Andrew Warner: Before we start, look at all the stunning custom logo designs that one client got from 99designs.com. 99designs is the largest marketplace for crowd-sourced graphic design. Look at all these beautiful custom web designs that another client got. Go to 99designs.com and describe what you need. Artists from all over the world will flood you with custom designs. You pay for only what you want. Look at these cool t-shirt designs that another client got. Go to 99designs.com and send me a link of what you get.
Here’s an email that I got from a viewer about my next sponsor, Scott Walker of Walker Corporate Law. “Just a quick note. I was looking for a lawyer to do an updated terms of service agreement for our product. Long story short, I had a hell of time finding someone who was charging reasonable rates and who was in the tech space. I ended up seeing Walker Corporate Law, your sponsor. They were fantastic.” So, Walker Corporate Law is the firm you turn to when you’re raising money or when you’re selling your company. But as you can see, they’re even there for you in the early days. Walker Corporate Law.
Finally, check out PicClick.com. It’s a bootstrap startup by Ryan in San Diego and he’s already profitable. PicClick is a visual way to search eBay, Etsy, and other sites. Ryan is a viewer like you. If you have a friend out there who’s shopping online, recommend that they check out PicClick.com.
Here’s the program.
Hey everyone. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. You guys know what we do here. Every day, I bring on a different entrepreneur or somebody who’s building an incredible company to come here to talk about how he did it, to explain what she learned along the way, to talk to you about the milestones, the setbacks, and everything that went into it, so that you can steal as many of these ideas as possible, bring them back to your company, go build an incredible business, and then come back here and hopefully do what Wes Wilson is doing today, which is do an interview and teach other what you learned.
Today’s big question is how do you build a profitable marketplace? That’s what I invited Wes Wilson to talk about. He is the founder of Brandstack and Upstack. The best way to describe what his company does is to give you an example of, actually, is to tell you about a person who I interviewed here on Mixergy who introduced me to Brandstack. The guy says to me that he had a name for his company but the company name sucked. People just couldn’t remember it. They couldn’t write it down. They kept misspelling it. He went to Brandstack, he got a new name. He also got a new logo with that name and he got a new domain. He got that whole package. He tested it out with some customers. Customers loved it and that’s his company name today. That’s what Brandstack is. Am I right, Wes?
Wes Wilson: That’s exactly right.
Andrew: The sister company is called Upstack. My understanding of Upstack is if you want custom work, what you do is describe it on Upstack, Upstack will introduce you to designers who will show you their portfolios, and then you pick the person who you want to hire and then work with them to create it. Right?
Wes: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Upstack’s the custom portion of it. It’s kind of a reverse bidding process: you name your price, your write your brief and you put it out there. We’ve got all our pre-approved designers on there ready to work with you.
Andrew: All right. Profitable for how long?
Wes: Just a few months now.
Andrew: Okay.
Wes: In fact, Upstack, what we were just talking about, was really the turning point for us. Brandstack has always been growing but it had never got us over that profitability point. Really what we did is we took this amazing community of designers that we built on Brandstack, very active, loyal, very, very talented.
We always had a lot of customers coming to Brandstack looking for custom designs and I was very adamant about pushing those customers away. In fact, what I would do is just refer them to designers on the site. Sometimes they could do the work and sometimes they couldn’t. The more and more that we kept talking about it, it started to make sense that there’s a lot more we could do with this community that we’re building than just have them on Brandstack so we partitioned off the custom side and that’s what ultimately helped us to get to profitability.
Andrew: Which is more profitable? Which is generating more revenue now?
Wes: Revenue, it would be on the Brandstack side.
Andrew: Okay.
Wes: The margins are a little better on the Upstack side just because we’re a little more hands-on on that side. We get involved with every single one of the projects. We help manage where needed. We have different pieces and upgrades and that kind of thing where we can get involved. It’s a little more costly on our side with employees, as far as employees are concerned, but all in all, it’s helped push us over the top.
Andrew: Cool. How much funding do you have?
Wes: We’ve raised less than $300,000 so far.
Andrew: From who? What kind of people, I mean? I don’t mean specific names.
Wes: Just Angels.
Andrew: Angels. Friends, family, that kind of thing or professional Angels?
Wes: Initially, friends, family was just enough to help us get developed and then we’ve raised from two of the founders of Rackspace here in town. They’re real big in the San Antonio community and so they’ve helped us get a little bit further.
Andrew: Oh, how do you know them?
Wes: Actually, it’s just San Antonio’s a small community. There’s not a whole lot going on in the tech world down here.
Andrew: Describe it. When was the first time that you met them?
Wes: It was actually by email. I got an email intro at one point. They had heard of what we did and we set up a breakfast. I think our first breakfast was probably somewhere around three hours long and it wasn’t formal at all. It was a lot of discussion and finding out a little bit about me and about him and just going back and forth that way.
Andrew: Did you ask for the introduction with the idea that they might invest in the future?
Wes: No. Actually, I didn’t ask for the intro at all. San Antonio is such a small tech community, when anybody does anything here, even if it’s just semi-successful, it gets heard about, just because we’re aching for something new to happen here in this town. It’s really been picking up lately. Rackspace is so huge in the tech community, not only just in San Antonio, but I think in the U.S. They’ve got their hands in everything, so the individuals that I was talking to heard about what we were doing. Found a mutual friend and we made the intro that way.
Andrew: Do you think that they were looking for investments and that’s why they wanted to meet you? To see if maybe you’d be a good potential investment in the future?
Wes: I get the impression that even if they weren’t specifically looking for an investment, what we were doing, I think, trying to meet people that are affecting our local environment.
Andrew: I see. Okay. All right. How outgoing were you? How did they even find out about you? You were going out to meetups? Were you going out to events? Were you getting your name out there some other way?
Wes: I did a little bit. I actually came from the commercial banking world, so everything that I did before this was always involved with chambers and very formal and ties and all that stuff. When I started this site, I was still in banking at the time and so I was trying to get out there at some of the Friday evening happy hours and that kind of thing. Fortunate enough to meet a group here in town that really had their hands in a lot of the stuff tech-related. From that, that’s how they were able to find the intro.
Andrew: Okay. Let’s talk about what you did before this. You said that you were in commercial banking. I read that you were. . . Were you a loan officer? Were you servicing loans?
Wes: Yeah. I was a VP at a local commercial bank, actually an Oklahoma-based bank. I did everything from trying to solicit startups or companies that need money to underwriting to closing loans and then servicing.
Andrew: How do you lend money to a startup? They got nothing.
Wes: One of the banks that I was at, we didn’t do anything with startups. The only way that we would ever touch a startup is if they were successful in their past, they’ve got bank accounts that they could probably run the startup themselves. We got big in to the healthcare industry with the last bank that I was at. With that, if you’re a doctor coming out of school, you’re automatically going to make a great salary, so if you’re starting up a practice or that kind of thing, we got involved more with startups in that field. It was a lot of doctors, a lot of dentists. But it was great, because a lot of the same rules still applied. I got to see a lot of financial statements. I got to see a lot of marketing plans. You stick around a good one, two, three years, you got to see the companies that failed and why they did.
Andrew: What did you see in common with the ones that failed?
Wes: Usually I think they were a little too lofty. They were spending too much money upfront. The ones that would come on and say, “The way we’re going to grow is just buy throwing money at everything. Advertise everywhere we can. Spend a lot of money on PR people.” Usually that’s what ended up turning out bad.
Andrew: They would tell you this? They would come in saying, “This is what we need the money for, to get PR people and office space and desks and fancy chairs”?
Wes: Yeah. Oh, yeah. There’s a couple of different mindsets that I found in that world. There’s those that know that they’ve been able to build up a really good network of, whether it’d be doctors or dentists, that can help refer each other. So, they’re going off, I don’t know if you call the good-old-boy network or whatever. There’s others that come out of it just thinking that we can solve anything by throwing money at it. Usually those are the ones, regardless, the bank loved it, because they know that they’re going to get their money back either way, and the loan’s higher in value that way, but it ultimately didn’t ever work out for them.
Andrew: How does a bank get their money back either way? What happens if they blow through that cash?
Wes: Well, because if the business goes down, they’re still doctors. They can go and get a salary somewhere at $300,000 so they can pay on this loan for the next 10 to 15 years. [laughs] They’ll get paid, just with a little more interest.
Andrew: I see. It wasn’t about collateral. It was about the person’s ability to earn.
Wes: At that stage, yeah. At a startup stage, it was.
Andrew: Okay. Were you starting companies along the way, too, before you started this one?
Wes: I have. I’ve done little things as a kid, whether it be the traditional lemonade stands or whatever. I started my first real company right out of high school. I used to do competitive speedskating, inline speedskating. I developed a custom boot, which was a combination of leather and carbon fiber and all this stuff. Really myself and one partner taught ourselves how to do it. That’s really when I got into the graphic design field as well, because I was too cheap to pay for anyone to design a logo or design a website. Started up a company. It failed, ultimately, but I sold a couple of pair of boots. I was able to create a website and go to events and learn the very, very ground-level of marketing something.
Andrew: Talk about why it failed.
Wes: I was inexperienced.
Andrew: What did you do wrong as an inexperienced entrepreneur?
Wes: I don’t think I put enough planning into it initially. Not planning in the sense of writing a business plan, because I wrote a great business plan from what I think. It was really figuring out how to apply that in the real world. I knew I could make a great looking logo, I could have a website that has the nice features, and I knew how to make a boot. I didn’t know a whole lot about what the cost of that would be.
I saw at the ground-level that if I could make a boot for $200 and I could sell it for $400, then I’ve got that margin there, when in reality, I wasn’t taking into consideration everything else that would go into it, whether it would be selling it, traveling, getting the word out. Then there were other pieces, too. At the time, it was competitive. The landscape was really competitive and I just didn’t have enough manpower or time or experience to really get out there and compete with them.
Andrew: I see. When you were a speedskater, did you wear those tight little outfits?
Wes: [laughs]
Andrew: You know what I’m talking about? The ones I see in the Olympics.
Wes: Yeah. I did.
Andrew: Do you have that picture anywhere online?
Wes: No. I think I’ve pretty much taken them all down.
Andrew: Interesting. If it exists, I know Dan Blank in the audience will find it. He’s already linked to your two companies.
Wes: [laughs]
Andrew: If it’s not Dan Blank, maybe somebody else will find it. A speedskating picture of Wes, I would love it.
Wes: I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere.
Andrew: All right. So, you were doing that. You were starting to do some graphic design. How much work were you doing in that business? How much graphic design work were you doing? And by how much, I mean how much revenue was coming in from that?
Wes: Oh. Nothing was coming in from that. That was all experience.
Andrew: I mean from the 10 years that you did it. You were doing some freelance design before you started this company?
Wes: Yeah. After the skating company, started doing the freelance design stuff and it was very little coming in. Really what I did was it was any friends or family that needed something. I was learning the ropes at the time of Microsoft Paint or something like that, eventually figured out how to use Flash and then Illustrator and then only until the past couple years, really figured out how to use Photoshop. A lot of it was really just experience. I tried to sell it as a great, high-quality product, and then I realized that there are hundreds of thousands of designers out there that are just a lot better than I am.
Andrew: Let me ask you this. On a personal level, we’re now a few minutes into the interview. The people who are just nudnicks, who are just tuning in for a second and moving on with their lives are gone. The ones who are only die-hard, very small, are here. Let me ask you this. Really, were you a designer or is this just good for the backstory for the business? If it’s good just for the backstory, I’ll love it too. I’ll love it even more. So feel free to be honest.
Wes: To be honest, I thought of myself as a real designer. I saw that as my career path. The entire time while I was banking, it was my nine-to-five job. I hated wearing the suit. I hated sitting in the same place. All the networking functions and all that stuff, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. What I enjoyed was the creative side of it. I really thought of myself a designer. Once I actually got out and I started doing this and I’m dealing with as many designers as we are on a daily basis, I realized I was not a very good designer.
Andrew: [laughs] Okay.
Wes: And yeah, it’s great for the background story of it, but I’m a closet professional designer, if you can call me that.
Andrew: Dan Blank just came back. He says he couldn’t find any speedskating photos, but he was able to find one of you at Chuck E. Cheese. I’ve got to click on that after the interview’s over.
Wes: Yeah. [laughs]
Andrew: There are no secrets on the Internet, my friend.
Wes: [laughs]
Andrew: All right. So where’d the idea come from?
Wes: It actually ties in with what we were just talking about. Realizing that that community of designers was out there, I started using them, basically outsourcing some of the work I got in. It wasn’t a full outsource relationship. It would get something in, I would kick it over to a couple of designers that I found, whether it would be on Elance or whatever, and have them help out with some ideas and we’d really refine it that way.
One day, it was on a Friday morning, I remember I was reading the Wall Street Journal. There was a mom and pop, they were talking about a company that they had started. They were creating these pre-made brands. I think it was a logo, website, and a 1-800 number. They were selling them for upwards of $100,000 a piece. They were just them two doing it in-house. I thought, “How cool is that? The Wall Street Journal picked it up.” That’s an entrepreneur’s dream to get attention like that.
Andrew: Actually, sorry. We lost the connection again. Pick it up from “how great is that.”
Wes: Okay. The logo that they had was a purple logo, it was a pizzapotamus, that was the one that the Wall Street Journal was talking about. It was, “How great would this be for a franchise pizza chain wherever?” Really, and I don’t know the exact way it transpired, but it was a transition from how difficult would it be if that really picked up and you’re only two people trying to create all these logos because of how difficult it is to come up with names and logos and all that. Then, how great would it be to have a bunch of other people to do that for you?
Really, I brainstormed the idea for about three hours. Coincidentally, I had a lunch with one of my banking clients at the time. He’s started up several companies. He’s a serial entrepreneur on a small scale. Met with him and said, “Hey. If there was a site out there like this, where you could just go and find a logo, find a name, you wouldn’t have to do any of the thinking, you could just purchase it and download it. Would you use it?” We bounced around a couple of ideas. The next thing he said, “How much do you need? Let’s do it.”
Right there, within the next two weeks we formed an LLC. We brought in one other person. They put together, I think it was somewhere around $30,000 total. They were giving me $2,000 and $3,000 at a time. Hired a development team in April. Had the beta site up in June. Really started talking about it in August of that year.
Andrew: What did that first version look like?
Wes: I designed it so it was fairly ugly. It was, the asthetics of it I guess are pretty pointless, but at the time it was just logos. The domain stuff, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to figure out how that part worked. Initially I started sending emails to the best designers that I could find that were using an online portfolio site, so there was probably 20 or 30 designers on there that seemed passionate about what we were donig. I think we had one sale in the first couple of months, but for the most part it was just people talking back and forth, patting each other on the back, that kind of thing.
Andrew: Talking back and forth how?
Wes: Giving each other critiques. I guess nice critiques. Welcome. It was a new place for them to hang out at the time. Everybody had hopes that there would be revenue that they could make at some point. It was just, “Glad to see you here. I’ve seen you over at this site or that site or wherever.” They would tell their friends about it and then they’d come and join.
Andrew: You said you weren’t sophisticated enough to know about the domain part. You mean that now you package the domain with the logo and the name? Back then, all you did was logo with the name and people can go buy it and go run with it?
Wes: Yeah. We allowed people to say with a simple field, “I own this domain.” If you buy the logo, you would get this domain with it. There was no, the security piece on it was me manually checking out of my kitchen, manually checking to see that they actually owned the domain or not. As I brought in some more experienced people and partnered up with the right companies, we’re able to actually tie in the registrar piece.
Andrew: Constantine in the audience is saying ugly is good. I keep hearing, also, in my interviews, first version is always ugly, or often ugly.
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: How did it help you to have a version that was this crude?
Wes: I think it helped me figure out what people actually wanted. In the very beginning, I had grand dreams of this being, I don’t know if I actually thought it would be a Myspace or a Facebook at the time or whatever, but we built our own blog. We built our own internal chat. We built our own forums. I had dreams of this thing being in a huge designer hub. Really, what it came down to was people came here wanting to see a really good design. They wanted another place to sell their work that they’ve already created. They didn’t need all the other stuff that was involved with it.
Andrew: Let me see if I understand this. There’s WordPress out there. There’s Posterous, say, there are tons of other things. You built your own blog, your own system.
Wes: Yeah. I was very dumb.
Andrew: Forums. You built your own forums.
Wes: Yes.
Andrew: I actually saw people complain about your chatroom. You guys built that yourselves.
Wes: Yes.
Andrew: Interesting. If you had to do it all over again, going back in time with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, how would you do that first version today?
Wes: The first version, I would probably build the entire thing in WordPress.
Andrew: Including forums, including chat?
Wes: Well, I don’t think I’d put on the forum. I don’t think I’d put on the chat. In the very beginning, I think I would do just the minimal, viable product. I would just build the entire thing in WordPress. Just to see if it works, I would probably have people email me the images and I would post it. I would probably put a PayPal button on there. I would play with it until people actually started buying something off of it.
Andrew: I see. They would send you a picture, you would take their logo or whatever they designed, you’d put it into a blog post, you’d let people comment underneath it, there’d be a “buy this” button where people can click and order it from PayPal, money would come to your account, you would take it from there. That dead simple?
Wes: I would go as simple as possible. I was fortunate in the beginning not to have a ton of money but have enough to really say, “I want to build this.” And I’d be able to build it. I think that was almost a hinderance, because I think I wasted a lot of money in the beginning. I think it all worked out great, but we didn’t have to spend as much as we did. I think we could’ve done it for a lot less than the 30 grand that we spent.
Andrew: I see. Did it take you all $30,000 to build this first version?
Wes: It took right around probably 25, somewhere around there.
Andrew: Okay.
Wes: Then the other 5 was to get a couple small banner ads, to try to do bug fixes, and that kind of thing.
Andrew: Where did you plan to get your. . . I guess there’s a marketplace, so you need customers and you need suppliers. Where did you plan to get your designers who were going to supply all this great work?
Wes: The designers, I looked at it, if you were to go back and try to market a product to a high school, I’ve always related it to that. I wanted to find the most popular, the most active logo designers that I could find on the Internet. What I did was I went to a couple of the more popular sites, saw the guys that were commenting and just sent them an email. It was probably a little cryptic in the beginning, “Hey, I got this great idea. I think your work would be perfect to it. I’m only sending this to a few people. Here’s a non-disclosure agreement. If you want to sign it, send it back, I’ll tell you what we’re doing.”
I think I just got lucky because I got probably a good 10 of those designers that I initially invited that were popular, well-known, well-liked designers within their specific communities. Once they actually signed on, they were great because they told their friends about it and they started coming over. One thing I figured out, the design community, they know everything about everything that’s going on in their community.
Andrew: The design community, you’re absolutely right. These guys talk to each other more than anybody else. If you do one thing to somebody in the design community, everybody in the design community’s going to be talking about it. Sorry.
Wes: You’re exactly right. We’ve seen the good side of it and we’ve seen the bad side of it. The good side being once you get a couple of them on board and they find out what you’re doing, they do a fantastic job of telling their friends about it.
Andrew: What’s the bad side of it?
Wes: We’ve run into some fraud recently. We’ve had some people coming on and we’ve had to go through some additional checks. Our timeframe where we actually pay designers has basically doubled. We used to pay designers within three business days, now it’s up to seven to ten business days. Once you get one or two designers mad about that, that they’re having to wait an extra week or so to get paid, that spreads like wildfire.
Andrew: What kind of fraud?
Wes: We’ve had credit card fraud. I think some of it are probably these people just checking the availability on it. In the beginning, what we had were these people uploading logos for sale, waiting three or four days, then turning and buying it from themselves with a stolen credit card. They’re basically cashing in. We’ve lost a decent amount of money for that. Now we’re taking a lot more time trying to make sure that each one of these is real. We’re still not perfect at it, but we’re trying.
Andrew: Who are you using to process your credit cards?
Wes: Everything runs through Authorize.net right now. Our [??] account goes through Chase and PayPal. Actually, on Upstack, when we started that one, we hadn’t gone through any traditional merchant accounts on that site. We just opened up PayPal.
Andrew: I thought so. I thought I saw PayPal and I guess I assumed it was also on Brandstack too.
Wes: On Brandstack, we still have traditional credit card payments. We left it PayPal on Upstack just really to see the difference between the potential fraud. We found, actually, that people that won’t go through the hassle of going through PayPal, creating accounts or whatever else it is, the fraud is a lot lower on that site.
Andrew: How did you plan to get your customers? We understand now the designers are out there, they’re talking to each other, they’re making themselves known by posting their portfolios online. I get that. How do you get the customers?
Wes: Customers are a lot harder, in my opinion, to get than the sellers were. Initially what we did was we invested a lot of time and energy into trying to create loyal sellers because the idea was if we could get these guys to bring their customers to Brandstack, then they’ll basically create this little ecosystem of a marketplace. They’ll, in turn, bring the buyers over.
It worked, but it’s probably not as high a success rate as we wanted. Now what we’re doing is we’re trying a lot of word-of-mouth stuff. We’re trying to get a little more creative. We’re going to start going out to more events. Before, that’s all we did is we stayed online. We stayed within our bubble and come to realize there are a lot of people out there that need graphic design that aren’t. . .
Andrew: How do you reach to people that are outside the bubble?
Wes: I wish I had a clear answer for you but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. We’re experimenting right now, like I said, with direct mail pieces. We’re experimenting with going to events, trying to host local parties or tweetups, that kind of thing, trying to touch people in a way that they normally aren’t.
Andrew: How have you been able to get your designers to bring in customers for you? That’s what I see happening a lot in businesses like yours.
Wes: We’ve experimented. . . Sorry, I lost you here.
Andrew: Screensaver on a Mac?
Wes: Yeah. I’m going to say experimented a lot. We experimented with a lot of different things; some worked, some haven’t. We’ve built widgets for Brandstack to allow people to try to sell their work on their own sites, hoping that would bring them back in. We’ve tried to incentivize people on the Upstack side by creating affiliate programs.
But for the most part, we’ve made it really easy for them to upload work onto our site. We pay out a high commission compared to what any other competitors are doing. We really try to communicate as often as possible with our designers. We figure if we can do those things, then they’re going to bring people over to buy from them.
Andrew: I saw a little bit of controversy about the way that artists felt that they were posting their own work on your site, and then they were linking to that work, and having to share the revenue with you. Basically, they did the work, they sent the customer to your website, they ended up having to split the revenue with you. How do you deal with something like that? How do you answer that and how do you deal with it?
Wes: It’s difficult, but I think what we have to explain, a lot of times they’ll bring their customers over, it’s rare that that customer will be a match for that designer’s work. So, like I said, they create their own ecosystem because one designer brings over customer A, another designer brings over customer B, those two customers search around until they actually find something they like. It benefits some designers; others, they get upset about it. We try to keep our commission as low as possible because we know that we are not the only ones bringing people to our site. It’s tough. We’re dealing with all those issues one day at a time.
Andrew: How old’s the company?
Wes: Brandstack was started in April of ’08. We actually launched the site that summer.
Andrew: And Upstack was February of ’10?
Wes: Yes.
Andrew: All right. So not that old at all. You’re still figuring it out and you earned a profit pretty quickly.
Wes: Yeah. Like I said, a lot of that was from the Upstack site. Our designers, I say our designers as opposed to we, but our designers have done a fantastic job of creating really, really good designs and putting it on Brandstack, and from that, we built up a little bit of a reputation for having really good work. When we opened the doors for Upstack, most of the clients were familiar with Brandstack, and expected quality. It made that transition a lot easier. They would come to Brandstack, maybe not find something that they wanted, and then they’re prime to start another project on the Upstack side.
We’ve made it beneficial for both parties, on buyer and seller side for Upstack. We have a no spec environment over there. Designers don’t do any work until they know that they’re going to get paid for it. On the designer side, we keep it limited. We go through an approval process for every single one of our designers, so they know that they’re not having to compete against tens of thousands of designers out there for every single project.
Andrew: A few people in the audience have been asking about 99designs. Let me address this. 99designs has sponsored me, and I’ve used them a lot. The way 99designs works is the designers create the work, and they don’t get paid, and you don’t have to pay for the work, unless you like it. And you only pay for what you like. That’s how you guys are different from them. How are you guys different from Elance?
Wes: It’s the screening process, for the most part. It’s the screening process; it’s the specialty. A lot of our model is based around that online workplace, except, like I said, every single one of our designers go through a pretty rigorous approval process of identity, identity confirmation We check source files. We check quality communication skills, that kind of thing. As a client, when you go through there, once you post your work, you know the end design is going to be good. As compared to Elance, really at that point, you’re spending most of your time screening to see if the designer is going to be of quality or not.
Andrew: I’ve got to say that you’re absolutely right. That’s my experience with Elance. You have to keep screening. Unfortunately, the people who are really good are the ones who get hurt because once you get to them, you’re just so jilted by everyone else that you’re on the lookout. “Are you about to cheat me?” “Are you about to run away?” “Are you about to give me some, I don’t know what?” It’s unfortunate. I wish they would screen a little bit. Sorry?
Wes: Not only that, but their prices are driven down. The good designers that should charge more for their work, they can’t in an environment like Elance, unless they get a customer that’s a repeat customer that understands what they’re paying for. You go out there and you can post a logo project and you can get very, very cheap prices back, but normally it doesn’t work out in the end.
Andrew: I’ve used them more for development work and there’s some really good people unfortunately who are in that pile with everyone else. The ratings just don’t do justice to the new guys who are really good who are just trying to make some money on the side. They don’t have enough time to build up the credibility, build up all the stars, to get all of reputation points that you need.
I’m intentionally, by the way, avoiding a conversation directly about you guys and 99designs and how you’re different. I’m not looking to create controversy here. I’m looking to learn about your business.
Mike B. in the audience is saying, “If you want to make money, don’t be an artist.” Let me ask you something, is there room for artists to make money, finally, with the Internet? It feels like everybody else has found a way to do it. Writers can become bloggers and start bringing in money. Guys who are great at singing can start selling their songs on iTunes. What about artists? What about designers?
Wes: I think there is, but it hasn’t quite been figured out yet. I think other companies are getting very close. I think we’re getting close. We’re not quite there yet because design, specifically, it’s so time-consuming. Other professions, you can pay by the hour and some designers still do charge by the hour, but there’s no guarantee. Usually, it doesn’t work within the number of alotted hours that you want because it’s all based on creativity and environment and the situation and who you’re designing for. It’s really, really difficult.
What we’re trying to do, specifically with Upstack, is just create an environment where it takes away some of the normal roadblocks that you run into. Having to find clients, having to outbid the next person, having to be found amongst everybody else that’s out there.
Andrew: When I say money, I mean serious money. There are more and more ways for artists to make money today, to make any kind of money and I’m seeing them do it. Everything from Etsy to using design sites where they can sell their work and much more. Sometimes I look at some artists’ work and say, “Man, you should be way richer than that guy that just sold an e-book that is pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from that freaking e-book.” Unfortunately, there isn’t that yet. The closest person who I see who is coming to that is a guy who goes by the name The Oatmeal. Have you seen his comics?
Wes: I have.
Andrew: He’s making a name for himself. He’s starting to sell some books, some posters.
Wes: I don’t know if this is fortunate or unfortunate, but someone like himself, he had to go out and do it on his own. There’s no place, there’s no environment for him to go out there to help him get launched.
Andrew: Yeah. You have to go there and hustle and become more marketer, I think, than artist for a while. Now he’s getting to go back and be an artist. I interviewed him a while back, back before he was more artist and talked to him about how he marketed. A few people want you to comment on Blekko, as a name. Blekko is the name of a new search engine. What do you think of that?
Wes: Blekko?
Andrew: Yeah. Blekko. It’s a new search engine. TechCrunch has been talking about it a lot. You’re in the naming business and the branding business. Do you think they made the right decision to go with a name like Blekko or are they going to be on Brandstack in a few months trying to find a better name for themselves?
Wes: As far as naming convention goes, I found that it’s better to put together a couple of real English words than a makeup one. I guess that’s because I’m always looking at myself being on a more of a quasi-B to B side. On the consumer side, usually the made-up names, you can get away with them so long as they’re easy to pronounce and easy to spell. If I’m guessing, and I haven’t actually seen this before, but B-L-E-C-K-O. That’s how I would spell it and if that’s so, then I think it’d be okay.
Andrew: Believe it or not, it’s B-L-E-K-K-O dot com. They got trouble.
Wes: They might have a little bit of trouble but with the exposure from TechCrunch and the others, it might help.
Andrew: All right. We’re in a Google world, we’ll all be Googling Blekko, we’ll type it in with a C. . .
Wes: It will come up anyway.
Andrew: . . .and we’ll end up on their website. [laughs] That question actually came from Matthew Clausen [SP] who says that it’s a name failure. You changed your company name. You used to be, what was your company name before? IncSpring?
Wes: It was IncSpring. Yeah.
Andrew: How did you come up with the name IncSpring?
Wes: This is one of the “laying in my bed, looking at my ceiling” nights, trying to find, actually wishing that my service was available before then because I went through hundreds of names, pages of notes, trying to figure out what a good name was. The ultimate thing that I thought was clever about the name was the reason that I ended up changing it.
IncSpring was spelled I-N-C-spring. So, Inc for incorporation, so quickly launch a company. I also thought it was clever because it was the same pronunciation as ink, I-N-K, which is on the designer side. The problem was people didn’t know which way to spell it. So, once I brought on this initial round of Angels, that’s one of the first discussions that we had was, “This is great. I like the name. I think it’s clever, but how good is it going to do in the long run? How many times do you have to spell inc before somebody actually gets it?” Ended up changing the name, again, going through the convention of trying to come up with a name that’s as close to what we do as possible. English words, easy to spell, and that’s where Brandstack came up.
Andrew: Did you buy Brandstack from Brandstack?
Wes: The domain was actually available. The logo we did buy, we bought from Brandstack.
Andrew: It was available before?
Wes: Yeah. The domain was available before.
Andrew: No, I mean the logo was available before?
Wes: Yes. Yeah. In fact, I actually paid a designer because I couldn’t find anything on our own site. I paid a designer to create the logo for us. We went through a ton of variations. I liked a lot of them, my investors didn’t like very many of them. One of our designers posted the one, I think it was actually called Paper Float at the time, so the logo was called Paper Float. The logo was posted up there. I think it said it could be used for a printer or something like that. I sent that link off to my investors and it actually worked out great because we found a new logo and I sold them on the service within that five-minute span.
Andrew: I see. All right. Now I get a sense of how the site works also. So you may not have the perfect name with the perfect logo, but if the logo looks okay, you can just switch out the name that’s on that logo and replace it with the name that you have in mind, right?
Wes: Right.
Andrew: Okay. I didn’t understand that before.
Wes: Traditional designers are probably cringing from that right now, because that’s not the way traditional design is done. It worked exactly for what we were looking for.
Andrew: What about copyright and trademark issues? What if I were to go online and just find the logo that I really like, dress it up just a tiny bit, post it on Brandstack, sell it for 500 bucks, and pocket the cash? Screw whoever ends up with that trademark or coprighted logo.
Wes: It happens, unfortunately. We’ve had a few situations where we’ve had to go back and refund purchases because designers have done that. We go through a pretty good screening process with every single logo that’s uploaded. I’ve got a couple of designers in-house that do that.
Like we talked about before, these design communities, they’re not only well-connected, they’re ruthless. If they see something that looks, the concept looks too much like another, or the design was taken from somewhere else, they’ll call it out instantly. They won’t just call it out to that designer, they’ll yell at us on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else until we take some action on it.
We’ve been fortunate enough that our designers see a lot and they catch a lot before it actually gets sold. We had this same issue, though, with people that will post up on our site and then another designer might take it and try to post it somewhere else. Again, we’ve had to take action on that as well.
Andrew: What’s to stop me from just grabbing a design off of your website and adding my name to it, using, not Photoshop, but maybe a more amateur photo editor?
Wes: One, again, you’ll get caught eventually. But two, most of the people that are coming to our site and you’re willing to spend a few hundred dollars, you want to get more than just that [interference] that you’re not going to use other than your website. You’re going to get [interference] complete purchase. that’s something we run into. It’s the world. It’s everybody pulling Google images off to put on their blog or stealing logos to use for their own. We have to fight it.
Andrew: Yep. I don’t know a perfect solution for that. The only solution that I can think of is more eyeballs right now. Maybe someone’s working on some technology that’ll be like the anti-plagiarism technology that’s out there, but right now, I don’t see anything that’s strong enough.
Wes: I’ve heard of a few people working on it, yeah, but I think we’re still a little ways out just because there’s so much involved and so much cooperation from the community to actually get something like that to work.
Andrew: What size revenues are you doing now overall?
Wes: We’re less than a million, still, a year. We’re, like I said, profitable, barely profitable. We’re looking right now at potentially raising an actual institutional round. Playing with the idea right now, thinking that we’ve figured out the model. We’ve got a little bit of refining to do, but I’m really excited about the level of progress we’ve made over the past several months and hoping we can continue to grow it.
Andrew: What kind of refining?
Wes: Greasing the wheels on Upstack itself, there’s several things that we found, which not just on our site, but on any site where you go and actually order or try to get creative work done. The first thing is writing a creative brief. For anybody that’s every had to do it, if you do it right, it’s a pain. This is why agencies get paid thousands of dollars to do that because they put weeks and hours upon end to create this creative brief. That’s one of the things that we found.
Everybody, not everybody, but a good percentage of the customers that were coming to our site, that were good with the price, they liked the process, they get to that page and see a big, blank page and say, “Please write down what you want.” They would stop there.
We actually just launched a creative brief wizard. It will allow customers to go there and it’s almost like a Mad Libs. You type in a couple of fields here and there. You use some sliders. You go through a series of selecting which logos you like better than the others. It’ll actually create a brief for you. We’re doing that.
We got, still, some refinement to do on the workrooms. We’ve created some design-notating tools within the site, to try to make that process of communicating back and forth between the designer a little bit easier. There’s a lot of things like that that we need to do that are related to actually going through the project process.
Andrew: I’m glad that you mentioned that about the brief. It should be so easy, but it does always scare me. I look at that blank piece of paper and I’m supposed to describe a piece of artwork that’s not even in my head, that I won’t know is great until I see it. I’m supposed to describe it right now, ahead of time, to people who are designers, who are going to judge the way that I write it down, who are going to look at that and come up with something based on what I wrote. Once they’ve come up with something, I can’t say, “Hey. I don’t like that,” because I just asked for it.
Wes: Yeah. Hopefully they don’t judge you too bad. You’re right. Plus, we, I’m taking myself out of the designer category now, speak a different language than what experienced designers do. They live in that world. You’re not only having to say, “I’m looking for a website design for this kind of website.” But you’re trying to explain your style and who’s going to see it. What kind of company you are, who your customers are, there’s a lot that really needs to go into a good brief.
At the same time, too, one of the reasons that I wanted to create this wizard was because I think that there’s also a point of information overload when you come from the agency side. One of the big influences in creating was I met with an agency here in town. I sat down at lunch, I gave them the big sales pitch. How would you use Brandstack? He said, “Honestly, great idea, but I never would. We’re an agency. We do our own thing.” It was very polite but he said, “There’s no way in hell I’m ever going to use y’all. If you can give me access to your designers because they all look really good, then that’s something I could use.” That meeting was actually the first week of December of last year and we had a very, very basic first run of it in January.
We ran two projects with that agency. They should’ve gone beautifully. The creative briefs that they sent, it was page upon page, a lot of time. They bragged about how much time and effort went into these briefs. Both projects failed miserably. They were utter failures. The reason being was, I think agencies are used to working with their in-house staff, and even if they use outside guys, they’re using them almost on a full-time basis. You have a lot of interaction. You get to sit in the same room. You get to go through so many different rounds of revisions and iterations and everything else.
There’s almost two ranges of a creative brief that are out there right now. The one that the agency does, or really experienced designers do, that a lot of time is just information overload, especially if you want to hire a first-time outsource designer. Then there’s the other side, where you’re just not giving enough information and then you’re completely thrown off when you don’t get what you’re looking for.
Andrew: How did you know that was a problem? How did you know that people were dropping out of your system because they couldn’t fill out the brief and were intimidated by it? Or maybe, on the other hand, they were dropping out of the system because they just didn’t really want to buy. They wanted to click around on the website and once they got a place where they had to make a go or no-go decision, they said, “No go. I’m just looking around.”
Wes: Initially, it was a flat-out yes. We’ve got everything set up in pages, so the first page is pricing and telling us what you want. The next page goes right into the brief. People would get past the first page and they’d get to the second, so initially, the mindset was maybe people don’t want to do the brief, maybe people are just clicking around like you said.
I put together a very basic one-question survey through Survey Gizmo and I emailed it out to everybody that’s ever signed up on our site. “You haven’t started a project with us. Can you tell us why?” It was, “I didn’t want to fill out the brief. I didn’t know what to expect. This costs too much money. I don’t need any work done, I just want to click around.” I emailed that out and it was a one-sentence email, “Hey. I really need your help. We’re trying to make things better.” Something along those lines.
I got quite a few responses, probably 60 or so percent of the people that were on our site actually clicked on one of the options and sent it back. Really, even at that point, it wasn’t real clear that the brief was the issue. Everything ranged between the brief and not knowing what to expect. I just manually wrote everybody emails. “Hey. Thanks.” I made them all personalized. “Would you mind clarifying?” They all came back somewhere around that brief area.
Andrew: I see. What did your first version look like with Upstack?
Wes: It’s actually a lot like what it looks like right now.
Andrew: Within a few weeks, you were able to create what we see now on the website?
Wes: Well, it wasn’t as pretty. The function was there. Really, the only way we’re able to do that is because when we were designing, virtually designing, what the Upstack infrastructure is, we looked into Brandstack and said, “Okay. Which pieces can we pull out of Brandstack? Okay. The painted pieces over to here, why don’t we just pull the cart over? We’ve got messaging on this side, so we can just plug this in.” We used the exact same language, the exact same CMS, so we can pull those things together. Since then, obviously since we do a lot of design, we’ve done quite a bit of refinements on the design side of it. Tried to improve on the UI side, tried to make it a little bit prettier. Try to promote more sales than we did before.
Andrew: I see. What CMS are you using now? Are you using WordPress?
Wes: No. It’s actually a custom PHP platform that my developers have always used. Just in talking to some of the traditional developer types, that’s probably a bad thing because if I ever decide not to use my developer anymore, then I’m going to be screwed. It’s worked. I’m not having to drain our bank accounts to make new developments, make changes. We’ll just leave it as it is for now.
Andrew: From what I’ve seen, I’m not sure if you could use WordPress properly for what you’re building. Maybe.
Wes: Yeah, probably not.
Andrew: Probably not, you’re saying. What were the benefits of having that first version roll out so quickly and not look as beautiful as it does today?
Wes: I think it’s because we didn’t overthink it. What we were thinking at the time was, “What are the basic things that we need for somebody to order a new project and to get work done?” Now say, too, that it looks like it does now, but when I think back about it, we weren’t able to accept payment on the very first version. There weren’t email notifications sent out like there are right now. There are a few things that probably should’ve been necessities, but I had wanted to talk to every single person that came through the front door of Upstack before they started a project anyway. Payments that I would take from people locally, I’d go by and pick up a check and give them access to it, or we would take it from PayPal if they weren’t locally.
Andrew: The reason that it’s profitable, the business as a whole is profitable, is because you had those two initial customers who were big customers who had big needs and a big wallet?
Wes: Those didn’t pay very well, actually.
Andrew: Oh, really? They didn’t get what they were looking for because they wrote the big briefs?
Wes: The first one, they paid and we refunded their money, which was painful since we developed the whole thing around what they were looking for. The second one we did actually collect on them, but they haven’t come back since. Like I said, the first two projects were absolutely awful.
Really what it has been, I think a lot of it is because we had a nice following on Brandstack, and so it was a lot easier to sell somebody on a new service that’s already tied into one that has some brand recognition and some reputation for quality on that side. People would come into it, maybe if they didn’t have all their questions answered, they could shoot an email and get those answered, or they would just trust us because they had been using us in the past. That’s on the regular retail side.
One of the things, too, that we figured out, we’ve started doing work for some, I don’t know if mid-market is the right classification for it, but for some larger companies that actually have design departments within them, and so we’re doing production work for them. Some of that production work can run through the platform, which most of it does, and other ones, if we’re trying to be accomodating for them, they’ll send it through, we’ll pick it up, and we’ll finish it up in eight hours for them using our in-house designers.
Andrew: Oh. I see.
Wes: That’s really helped to supplement some of the cash flow, because what it does, you actually create a monthly revenue model at that point even though it’s not a subscription basis, but they’re always needing work done.
Andrew: I see. Let’s see. A few people in the audience are talking about TinEye.com, which AndrewSG recommended. Do you know TinEye.com?
Wes: Yeah. I think that’s the image piece. We’ve tried to run a lot of images through that. Problem is, I don’t think their database is large enough yet.
Andrew: I see. What TinEye does, it’s a reverse image search. You upload a picture and it finds other places where that picture is. I don’t know if Steve’s question will make sense to you, it doesn’t to me. I’ll read it and maybe it will. “How about improving Brandstack’s registrar to attract designers from other marketplaces?” The registrar is the domain piece. How would that attract designers from other marketplaces?
Wes: One of the issues we’ve run into later is our current registrar is not up to par, where it should be. One of the things that the designers seem to like, they’ll buy a domain from our registrar. When that logo and domain actually sell, we handle transfers and everything else, so we really cut out a lot of that headache. Like I said, though, the problem is our current registrar is difficult to work with. Customer service is bad. It causes a few issues. We’re actually talking to a couple of firms right now with hopes of upgrading that side of it and building a few more features around the domain side.
Andrew: Steve, I like that you knew what you were talking about. Who are you using now as a registrar?
Wes: I feel bad now that I just said they’re not doing very good. It’s a division of Directi, it’s ResellerClub.
Andrew: Okay. Best way to get customers. What’s the best way that you’ve learned so far to get customers?
Wes: It’s referrals. I don’t know if that’s something we directly influence other than trying to treat our current customers right. We’ve never dumped a lot of money into advertising trying to find clients. We’ve experimented here and there, but for the most part, it’s been our current users telling other users about it.
Andrew: You don’t have a formal way of getting your users to tell other customers?
Wes: Formal, no, not so much. Like I said, we try to be as responsive as possible with customer service. Any time we can make an upset customer happy, usually we found that they’ll tell their friends about it. We’re actually going to be playing around this month with a few different designer appreciation ideas, mailing them things, doing unique things, trying to surprise them and take them offguard that way and hope that spurs up some sort of social conversation.
No, for the most part, it’s really been just being straightforward. Any time we make any significant changes, making sure they’re involved with that. Letting them help us build what the site is right now.
Andrew: Is there an affiliate program in Brandstack?
Wes: Not in Brandstack. Our commission is way too thin on that side. There is one on Upstack, although we haven’t promoted it very much, just because we’ve been bumping our margins down on that side as well.
Andrew: The person who introduced us, who first told me about you, is Paul Singh. He’s the one who I referred to in the beginning of the interview. How’d I do with the description of the way he used your site?
Wes: It was perfect actually. The name before, so it’s Mail Finch now, the name before that I think was somehow related to snail mail. See, now I can’t even remember what it is. He’s actually the one who helped teach me about the minimum viable product, the lean startup, and all that. He’s been a great mentor in that regard.
His first site was very, very basic, plain Jane. He had the domain. He had a name, no logo, no real design tied into it. I remember he had even emailed a couple of times, “I’m looking at this logo. What do you think? I really like this name.” If I remember correctly, I think he was actually sitting in an airport when he made the purchase. Got off the plane and rebranded here pretty quickly.
Andrew: I think he said that before he even bought the domain, before he even bought the name, he just tested it out. He called up a few customers and he said, “Hey, I’m calling from Mail Finch.” Then he started talking about the business and when they didn’t stop him to say, “What’s Mail Finch?” Or ask him to repeat the name again, he realized, all right. He’s got one that’s much better than he had before. Yeah. The previous name, I don’t remember what it was, but it did sound a lot like snail.
Wes: Snail Pad.
Andrew: Was it Snail Mail?
Wes: Snail Pad.
Andrew: Snail Path?
Wes: Pad. P-A-D.
Andrew: Right. Okay. That was another issue, some people were saying Snail Pad. It was all kinds of problems. All right. Let’s see. The first question that I started this interview with is how do you build a profitable marketplace? What’s the best lesson that you’ve got from that?
Wes: I think what we had just talked about with what Paul had did, I think that’s what you should do with everything that you develop. Anytime before you introduce a new product, before you build a new feature, I think you need to make sure that your customers or your potential customers want to see that.
We’ve gone through exercises of creating things that we think our customers are going to want, to find out that we wasted a lot of time and a lot of money. When we actually changed our mindset, and started developing things that our customers actually asked for, or sound like they’re interested in, we spend more time refining however the revenue generation is based around that particular feature than trying to go back and recreate something that they might want.
Andrew: Do you have an example of each of those? Maybe we can start out with an example of something you built that your customers looked at and said, “No. That doesn’t make sense for us.” One that you had to scrap.
Wes: Yeah. On Brandstack, the original name Brandstack wasn’t intended to be used exactly how it is now. The original name was because you were going to be able to come to the site and get a logo and then print design, and then a website design, and all these other pieces. You’re basically going to be building your brand, so it’s stacking everything on top of each other.
We built these great-looking brand managment tools conceptually, mocked them up. Brand management tools, and it was going to tell you exactly what else you needed to get to build all the digital pieces you need for your brand. Built the product for it. Built the new sections where you could buy and sell print designs and website designs. Contacted all of our designers. Asked them to send in designs, which they started to on a very, very slow basis. Created the pages for it. Didn’t actually launch it because we were getting not very much response at all.
Really, when I started pinging some of the designers and some of our clients, what I heard was, “Oh, that’s great, but another company’s already selling website templates. They’re really good and they’re going to charge less than you would anyway. Why do I need all these original print designs? I can go get cards from Moo or something like that for next to nothing.” It turned out that we spent, probably, a good two months building all these functions and features, trying to collect inventory from designers, to realize it was a waste.
Andrew: That’s painful. What about one that you did build with the customers and it ended up being surprisingly successful?
Wes: Actually, on Upstack, so far there’s one notation tool that’s in there. It wasn’t a particular idea. I’m sorry, there was one customer that sent in the idea. Right now, the way that it works, and this is really with any other design site, whether it’s Elance or whatever else, everything that you do has to be conveyed either by text or by voice. If you’ve ever done any team-building exercises and that, you realize how difficult it is to truly explain something with words. All we did when one of our customers said, “Hey. Have you ever seen. . .” I forgot what the actual app was, but, “It’s really cool. You can go through and just highlight certain areas of a picture, make comments on it, you can both go back and forth. . .”
Andrew: Skitch?
Wes: Yeah. Okay. So there’s Skitch. I think there’s Notable. Yeah. There’s a couple of other ones like that. “It’d be really great if you could just do something ilke that.” We took just the very, very basic idea of it and in a matter of probably three days, just plugged it in, where clients could go through and highlight a little section, write a note for it, and then the designer knows exactly what he’s talking about. That’s probably our most-used feature right now. It was one customer having an idea. It took us, like I said, less than three full days to build it and then we put it out there. We’ve been testing it on the fly.
Andrew: Right on. I love Skitch. I know what you mean. If I could just mark up an image directly, it’s so much faster than trying to write a few paragraphs that explains what I mean.
Wes: Exactly.
Andrew: All right. Actually, final question. What’s next for Upstack?
Wes: Next for Upstack. We’re getting ready to make this announcement. I guess this could be considered the announcement for the creative brief wizard.
Andrew: I got to get sound effects here. Somebody find sound effects that I could plug in to this. All right. Let’s have the announcement. Awesome.
Wes: Just for logo designs right now, in general, you can go through the process and we will, in less than 90 seconds, write the creative brief for you. That’s one of the things we’re going to be doing. Once we can refine this over the next month or so, we’re going to turn that on for websites, print designs, illustrations, everything else.
Everything that we’re going to be doing from Upstack from this point forward is try to take all of the painful spots of the design process and just figure out some way to just make it a little bit easier on the site. I figure if we can keep doing that, it’ll make the process that much better for designers and clients.
Andrew: Do you think you can expand Upstack beyond images, beyond design work? Could you have a team of writers who would be in there who I could hire if I needed a writer for Mixery and maybe somebody else who could do music or sound effects so I could add that here? Or do you need to focus on graphics?
Wes: Yes, we can. We’ve seen more people ask for coding because they’ll go through and they’ll have the Photoshop document for their website done, but they need to get it coded. Going back to what we were talking about before with the miserable failure of trying to do print and website at the same time, I’m going to stay hard and fast to graphic design until it’s completely dry on me.
Andrew: I see. It’s going to be a long time before it is. Should somebody in my audience go out and build the Upstack of development?
Wes: Yes, please do. We will partner up with you and we’ll have a nice little back and forth.
Andrew: Nice little referral system. If they were to do it, how could they do it right? Should they focus on just one language? Should they focus on just a handful of people and then build from there?
Wes: I think you would start on one language. I would, just because it’s so universally known, I would probably start with something like PHP because, and I would really, really stick to the quality side of it. Every single developer that you get in there, you want to make sure they really know what thy’re doing.
One of the things that we found very interesting on the Upstack site, too, is we’ll take ownership. Not ownership in the sense of copyright, but ownership of the work or the quality. That would be another big thing for a company like that. If a client comes to us, the designer does work but they don’t like the work or it’s not the direction they wanted, we’ll pull that in-house and we’ll just keep working with that client until he’s happy and off telling his friends about us.
Andrew: Aren’t you, with Upstack, more of a design shop with a lot of freelancers?
Wes: Depending on the day that you ask me, we could be either a SAS tool or a big, virtual agency.
Andrew: Got you. Okay. Fair enough. Sometimes you have to do both in order to build a business.
Wes: Yeah. Exactly.
Andrew: All right. Thank you for doing this interview with me. If people want to find you, they can check out Brandstack.com and Upstack.com. Do you have a personal blog or some other way that they can connect with you?
Wes: No. That’s it. We’ve got the same handles on Twitter, Facebook, pretty much any other one of the social sites out there.
Andrew: All right. Awesome. Go out there, check out the websites, and send them a message to say “thank you” if you got something valuable out of this interview. Thank you all for watching.
Wes: Very nice. It was a pleasure.
Andrew: Thanks, Wes. Great meeting you.
Wes: Thanks.
Andrew: Bye, everyone. Bye, Wes.
Wes: Bye.
Sponsors I mentioned
Walker Corporate Law – Scott Walker is lawyer who takes startups from incorporation, to funding, to sale and everything in between. Watch this video to learn about him.
99designs – The largest crowdsourced marketplace for graphic design. When I used them, I wrote a description of the design I needed and how much I wanted to pay. I got a bunch of designs back. I gave each designer feedback and picked the one I liked the best. Try them for Logo Design, blog design, app icons and more.
PicClick – Is a 1-person startup from my friend Ryan in San Diego. His site gives you a visual way to search eBay, Etsy, and other sites. Try it this iPad accessories search, for example, and tell me what you think.
[Paul Singh first told me about Brandstack. See the brand he bought here. And Romy Misra introduced me to Wes.]
