Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 7)

Adam Schwartz: We don’t really know what to expect. Even if you’re a $4 million company, you’re still not that big. You don’t know how far this is going to grow. Are we going to grow 100% again or is it not going to scale that way? We’re just going three months at a time and just reinvesting profits into the business. We’re staying profitable and tight, and trying to use the same lessons we learned through BustedTees in terms of building something that is sustainable.

We could certainly take venture money. We could have taken it for BustedTees and we have been in a great position in TeePublic to take money. I’m an operating partner for a venture firm. Josh is a partner at a venture firm. We just feel like we want to do this in a different way. We were profitable in 2015 and we continue to invest.

Two things happened. One is we decided to incubate another company. It’s called The Loyalist. It’s similar to TeePublic, but it’s in a different vertical. It’s in sports: youth sports teams, high school club teams, and college teams. They use it to power their athlete and fan merchandise. You can customize it as well. We did raise some money for that. We’re incubating that as a company. Josh and I are founders of that business. We launched that in January of 2016.

We said, “For TeePublic, we’re going to see what this thing is going to do. We’ll see if we can keep up the same clip of growth.” Till date, growth has accelerated. We’re growing faster this year versus last year in terms of percentage and in terms of monthly revenue growth. We’ll grow again this year by at least 100%. We’re just scaling the team and scaling the processes. We’re now getting to be a large sized business with over 200 million user-generated SKUs on the site. The reason we have been successful to a large extent is, we care deeply and worked very hard to create a human element in our community team.

We work with designers on an individual basis as often as we can to enable them to be successful on the platform. How do we scale that? We’re putting a lot of processes in place to do that. A lot of that is people – scaling the community team itself. We’re also building tools that create efficiencies for that team so they can manage tens of thousands of different artists and make sure that everybody is getting that same experience that they got when we first started. We’re talking to each of them and recruiting each of them by hand. What I love about this business that is a little different from BustedTees is, I felt like I manufactured all of that growth between 2011 and 2013 on BustedTees in a plant.

Sramana Mitra: You have a good handle on why it’s growing, how to make that scale, and how to make it repeatable. On this one, you got a better handle on what drives velocity.

Adam Schwartz: Exactly. It’s the supply side. If we can increase the number of designers signups and the designs uploaded every month, then we’re filling the supply side. I can actually correlate mathematically the supply side to all of our KPIs.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations so far and good luck with the next phase of the journey.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz
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