigation or something, and had to wear a full-body suit with a head covering and all, you know, in the 90° Philadelphia summer heat, so tutoring was a bit step up from there. But the other thing that was very entrepreneurial for me all through kind of high school and really college as well, was that I became very passionate about community service. My school had a pretty great community service program and as soon as I started volunteering I just found a lot of satisfaction in helping people. And it also, I think, also spoke to a kind of entrepreneurial bent that I had; I was organizing things, I was recruiting people to get involved; I was trying to motivate them and kind of turn ideas into a reality. And you know, it just appealed to me a lot more than studying did.
Andrew: Let me ask you this. Here’s the thing that I think about when I think of you selling courses, selling to other students. It’s a little intimidating. I remember when I was starting businesses in school, I would do them in hiding. I would do in direct mail businesses. I would try it, or I would go into neighborhoods were my friends weren’t likely to go just in case I failed; just in case I might have come across badly somehow. I wanted that separation, but you went in there and you tried to sell other people your age, your peers, and risked shame and failure and everything else, and criticism. Why were you able to do that?
Marc: I never thought of it that way!
Andrew: Interesting. Why do you think you didn’t think of it that way? Why didn’t that come to you, while to me it came right away?
Marc: Well, you know, I mean, I was trying to make a joke, that maybe if I thought of it that way I wouldn’t have done it, because I’m not saying that you don’t have a valid point. I guess if I think real hard about some of the things I did and thought and said, then, you know, I can feel pretty embarrassed about it. So in retrospect, but you know, I think one thing I can say about myself is that I’ve always been my own person, and haven’t been too susceptible to peer pressure or others’ expectations of me.
And it’s interesting, because I wouldn’t say that I don’t care what people think; I care very much what people think. I mean, we as a company and I personally am nuts about customer satisfaction. We’re nuts about team satisfaction as well. You know, if someone at CustomInk isn’t happy, that really upsets me and I care about that a lot. So in some ways I think I might even be, you could argue that I care too much about what others think and feel. But it’s more from a substantive perspective than an appearance perspective.
Andrew: So it’s fair to say that you were thinking, ‘I want these kids to think that I know what I’m doing; that they signed up for the right class; that I’m ready to lead them through this SAT. And that’s what helped you promote to them, that’s what helped you teach in front of them, that’s what helped you lead them?
Marc: And the most challenging thing actually wasn’t the SAT business, when it comes to those kind of social dynamics, it was the community service work. I mean, I would walk around when we had something we were trying to do, an event or some kind of volunteer activity, and if we didn’t have enough people to staff it I’d walk around the school pitching people pretty hard that they should do this, and here’s why. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time, until you just asked about it. But I think that the idea of me coming off all pushy or annoying didn’t bother me so much. I was more concerned that if someone did it they’d have a good experience and want to do it again. So I guess that’s just my personality.
Andrew: Okay. I’m going back to the research, and Marc, I did a lot of research on you. I read more about you than I should really be reading about another person without feeling like I’m stalking, but I kept seeing over and over this reference to your dad. At first I felt like, whoa, I got a little too much, and then I saw that you were talking about it with a few journalists. Like in the Washington Post, you said: ‘Dad had up and downs in his career. He’s very resilient, very smart very hard-working. I didn’t think consciously about it at the time, but in retrospect it set an example as an entrepreneur.’
And in Forbes Magazine you and your dad talk more openly about the ups and downs. Tell me about that. I mean, here’s what it says, even though you were open in Forbes you say: ‘When the stock market crashed in ’87 the IPO window closed, his company already had other problems. Dad eventually sold the business for nothing to avoid bankruptcy.’ And then you say he was pretty stoic, he picked himself up and moved on. That’s a really hard thing to rebound from. What was it like before the rebound?
Marc: I don’t think there was a ‘before the rebound.’
Andrew: You mean there was just immediate company close? How do you do that? This is what’s fascinating to me about you and about your dad. How do you do it without feeling shame in the community; how do you do it without feeling like I can never do it again?
Marc: Yeah. Well, I don’t know; I haven’t had that experience myself. I hope I don’t have that experience, but my dad, I think is, just as I said in that article you quoted, a really resilient strong person, and he’s really able to compartmentalize. I’m probably more reflective than he is for better or for worse. So you know, he just, it was my perspective as a kid, he just pretty much immediately went back at it. A lot of it was probably necessity also. You know, he was still making a living. He’d had some success, significant success earlier in his career, but still, you know, he needed to make a living. And that was probably a big reason that he was right back out there.
Andrew: I see; the need to go out there and make a living. It doesn’t give you any time to sit and feel bad for yourself and reevaluate your decisions, because you have to go out there and do something.
Marc: Yeah. And, you know, achieve.
Andrew: Achieve.
Marc: Part of it was the practicalities, he was also, he’s a driven guy.
Andrew: Did he encourage you to be an entrepreneur? Was this like, ‘This is really the direction if you want to own your life, otherwise you’re making a fool of yourself?’ No?
Marc: No, no.
Andrew: What was the influence that way?
Marc: My dad is not at all like a Father Knows Best guy kind of dad. And I remember, you know, as I got to be 20, or when I was an adolescent, but increasingly as I started to get to be 19, 20, and closer and closer, or at least I thought, to having to pick a career, I remember having conversations with my dad where I would say, “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” You know, like just what I’m going to do with my life how. How do I figure that out? And his answer was something like, “Don’t worry about it, something will come up.” That was a lot different than I think a lot of other parents who maybe felt very strongly, either rightly or wrongly, that their kid needed to be on a path.
So I guess that encouraged, indirectly, open-mindedness and creative thinking. And when I graduated from college and was actually starting my career, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I ended up a financial analyst at an investment bank because those firms were recruiting. And, you know, with not having anything that I was really dying to do, I just kind of fell into that. I’m very analytical so the analytical work was a good match, but in the bigger picture, you know, it really wasn’t for me.
Andrew: Did you know that going into it, this isn’t for you?
Marc: I was giving it a try.
Andrew: You were? Trying to really see maybe if you did it day-to-day, it would be more interesting, would be a better life than you imagined, or could be a good life?
Marc: It wasn’t so much a matter of interest or even lifestyle. I mean, everyone hears about how brutal the hours are in those kinds of entry-level jobs. But starting CustomInk was even more work, so it wasn’t so much the lifestyle, I think it was just that I’d always — for several years at that point, teenager and young adult — I’d always pursued things that were meaningful to me, and where I was being entrepreneurial, like I said, the public service stuff, the tutoring business, etcetera. And after about a year working at the bank I really had that kind of itch to do something that I was passionate about.
Andrew: Can you tell me how you analyzed your options? I saw that you were considering telecom, that you were considering I’m sure other options. I’m really curious about the thought process that helps a person find that one thing that they’re going to spend, if not the rest of their lives in, then a really sizable chunk of their lives on. How did you do it; how did you decide?
Marc: I always think that this story of how I started CustomInk is not that interesting because of how straightforward it was. You know, oftentimes people have this great story where they fell into something, or they had a Eureka moment. You know, they stubbed their toe, and they realize, “Oh, I should start a business doing padded doorstops,’ or whatever, and there really wasn’t anything like that with CustomInk. I was going through a phase where I was constantly having all these different ideas. I explored a few of them and I spent a little bit of the free time that I had exploring those different ideas, and then CustomInk wasn’t even actually my idea.
Andrew: Before you get into CustomInk, what are some of the options, what are some of the business ideas that you explored?
Marc: There was one that was like an idea for a sort of marketplace business model for RFPs (requests for proposals). So kind of like a Responsys, probably not Responsys, an eLance type of thing, but less geared towards individuals and projects and more institutions issuing RFPs.
I had another one that would be like a phone-based and web-based community for the elderly, people who are stuck in their homes, to have social interaction: play games, listen to lectures, participate in group discussions, those kinds of things. I actually think that’s a great idea. I just think it would be a much better non-profit than a business. There were a couple of others; those are the ones that I can remember and that I was maybe the most serious about.
Andrew: So what’s the thought process or decision-making process that you went through to pick the right idea, or at least to say no to some of the previous ideas before CustomInk.
Marc: CustomInk came to me because a college buddy had kind of spent the summer working on the business idea and built the first version of the website, the first generation of the website, where you could upload a graphic onto a picture of a T-shirt and buy it. And it didn’t really get traction, but there was at least something there to kind of visualize the possibilities. There were a couple of other venture-backed dotcoms at the time that had literally tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, with basically the same business model that CustomInk ended up having, of design, custom T-shirts, or some kind of promotional product online. We don’t think of our shirts as promotional products, it’s more about group identity than it is promotional. But still, you know, custom printed products of some kind designed online, and then the company produces them.
There were probably half a dozen of those venture-backed companies, but no one had really made it work yet. You know, when I kind of got into the idea I started researching the market and I found that there was this large existing business that was not very well served by the traditional industry. The traditional customer experience of walking into a print shop or calling someone up, faxing back and forth designs, or maybe e-mailing them, but still not really being able to get a good look at what you were buying; or you know, being able to refine specifications and having to sort of keep your fingers crossed until the end product was delivered.
There was so much opportunity to improve that customer experience, and at the same time there were all these inefficiencies with helping customers, unless they were like a super attractive customer, where they’ve got a 200-shirt order that they re-order every season, and you set up the design once, and then it’s just a great relationship. For the 50-person family reunion that’s going to order once every few years and it’s going to be a different shirt design each time, that was a very difficult transaction for printers as well, so we kind of got the idea that if you could make it really smooth and easy and fun for all parties online that would be a better solution. That was kind of the original business concept.
Andrew: Okay. Let me pause right there to give people an understanding of what time period we’re talking about. We’re talking about 1999; the friend who had the idea was Mike Driscoll; there were lots of dotcoms that were well-funded in every space, including famously, dog food, and you were going up against them under-funded. The thing that I would think about is, “Sure, the experience right now stinks,” if we were looking at 1999. “Yes, there’s room for improvement there. Yes, there’s a bigger market for it.” But I would wonder, if I don’t have any experience in printing, how am I going to print this stuff? How am I going to print the shirts that people are asking for? How am I going to even anticipate the problems that they’re going to look for? Up until recently I thought men and women wore the same-shaped T-shirt. I discovered recently at a conference no, women need different shapes. So that would be one issue. The second issue would be where am I going to find my customers, and then the third is, what about profits and growth? Actually, the third is like a whole hodge-podge of big issues. Let’s tackle that one at a time; where did you imagine you were going to get your customers?
Marc: First off, let me just back up one second before getting into specifics, that part of the reason why I ended up pursuing this idea rather than the others is because I felt like I could get my arms around it. You know, all the complications you just brought up are valid, and they’re obstacles, but they were relatable to me. I don’t know why exactly, I just wasn’t intimidated by those, or at least I wasn’t intimidated to the point that I didn’t think I could solve those problems.
So, taking them one at a time – customers; initially we were going to be very focused, really exclusively focused on the college market, and we had all of these ideas for marketing programs geared toward the college market. And once we got going we found that the ideas we had really didn’t work, so I’m sure this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs in your audience, they’ve got to be flexible.
Andrew: So you said, “I’m going to go after the college market.” These guys need T-shirts all the time. They have a party, they need T-shirts; they have a fraternity, they need T-shirts. How did you try to get after them?
Marc: Well, there were programs ranging from working with collegiate institutions, like fraternities and sororities; partnerships with on-campus groups.
Andrew: Were you guys picking up the phone and calling them one at a time and saying, “Hey, we’re CustomInk; we’d like to give you guys better T-shirts”?
Marc: I think we probably tried some of that as well. And I don’t mean to suggest that it didn’t work at all. I mean, to this day I think we’re disproportionately strong in educational markets, collegiate and K-12, relative to the population. But, you know, we weren’t really getting traction as a company with just those efforts, and what emerged was pay-per-click search engine marketing. You probably remember GoTo.com, before it was Overture, before it was Yahoo Search. It was the first, at least the first I knew of, pay-per-click search engine, and it spawned Google AdWords and everything.
What we found is that we got traction with search engine marketing, paid and natural, and then we just were nuts about customer satisfaction. We didn’t do that as a business strategy, it was just who myself, and the rest of the early team, were. That was just our character, and that led to a lot of repeat and referral business, and we built from there.
Andrew: This is in the days where you could buy an ad from GoTo for like 25 cents, targeted and sent to your site where people would buy.
Marc: And you know, that didn’t even exist — well, it probably existed. You know, myself and my co-founder Dave; well also there was Mike, who you mentioned, who was one of our co-founders, but he wasn’t really active in the business once we formally founded it, and then my technical co-founder Dave Christensen was the other key principal.
At the time we didn’t even mention search engine marketing or pay-per-click marketing, because that hadn’t caught on. It’s just funny to think that all of our original plans didn’t take us very far, and then something we hadn’t anticipated, but that we were nimble enough to embrace, ended up really being key.
Andrew: How did you discover GoTo?
Marc: I think I saw a television ad. I think I personally saw a television ad and, you know, kind of brought it up with our marketing guy, who didn’t really know much about marketing but was figuring it out and was resourceful. We just kind of dug into it ourselves and figured it out.
Andrew: One of the first tactics that I discovered when it came to GoTo, back in the day, was if you buy an ad, you can put the key word in the ad, which of course today is very commonplace. And you could send people to a landing page, not the homepage — which again, it’s commonplace, but it was pretty interesting at the time. And once they got to the page you can automatically populate the page with the keyword they were looking for. So if they came in saying I want . . . we were in the newsletter business. If they did a search for T-shirts, we’d say: “We have a newsletter about T-shirts.” They come to our webpage and we’d say, “Join the T-shirt Newsletter.” Obviously, it wouldn’t work for T-shirts, but it gives you a sense of the process. That’s like one little thing that we discovered at the time that changed a whole lot of conversions for us. What did you discover back then?
Marc: It would be difficult for me to articulate things quite that specific, partly because it’s been 11 years, partly because I also wouldn’t want to, you know, give away anything that was really an ah-ha, and is maybe secret sauce that still works for us today. But what I will say is that we’ve just put a ton of energy, and still do today, to the customer experience — actually making it work for customers.
At the time we were competing against a lot of companies that went from zero to 60 in three months. You know, they had — I mean zero to 60 figuratively – but in many cases probably literally, that they had 60 people within a few months of their existence, and had whole development teams and product teams. And the, you know, people who were supposed to be the entrepreneurs already had their sights set on IPOs and things like that. And that was so different from where we were. We were so grounded, and were really focused on making the business actually work for customers, as well as from a marketing perspective and an operational perspective and so forth, but particularly from the customer perspective. We just really wanted it to be a great experience, and that’s where the majority of our energy went.
Andrew: So I read . . .
Marc: And with a focus like that there ends up being dozens, or even hundreds of little things that make a big difference.
Andrew: Can you think of one of those that you can share with us today that would just give us a sense of the kinds of tactics you were taking?
Marc: I can give you an example.
Andrew: Okay.
Marc: At the time, you know, web technologies are not what they are today, and we used a Java applet to kind of display the design on the shirt. And that’s what competitors were doing also, those venture-backed dotcoms that I mentioned. If you just let things happen as they did naturally, the graphic on top of the shirt wasn’t anti-aliased correctly; it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look natural. It looked digital; there were sharp edges to the graphic rather than smooth curves. Do you know what I mean by that, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah.
Marc: I guess the real question is whether your audience will know what I mean, but basically it looked pixilated, I guess would be the best word for it. You know, we thought that was a huge problem. If it didn’t look right on the screen people were not going to spend $400 on shirts for their business; there’s too much riding on it. And especially at the time e-commerce was so new, so there’s every reason to think that if it looks digital and pixilated on the screen, that’s how it would look in reality. And we put a lot of effort and got very creative technically into solving that problem and making it actually look right. I think that was an example of one of the kinds of things that let us get out of the starting gate, whereas, you know, those other venture-backed dotcoms pretty much all wiped out when the bubble burst.
Andrew: When you make a change like that, is that because feedback is coming to you from customers where they say we’re abandoning our . . . were they abandoning their shopping cart? How do you know; how do I know what that insight will be for my business, or my audience for theirs?
Marc: I think a lot of that just came out of putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes, and you know, just being very hands-on. So in my experience that was important as an early-stage entrepreneur.
Andrew: How do you put yourself in your customers’ shoes? Do you go through the sales process; do you talk to them; do you buy your own T-shirts?
Marc: You know, I think that, I think it’s more of just a mindset thing, you know, using the site. I’ll say one thing that may be helped for me is that I personally was not developing the website, so I was able to look at it more objectively.
Andrew: I see.
Marc: And, you know, look at versions and give feedback, as opposed to being totally locked into the actual development. But I can’t really tell you how to do it. I think it’s just a mindset thing.
Andrew: Well I have tremendous admiration for what you’ve been able to accomplish. Let me just go through this, and I mean, even in the first year what you were able to accomplish I think is impressive, let alone what you did last year, $70 million, as you say.
Mike Driscoll created the first version of the site in ’99. You really launched officially in 2000 with the business as we know it today. 2001 you hit your first monthly revenue of $25,000; ended 2001, according to my understanding — $1 million in revenue. Before I continue from there, that first year to hit that number — that’s from paid search for the most part, right?
Marc: I don’t . . .
Andrew: Can’t even remember that far?
Marc: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Marc: I remember it was a million bucks in 2001.
Andrew: Okay.
Marc: As you said, Mike started the company, started the site as a project basically in ’99. We eventually formed a company in early 2000; got the website up by the end of that year, and in 2001, it was January of 2001 when we had that kind of first real month of revenue, $25,000. And I do remember thinking: you know, wow that’s real money! That’s not just like our parents’ friends feeling sorry for us and placing a few orders. You can’t explain away $25,000 in revenue.
And then the business just started growing very rapidly from there. And again, I think it must have been search and repeat and referral, but I can’t remember in detail things from that long ago.
Andrew: Okay. So 2001, $1 million; 2002, $3 million; 2003, $7 million in sales and profits. At that point do you say to yourself, “I can breathe easy now. My life is okay. We’re doing $7 million in revenue. We’re actually profitable. I don’t worry anymore”? Or from 2003 to 2011, are you still, are there still nerves there? Are there still worries; are there still concerns; what are the concerns?
Marc: Well, there definitely are. I mean, I have real high aspirations and real high expectations for the business, and I think that I’m always comparing our results and trajectory to those expectations, and that doesn’t let up. You know, on the other hand, no doubt positive cash flow is so much better than not, and we definitely had those touch-and-go years early on.
Again, the bubble burst pretty much like the next day after we started the company. I think literarily like the NASDAQ peaked, like, within a couple of weeks, and so we really were building a company and growing it in the aftermath of all that. You know, I remember we had a couple of years where we here and there had to ask people to defer some of their compensation so we could make payroll. We had to take a number of extraordinary measures before we kind of turned the corner as a company. So, you know, it definitely was better to not be in that situation, but I wouldn’t say at all that the tension and the eagerness goes away, because as the company has progressed, the expectations, the goalposts, keep rising and getting further away.
Andrew: What keeps you what keeps you up now, or what has kept you up since then?
Marc: There was certainly a period of years where it was the practicalities that kept me up. You know, will the system scale, and how do we keep the team strong as we grow? If you’re doubling the size of the company in the course of a year and you care as much as I did, and as the rest of the early team did about the quality of the people that we have, and the quality of the experience we give customers, then keeping that team healthy and effective and happy and high-quality as we grew, that was intense. And then also involved in the processes to keep up with the business, especially in a high-touch business like ours, all of that work was very intensive and was the main focus for me for a number of years.
Now I think what occupies my thinking the most, or keeps me up you could say, is just thinking about what CustomInk could become. Because I think that, you know, we’re in a great market; we are the leader, you know. Ad I hope that doesn’t sound obnoxious. A dozen years ago when I was starting this I wouldn’t have expected to find myself in this position, but now really I think CustomInk is the leader. I think we’re the largest in what we do and we kind of reinvented how it’s done, and you know, we continue to kind of push the envelope in terms of capabilities and customer satisfaction, and winning different awards, those kinds of things. And I believe that this market, the custom T-shirt market, could be so much more than it is.
Andrew: I’m sorry to interrupt, but I want to understand this. I’m looking for an understanding of how you were able to do it, and I understand that hopping on pay-per-click back when the rest of the world wasn’t aware is a huge advantage. Keeping at it and having your costs low at a time when everyone else was going out of business, that’s a big advantage, and allowed you to grow while everyone else was in a depression, in a funk in this industry. But more tactically, how do you go from nothing to being so big? How do you go from nothing to building so much a big revenue system from selling so many T-shirts? And I don’t mean just T-shirts, but selling so much. How do you, give me a few ideas that helped you grow, that helped you get outsized results?
Marc: Man, you know, I hate to disappoint you, but I think the biggest thing I can say is the focus on customer satisfaction; that our business wouldn’t work if our customers didn’t come back and bring their friends.
Andrew: So how do you do that? You’ve said ‘customer satisfaction’ a lot and I just kept putting it at the side of my head to come back and bring it in, so let’s talk about it. How do you get customer satisfaction to be as high as it is? And you guys show your customer satisfaction right on your homepage; there’s a link that takes people to a page where they can see every complaint and every satisfied customer that you guys have had. How do you keep customer satisfaction up? I’d like to do it and I’m sure my audience would.
Marc: So that feature that you’re referring to is what we call Uncensored Customer Comments or Customer Uncensored, and as customers complete our post-order evaluation, we truly do stream uncensored, unfiltered feedback to our welcome page, and you can click to read more in-depth and search. We started doing that very early on; it was an original idea at the time and it still is 10 years later, a pretty original unique thing. You know, you’ll see in our industry and lots of industries, you know, people will post handpicked customer testimonials on their website. CustomInk’s progress has spawned a lot of imitators, and you’ll see in their overall effort to imitate us they also imitate the customer comments that we have.
Andrew: Are you saying that people copy your customer comments?
Marc: Well, no, no, no; I’m saying they try to make it look like they’re doing the same thing.
Andrew: I see.
Marc: But anyone can handpick some positive comments; the way we do it, it truly is unfiltered, and I think that that had a big impact not only on prospective customers looking at our website, but also on the team that we built. The right people, the people that we wanted that were really going to deliver on that promise of customer satisfaction, were hooked by the fact that we do that.
Andrew: How do you do it? How do you get so many positive comments; how do I make my customers as happy as you make your customers?
Marc: You know, I really think it’s the team. It’s a good process that was honed over the years, learning from mistakes and so forth, but in custom business like ours that’s kind of inherently high-touch, it really comes down to, you know, having great, talented people that care and go the extra mile to improve a design, catch a typo, make a style suggestion, stay late to get something done to meet a last-minute change in the delivery date, and so on and so forth.
And from a management or leadership perspective, I think empowering people to do that, to make those decisions, not stranding them by over-the-top focus on the financial implications of going the extra mile for the customer, that was I think a good management approach that we took. But really, the most important thing I think was the team that we put together, and we’ve been for years almost as obsessive about having a great workplace, being a good employer, as we have been about having good customer satisfaction. So yeah, I would hate to come off like tooting my own horn on this, but we’ve been recognized as a great place to work in the Washington Metro area for the last six years running. They publish this list every two years, and we’ve been a fixture on it.
We’ve been in other publications for our workplace practices, and I think it’s all part of that Golden Rule cycle of, you know, we try to get great people and treat them well, and then expect them to treat customers, each other and the company as an entity in the same way. And we have problems like any other company, miscommunications, missteps, morale problems here or there, but I think underlying all of it is a foundation of trust and good intentions that keeps things moving in the right direction.
Andrew: Okay. Well, we’ll leave it there. Thank you for doing the interview. And let me thank Jason Kaplan, a venture capitalist with Southern Capital Ventures who introduced me to you. He’s introduced me to so many great people. How do you know Jason?
Marc: As I’m sure a lot of people watching will be able to relate to, in the early years, when we really, really wanted to raise venture capital no one was paying us any attention. Then once we turned the corner and didn’t really need it, now they all call on us. And Jason is one of the venture capitalists who has kind of struck up a relationship with CustomInk. And even though we don’t work together he’s just impressed us as a good, smart person and someone who is certainly worth keeping in touch with.
Andrew: Absolutely. He is, when I started Mixergy I said the mission here, being able to get the kinds of entrepreneurs that I hope to get on is so big that there’s no way I could do it on my own. And it’s true — without Jason Kaplan and others like him, but especially Jason Kaplan — there’s no way I’d be able to reach out to you. I wouldn’t even know your story as well as I did. He helped me get an introduction to, not just an introduction but an interview, with the founder of Living Social and many other companies that people have seen here on Mixergy. So Jason, I’m grateful to you; and Marc, I’m grateful to you for doing this interview.
Marc: My pleasure.
Andrew: Cool. Thank you all for watching, and come back to Mixergy, give me feedback.
Marc: Okay.
Andrew: Bye everyone.
