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Peer Effect
As founders we’re sold a lie. The journey has to be tough. Isolation is normal. We have to choose between work and life. On this podcast, James Johnson, renowned coach to Series A+ founders, explores a better way. One where you build a great business and a great life.
It’s time to take back control. The answers are out there. Your peers have already uncovered hard-won insights, practical tips and people to look out for.
That’s the Peer Effect.
Tune in every Wednesday for 30 minutes that will inspire new thoughts, avoid expensive mistakes and keep you energised.
Peer Effect
Customer-Led Growth, Consistency and Doing the Unscalable, with Jeremy Parker
Jeremy Parker, co-founder of Swag.com and the innovative mind behind Swag Space, joins us on "Peer Effect" to share his journey of reshaping the promotional products industry. With a knack for pivoting and scaling businesses strategically, Jeremy has navigated Swag.com from its inception to its acquisition by Custom Ink, and beyond into new ventures.
His approach to understanding customer needs and adapting to market demands exemplifies the agility required in today’s fast-paced business environment.
In this episode, we delve into:
- Jeremy's experiences in scaling Swag.com and his strategic insights into customer engagement and market penetration.
- The evolution of his role from a hands-on startup founder to CEO, and his recent shift back to founder with Swagspace.
- Practical advice for entrepreneurs on maintaining resilience, adapting strategies, and truly listening to what customers need.
Discover more about Jeremy Parker’s work at Swag Space or follow him on LinkedIn for more exciting insights.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Welcome to another episode of Peer Effect, the podcast that fuels you with new ideas and inspiration through interviews with founders and experts who have made it happen. If it's your first time listening, I'm your host, james Johnson, and I coach Series A Plus founders to take back control so they can take their business further and live a great life. And live a great life. Today we're getting a first-hand look into the world of promotional products with Jeremy Parker, a visionary entrepreneur who's reshaping how companies think about swag. From navigating startup challenges to successfully negotiating the sale of swagcom to custom ink. Jeremy's journey is a masterclass in pivoting and scaling a business with agility.
Speaker 2:Let's get started class in pivoting and scaling a business with agility. Let's get started. High level with Swagspace is just so your audience knows Swagspace is the ultimate universal swag platform. So there's 22,000 promo distributors in our industry. Swagcom was one of them. Swagcom happened to be a very fast growing doing $40 million plus a year in sales. There's a lot of other companies that do an average between $250,000 to a million dollars. They're mom and pops. They have a small team of five. They're very traditional sellers. It's all back and forth emails, presentation decks, phone calls to close sales.
Speaker 2:What I've noticed over the last eight years being in this industry they have no technology, they have no resources, they have no warehousing capabilities, they have no ability to do kid boxes. It's very manual, everything is very manual. No-transcript at swagcom over the last eight years our idea is what if we took that technology, white labeled it and gave it to everybody? Now everybody in our industry instantaneously uploads their logo, their brand colors and has the ultimate e-commerce experience to start selling swag. It will take that 20% and make it 100%. They could just focus on selling and let our system handle the rest. And then we took it a step further Once orders come in, we also become the de facto supplier. It hits our back end so no longer do they need to buy water bottles from that vendor or a T-shirt from here and send it to a screen printer or notebooks from there. Once the order comes in, swagspace collects the full amount. We give them their portion of the order and we handle all production. It streamlines everything and we've had amazing success so far. But a lot of the ideas that I've had proven to be right, some and some have been wrong and you can only really learn that by getting it in front of beta customers and customers and testing it and being open to their feedback.
Speaker 2:When I was starting a business called vouch back in the day, I spent about a year building the platform and I used to lose sleep over every single detail of building out this platform. And the platform for vouch just high level was oprah's favorite things democratized for everybody. So it was a social networking app based on what you truly love, so you could follow celebrities and see what movies and books they love, and you can follow your friends and see what restaurants and all these different things, and you're really trying to get recommendations in a really authentic way. So that was kind of the idea of this app. We wanted to own the like button, which we felt was the most monetizable aspect of Facebook. Really great, really awesome experience. So I was building this company Voucher, all these celebrity partners.
Speaker 2:A year later, we launch it and no one used the app how I expected. All the things I lost sleep over, no one gave a shit about. I mean, that was the truth, like all the things I didn't even think about. Those were the things that they wanted and it was such a clear insight of build what your customers want. Get out of your own way, remove the ego, because a lot of entrepreneurs have an ego that they think they know what their customers want and they start building things what they think and ultimately, they're often wrong. And I was like a slap in the face of like, get out there, start selling, start talking to customers, learn what they actually want, so you build the right thing.
Speaker 2:So I think my biggest unique insight when I started swagcom is we just had a landing page with swagcom. It was just like a coming soon and I started knocking on doors and making sales from day one. That was like my big thing. I'm not going to be in my head and overthink things and build something, just for it to be launched in deaf ears. I want to really make sure we're building the right thing. So that was the first insight and it really changed the trajectory of swagcom, so much so that initially my ego was telling me let me go after the marketing teams, because the marketing teams, I thought, have the biggest budget.
Speaker 2:Now, ultimately, marketing teams buy a lot from swagcom now but that wasn't the right idea for the initial customer. And after speaking to the first about 300 to 500 really marketing team members at different companies that reached out on LinkedIn, I realized it wasn't the marketing team that I want to go after first, it was the office manager. Because the office manager they have a much smaller budget but they control the office. They're buying for the sales team to use the swag and the marketing team and the HR team it's kind of like the Trojan horse to get in the company. So we it was like a key insight that no one's going after the office manager but they're the gateway drug, they're the gateway into the company.
Speaker 2:What if we go for them? First they buy a thousand dollars, 10,000. They introduce us because all of our t-shirts say swagcom and interlabel and now the marketing team gets a swag box from us that we're creating for the company and then they say, wow, this is great quality, let us buy for our external customers and our new leads. And that's exactly what happens. When everyone was going after the marketing team and they were overwhelmed, we went kind of around the door and went to the side entrance and it allowed us to really get in the company and expand from there. So talk to customers, because you'll never know what the right answer is.
Speaker 1:This idea of talking to customers, because you'll never know what the right answer is. This idea of sort of talking to customers and sort of the Eric Ries idea of kind of building around like the only opinion that matters is when people give you cash for stuff no-transcript.
Speaker 2:when we were building swagcom, we knew that the targeted buyer was a millennial buyer. It was a key insight. I saw even before starting swagcom that the buyer was shifting. It used to be a 40, 50-year-old office manager that was buying swag for companies. Now it's a millennial. You can imagine a 23-year-old. It's their first job at college. Facebook gives them $10,000 to spend on swag. They're nervous. They don't want to buy stuff that ends up in the trash. It's going to cost the company money but, more important than anything, it's going to tarnish their own reputation and people are going to be looking at them. Who gave Jennifer responsibility? Who gave Peter the responsibility for buying swag for the?
Speaker 2:company it makes them look bad. So there's a lot of key insights just by the nature of being a younger buyer. But even more than that, we didn't even think about the different departments that buy and who the kind of persona of those buyers are. And having those conversations getting out of our own head, I think, was a really key insight. Really just talking to people and learning and writing notes. And even with Swagspace, this new business I'm starting, we've been talking to customers. We've been learning.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love getting candid feedback, like really asking for it and not just asking for it because you want to be, you know, seem cool that you're open to other people's ideas, but really taking it and like learning. Like we had a beta user came to me and says Jeremy, I love the idea, I love the idea, I love the platform itself. There's a couple of reasons why I cannot use the platform and I said I need to hear this. Like what's the reasoning that's preventing you If you love all the things about it? What's he said? Well, historically, my customers ask for products that you guys don't have on the site, which I knew that would happen. But when I asked your team to source it, it took your team about 12 hours to add products.
Speaker 2:And that's just way too long for me. Like my customer is going to find somebody else and I can't source it. I said, well, how long do you need to add it? He says you need to add it within six hours. So we made a change, we changed the rule, we hired more people. We said, okay, we're going to lose out. Our resellers, our partners in this are going to learn where the issues come from when you have conversations. So that's my first insight is get out of your own head, remove the ego, start, start working right now. Be a man of action or woman of action and really just start and get out there and try to learn as much as you can, because that's really going to help you guide to building the right solution.
Speaker 1:What I'm quite curious about here is practically how you identify you're talking to the wrong person or there is someone else in this organization that you could be talking to. So when you're building swag, it's not the marketing team, it's the office manager. And let's say we're doing the research for Swagspace, you've got a team of, let's say, a small team of five. You assume it's probably the founder of that business you want to talk to, and so you reach out to them, maybe first. How do you during that conversation realize that they're not the person you need to speak to and therefore actually that maybe someone else in their team needs to speak to and actually their opinion is more valuable?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you from swagcom, when we were, I wasn't even thinking office manager. I frankly didn't even know what office manager was. We went after the marketing teams because it was pretty obvious Marketing teams have the biggest budget. Office manager, they're only buying for their internal team. So if you're going after a team of 20 people, you're going to sell 20 products. It's not that much right. So marketing team made sense on the surface. But when I was speaking to the marketing managers, I realized everybody goes after the marketing team.
Speaker 2:These guys were telling me yeah, four other different companies we use, we have this whole process. It was overwhelming and I'm trying to think to myself. I'm starting this business from nothing with my co-founder, josh. We have a brand named swagcom, which is great and we invested a lot of money and it was. That's a whole different story. But we don't like what's going to differentiate ourselves. So why would they use us versus the hundred other companies are pitching them and I noticed nothing in the beginning. We didn't have a technology platform, we didn't have a solution to make it easy for people to buy.
Speaker 2:At that point we were just like everyone else, we were traveling salesmen. But what I noticed is that some insights were like they were leading me towards like you should speak to Peter you know he, he does the buying for the office Like things kept leaning towards this new office manager type of role and it was like this is very clear, like we're not going to get the biggest budgets, they're not going to spend $100,000 hours with us, but maybe they'll do 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000, but it didn't really matter. It was about getting into the company. It's all I cared about. It was about logo hunting, getting the Facebooks and Google logos on our homepage. So when people come to it they say, oh, google and Facebook use it. Of course we should be using it. So it's more about that. And it was about getting in the company and saying, well, if we do a great job for this office manager, by nature the marketing team is going to learn about us and then we can get the bigger budgets. But you don't always have to go directly from point A to point B in the fastest way possible. Sometimes it actually makes sense to go in a roundabout way, but it's the way to get in the door and kind of avoid all these people trying to go after the same people.
Speaker 2:We have other promo adjacent industries like party planners, event planners, screen printers, college kids that want to start a business. I mean, this service makes it so easy to sell swag Anyone. All they have to have is their logo and their brand colors and instantaneously the site is generated. You don't need to know suppliers, you don't need to know embellishment methods, you need to know nothing. You can get started instantaneously and for free. And that's what's kind of beautiful about the industry.
Speaker 2:If you're going to get started selling swag. It's a process. There's a lot of different things you have to learn. It's super complicated. You have to build. You have to spend a lot of tech time and resources and infrastructure building. Now, within five minutes you get the most up-to-date next-gen technology and the best supplier in the industry all combined into one solution.
Speaker 2:So we're still figuring it out and I'm hoping that we figure it out within the first six months of this year. That's kind of my internal goal is figuring out exactly the right audience that the product is used for, and then the second half of the year we could double down on that audience and really refine the experience to be perfect for that audience. But sometimes, like now, I don't know the right and I want to give myself some time to learn. And, by the way, it might be everybody who knows, or it might just be event planners, or it might just be promo distributors, or it might just be college kids that want to spin up a business, or it might be work from home, moms that have like a charity in their neighborhood or a synagogue, or you know that they could sell $10,000 worth of swag to make an extra $3,000 for themselves. Like, we don't know yet, but there's just a lot of potential that we're just trying to kind of dip our toes in the waters and see.
Speaker 1:So really, for instance, I think anyone listening it's just the idea of going with the hypothesis be open to change it. Don't hold too tight to your own opinions and just try and identify who really matters in your target organizations.
Speaker 2:It may well be very different to who you expect Exactly, right? You know, I have some personal mentors that I've worked with and obviously my dad is an entrepreneur, so I've learned a lot from him and I'll tell you kind of like a key insight. I worked for three years or so with Jesse Itzler, who's a very famous entrepreneur, started Marquee Jet private jet company and Zico Coconut Water. But I would say, two big insights from different people and I don't know exactly. Honestly, I'm trying to remember who told me these things. My dad told me the first one. I'll tell you the first one.
Speaker 2:When I was nine or 10 years old, I was in Colorado, beaver Creek, colorado, on family vacation and my dad was trying to get an upgrade. So he was talking to the front desk and he was trying to get an upgrade and they said no, sir, no, mr Parker, not possible, not possible. I remember this so vividly. He looks over to me, bends down and he goes did you hear that man say no? He really means yes, he just doesn't know it yet. And it was this kind of key insight. And and it was this kind of key insight and what happened is he ultimately convinced him. My dad's a charming guy and we got the upgrade and it was just one of these things.
Speaker 2:Now with business, when it comes to business, you're most likely going to get a no. Most entrepreneurs fail way more than they succeed and obviously everyone just remembers their success stories. But there's many, many years of leading up to failures, ups and downs, and it's kind of what you're signing up for. And even within the company, like I remember with swagcom, I wanted Amazon right. Amazon's the biggest company in the world, or one of them at this point, and I'm like that would be an amazing brand to have, and I was in my mentality of being a logo hunter.
Speaker 2:Right, I was getting all these cool brands up front and I went to Amazon and they would never do business with us. It was like two or three years of me reaching out to everybody. They had procurement teams. It was impossible. It wasn't like an easy solution to go to the office manager. The office manager was bound by a procurement team that made the decisions Ultimately. They kept saying no, no, no. And now they're one of our biggest customers and we have 100 different employees at Amazon buying from us for very different reasons. We're actually warehousing a lot of the Amazon internal employee stuff which is kind of cool to think that swagcom is warehousing Amazon stuff for their own internal employees, and you just never know.
Speaker 2:I think it's just a lot about just keep pushing, keep pushing. And that takes me to my second point, my second idea Consistency compounds. Oftentimes, when you're starting a business, you overestimate what you can accomplish in a year and you underestimate what you can accomplish in five years, and that's a true thing and I never really thought of it that way. But if you keep your head down, you're not going to be productive every single day. You're not going to have an amazing day where you'd be celebrating Many. Often days are going to be really bad. But as long as you kind of keep going and keep being consistent, you never know what you're going to accomplish.
Speaker 2:When we started swagcom, my dream was to make a million dollars a sales year, Like when you're starting a business from nothing. It's like and I never, I just like a million dollars. I never really did that. I did some businesses before that. I had a business that sold to a private company when I was 25 years old, but we didn't really make money. It was more of like contracts and technology that we sold versus actually making sales. And swagcom was like my first real selling of products and so I never did that. So to me, selling a million dollars worth of physical products, that's a lot. That's a lot of t-shirts to sell, it's a lot of water bottles Like it was overwhelming.
Speaker 2:I remember my first year in 350,000 of sales and I was like, wow, you know, this is actually going to be possible. And then the second year we did 1.1 million. I was like this is unbelievable. And then the third year we went to 3 million, and then the fourth year to 7 million, Then the fifth year to 15 million, sixth year to 30 million.
Speaker 2:And I'm looking back and I'm like if you told me when I was starting Swagcom that we'd be doing $30 million of sales, I would have been like this is unbelievable. This doesn't even make sense. I can't even fathom it. It used to take me like 15 hours to make a thousand dollar sale based on the back and forth and the price quotes and all these. Now we're doing orders on our site for a hundred thousand dollars without talking to anyone. It's like you never know what can be accomplished. So I always tell my friends and entrepreneurs like consistency compounds keep pushing every single day and ultimately you're going to look back and be like this is unbelievable. Now, $30 million in sales. We get acquired by Custom Ink. We're doing $40 million in sales. We're now a much bigger company. We have over 100 employees, and you just start with me and my co-founder, Josh, in his apartment and the only way to really kind of rationalize that is consistency. And I would say consistency compounds is kind of like the biggest life lesson I learned.
Speaker 1:How did you keep yourself consistent during that period? Because I think, clearly, being on from the challenges, there are mental challenges, there are financial challenges. What was sort of behind that? How do you keep that consistency?
Speaker 2:that's the hard part. It's it's very hard, especially when there's down times. You know, I wasn't taking a salary at all the first two years of business. You're depleting life savings to see kind of the longer term vision. It's hard. It's hard to kind of see the end of the rainbow when you're when you're so in it, when you're in the mud. But I kept hearing that consistency compounds and I kept telling myself you never know where you're going to be next year. You never know where you're going to be next year. Just keep trying to get better every single year. And we were lucky. We never had in the early days any kind of down year ever. So I always kind of saw oh, I did 350. I did 1 million. Wow, by next year 3 million. My consistency and my output was actually getting rewarded. That doesn't always happen and I've had failures in startups before and I've had failures in startups before and I've seen the output not actually being realized.
Speaker 2:So it's a much harder place to be in. But I would say I think you just have to have the mentality Whether things are going right for you or going wrong for you, just know. If you keep pushing, you'll ultimately figure it out. And, by the way, you might not be doing the right business, and then that's a separate conversation of when to give it up. But I think as long as you're consistent, you're going to learn quicker. Is this the right business for you? Is it not the right business? And maybe what the right business is? If you combine the first point that I talked about, about talking to customers, getting out of your own head, stop thinking you know all the answers. Remove ego and consistency. Those are a surefire way to giving your best shot of success. It's never a guarantee in entrepreneurship. I know so many smart people, way smarter than me, that have never had the outcomes I've had because, for whatever reason timing or it wasn't the right idea.
Speaker 1:It wasn't the right market.
Speaker 2:it wasn't the right luck. A lot of things have to work out for you to be successful, but I can tell you a guarantee way to fail is by not being consistent and by thinking that you have all the right answers. That's a surefire way to fail. So if you can remove things that are obvious ways to fail, you'll be a better position to succeed.
Speaker 1:It feels like some of that in terms of the not. If you're not getting out to speak to customers, not only not getting the insights of how to make it work, it sounds like you may be also not hearing the reasons why it might not be the right business Like if you're hearing the same thing again and again. It's stuff you just fundamentally can't change Totally. You've got an answer already.
Speaker 2:Exactly right.
Speaker 1:So, from an external perspective, go out and talk to your customers They'll give you all the answers and from an internal perspective, set the right timeline and then just be consistent. Don't expect it to be like a one-year success story, because then you're going to set up failure, acknowledge it's going to be five years or longer, and just know that if you stay at it and you're combining it with going out and ask questions, you're not guaranteeing success, but you're removing two significant causes of failure.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. That's what I've seen and it's do the unscalable. So what I mean by unscalable is a lot of people always think everything needs to have a process, everything needs to be like if I do it now, it needs to be able to get me 30, 40 customers, a thousand customers in the future. And I think entrepreneurs are always looking to the future of like what they're going to be a crate or this is gonna be the biggest idea. We're going to get thousands of users and all this. You got to get your first user. So do the unscalable things. Get the first. Before you start thinking all the way out there, think about the first, see if it's the right customer.
Speaker 2:And for me it was me and my co-founder, josh. The early days after our office at his apartment building, we ended up getting a WeWork in Times Square and we were just the two of us. We had a small, no window office at WeWork and we felt like we made it. But the reason why we went to WeWork is there are so many other startups at WeWork and our feeling is it's not comfortable. I'm not necessarily comfortable going up to random strangers and talking Most entrepreneurs are not but you have to get very comfortable with doing that. You have to be the first and best salesperson before you can hire other salespeople. You know, founder-led sales is actually a really important thing. So me and my co-founder, josh, went up and down the hallways of the building, knocking on doors and asking who buys swag and if we could talk to them in person, because we felt like we got a lot more out of people If we were in person with them. They felt like they couldn't leave and they would give us the real insight right, and that's like the things. We learned a lot those early days.
Speaker 2:We made some sales in the early days. Those sales led to other sales. Our second customer ever was WeWork. They had this thing called the WeWork Summer Camp. So I remember I did. There was a t-shirt we sold to WeWork, I think for like $5.15, like the really super premium t-shirt, because I wanted all the products to be given out to 4,000 members at the WeWork Summer Camp to all have the WeWork logo all printed beautifully and in their label it should say swagcom and our tagline was we made this. So when they give out swag to everybody and they see swagcom, we made this then they know about swagcom and it's all kind of connected and we undercut everybody. I think we actually lost a couple of thousand dollars, so much so that we had to roll all the t-shirts up and I had my entire family rolling the shirts for three days. I mean 4,000 t-shirts. I don't know if it sounds like a lot or a little, but I had my aunt, my grandma, my uncle it was like family, parents, my siblings rolling t-shirts.
Speaker 2:We rented the U-Haul, we drove it four hours to the summer camp, we did everything and we probably lost a couple of thousand dollars, right, but it was worth it, because we learned what it took to do a big order. We got WeWork on board. We got to put WeWork's logo on the homepage, which allowed other companies who came to our site to say, oh, they work with Facebook and WeWork. And then we got Bravo TV, and then we got this company and that company because people start to trust us. And even at the WeWork summer camp, that one order got us around 15 other customers who felt the shirts, who liked it, who said, oh, wow, weworks using swagcom. We should use swagcom, and it was kind of like our customers are doing the marketing for us.
Speaker 2:That's only possible if you did the unscalable. That's not something you could constantly do, every single day. That's something that I don't do. I don't knock on doors anymore. I'm not a traveling salesman, I'm not rolling t-shirts, but when you start, you have to do those things. And it's actually really important to do those things Because, as a founder, you have to put yourself in position of everybody in your team so that not only do you know the right ways to build things, but you're more of an empathetic leader, because you know the stuff that you're asking them to do. You did it yourself and I think just do the unscalable is such a great way. So if you combine that with removing ego, you combine that with removing ego, you combine that with consistency compounds and you do those things every single thing together, it's just like perfect storm of giving you the best chance to succeed it's about doing everything you can to increase your chance, isn't it?
Speaker 1:there's, there's, there's no way of guaranteeing it, no way again maximizing your your luck.
Speaker 2:That's really it. When I was I, I was accepted to this program called Techstars like an incubator and I moved to Chicago for three months in 2017. This is the second year of the business. We just launched the first version of the e-commerce site. It wasn't great. We're still figuring all these things and I'm living in Chicago and I'm sleeping on like an inflatable bed, like it wasn't ideal. It wasn't like the greatest experience and I got the most value out of the program, not even within the program.
Speaker 2:It was something that happened external, and what happened is the last week of the program. Basically, they set you up with other entrepreneurs in the area and there was this company called Jelly Vision, based in Chicago, and they're a fairly large company, 200 plus employees at the time. I don't really know where they're at at this point, but the guy at Techstars connected me to the CEO of jelly vision and I met. I met with her. I mean, I got there. She said hey, I want you to meet the office managers, cause at this point, we knew that our customer was the office manager and she said I want it, I want you to see what they do so you can learn from them and I went up to the office managers floor, second floor, and there was five office managers sitting on the floor unboxing swag, reboxing it, kidding it, handwriting note cards, and it was like a light bulb that went off and I said why are they doing it this way? Where they're buying it from all these different suppliers, they're bringing it in, they're unboxing it, they're reboxing it, they're packaging it. What if my service did that so easily? Where customers are going through the checkout flow, they're given two options. It's like a light bulb send all the swag and bulk to one address or click on a button and we hold all that swag in inventory for individual distribution to remote addresses. We call it account-based marketing, where you'll be able to individually distribute to remote employees your best customers, your best leads. Fine, it was like this amazing light bulb moment. That one instance. I was like this is the future of the industry.
Speaker 2:The next year, next year and a half, I started building out this infrastructure, this warehousing. It's complicated. I had to get three PLs. I had to get different locations of three PLs. I had to make it so simple for a customer to go through checkout, send the bulk or send to multiple addresses, upload the CSV file, calculate the shipping addresses in real time. If you don't have the addresses, you could build a giveaway landing page. Capture the customers or the recipient's t-shirt size and address speaks to the system and distribute All these different things we were learning. We're talking to customers.
Speaker 2:Covid hits in 2020, the whole world shuts down. Everyone in the promo industry goes from like whatever they're doing, 99% of their revenue goes to zero, same as us, right, like? Offices are closed, no more trade shows, no more in-person events. Everything's closed. The whole industry is like nothing. All my investors are saying cut costs, lay off the team, fire people hide in the bunker. Every one of our competitors are doing the exact same thing. Everyone is kind of hibernating and waiting for this to pass, and it was this moment I'm like well, we have this amazing technology. We're just getting it launched. Why don't we rebrand it from account-based marketing to engage with your remote employees? Right, everyone's disconnected.
Speaker 2:Everyone's remote. This is a good way to keep the company culture thriving even when no one's in the office. We did a hard pivot, rebranded our homepage, rebranded all of our marketing, rebranded a couple of different things to the site and when everyone was kind of hibernating, we were working and we were doing and we launched this platform in March, April, May so two and a half months of very low revenue. We ended up going from $7 million. We were thinking we're going to go down to $2 million because the first couple of months were really strong, and then we ended the year at $15.5 million. We more than doubled our sales that year when the whole industry was down 40%.
Speaker 2:That only happened by being open-minded to the opportunity of a new thing. If I didn't go to Techstars, I wouldn't have met those office managers who then were doing those things to have the insight. So you never really know where things are going to come or what it's going to lead or how it's all going to be. But you just kind of have to open yourself to the opportunity to learn and to listen to your customers and see how they're doing things, and they might not have the right answer. They might not say hey, Jeremy, this is what I would do. Sometimes they do have that, but maybe seeing how they do things, it could tell you the wrong ways to do things, that maybe you can make a better experience and build it the right way. So there's all these different ways, but I think talking to customers is the only way that you're going to be able to learn the right thing to build.
Speaker 1:There's definitely a tendency to see it as like hide in the bunker is one of my other guest posts and sort of focus on building a better mousetrap and just making sure everything works really cleverly and clearly. In your case, you had lots of work to do in terms of the warehouses, redesigning everything. There's a lot of people, stuff, there's a lot of infrastructure there, so what percentage of your time then do you think you spend externally with customers versus internally?
Speaker 2:I was working crazy, I'm telling you. I was working 18 hours a day. I didn't have a life besides, in the early days. I don't necessarily recommend that. It's not necessarily the healthiest thing, but it's the only way that I could do it, because we didn't have the resources at that point to have a team. Now, at this point, every time we bring on a new account manager or a customer success person, I do the onboarding. I'm part of it. Now, at this point, every time we bring on a new account manager or a customer success person, I do the onboarding. You know I'm part of it. Now we have a whole team that does it, and I always said to them you are the eyes and ears of the company. You're the one that's going to learn from customers what the things that we should be building on.
Speaker 2:I need there to be an open door policy that when you hear something from a customer, or if you see something, whether you know how to solve it or not, tell me, because it's impossible for me at this point to be talking to every customer on a day-to-day basis like I used to. So, right when we got to about 15 employees, I wasn't talking to customers and actually it was a very hard thing for me, you know. It was something I had to break. I used to be somewhat of a micromanager on this and I was probably pissing off some of my early employees. Like it wasn't like an ideal situation. I always kind of questioned them or I was kind of listening in or I, you know, I jumped in. I was like had the live chat that they were dealing with and I jumped in, sometimes that they weren't answering it right and it's not a good way, like like I could maybe my my decisions to jump in were right because the customer needed to hear something else versus what they were being told. But you got to let people do things, even if it's not 100% perfect, if it's 80% perfect. That's the only way the business will succeed. You can't be, as a founder, do everybody's role. It's impossible. So I learned that the hard way and we had some challenging months where I had to kind of step away and be okay with things not being done exactly the right way. But then I learned, you know what I have to train the people to do the work that I want in the right way and they are talking to customers or ultimately get the right solution.
Speaker 2:And now my team is amazing. We have people who've been with us for six, seven years who like listen to customers, know what they're looking for. Bring it to me. I'm still head of product and user experience and design. So my role now is I'm no longer CEO of swag.
Speaker 2:I was stepped away from that role four months ago to be the founder of Swagspace. But because Swagspace and swagcom are both using the same underlying technology right, because we're white labeling swagcom's tech for Swagspace I'm still also in charge of all user experience of both platforms. So I'm like head of product, which is stuff that I really enjoy doing, and I'm founding this new business and we're really trying to figure out product market fit and so it's a completely different thing. Like the role of a founder changes so much. You're a founder and then you become a CEO, right and then the CEO's role is such a different role and your people management and there's so many challenges and there's a different CEO mentality from, like, when you go from 10 to 20 people, from 20 to 50 people 50,. Your job has to constantly change.
Speaker 2:And now that I'm back at the founder level, I really feel like this is where I'm supposed to be, like starting something learning, listening from customers, building it like creating from zero to one, like building the product and, hopefully, building a team that can help scale the product long-term.
Speaker 1:I work with a lot of founders and that transition from founder to CEO is really tough, like it's almost all the behaviors that made you successful in that phase one kill you in phase two. But it's quite a nice way of framing it, going like you're hiring people to replace you in different segments. It may be that one of those segments is the CEO segment. It may not be. Maybe you evolve, but it may be that actually that's not your happy space, so that's just a function that you can hire for.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. That's my belief and some people are great at it. Some people don't like that and I found for myself. Personally I love building things. I love seeing creating something out of nothing, like seeing the future. That's how I think of being an entrepreneur. But I don't necessarily love managing the day-to-day and the people and the problems and all those different things. That's not for me. It doesn't have to be and I'm okay with that.
Speaker 2:When I passed off the CEO role to Gita, who's like my right-hand person at swagcom, she's like I've never seen the founder CEO to step away so easily, like somebody they always want to kind of hover over and make sure they know everything. And she's like you are like so unique in that way and I I said, well, I don't know other people who have done this. It's kind of a unique thing. But you just kind of have to look internally and say, is this right for me? It wasn't right for me, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And if it's not what I want and I know what I do want then I would rather spend my energy, my time, my resources on doing stuff that I actually want and then I feel like I am the right person for it.
Speaker 1:If you're doing something that you fundamentally don't enjoy it, it's very hard to be consistent in it for long enough 100%. As we wrap up today's episode, Jeremy's experiences remind us of the virtues that form the backbone of a thriving business Adaptability, deep customer understanding and swift execution. Thank you for joining us on Peer Effect Tune in next Wednesday as we continue to explore more practical insights, tips and real world stories from founders and experts who've made it happen.
