lystn

How do you know if it's the right move to give up on a business you've been working on for over half a year? When Evan Stites-Clayton was approached by his co-founder Walker to give up on their business, a job site for college students, to work on a completely new product, a t-shirt company, he had to make this difficult decision. While throwing away months of hard work was painful, the new project was difficult to ignore. It had generated thousands of dollars after just one weekend of work, while the original business idea had no clear demand or differentiation after six months.Soon, the pair was working on the new business idea exclusively - a way for businesses to raise money from their online audience (crowd-funding) by selling merchandise - specifically T-Shirts. Teespring was born. In this episode, Evan outlines exactly how this idea was conceived, and what the team did in the early days to find customers. We also uncover how they stumbled upon a new marketing channel that would go on to grow their business from $250,000 dollars a month in sales, to over a million dollars a day. Evan and his co-founder Walker's meteoric growth helped them raise over $65 million from some of the top investors in the world, like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, but as the company scrambled to keep up with investor's demands to maintain their hyper growth, the company started experiencing issues. In our interview, Evan opens up about some of the pitfalls of growing too quickly, and how other founders should carefully think about the choices that they make especially when they're raising money from major institutional investors at high valuations. He has incredible insight into the trials of scaling a company, and provided us with a sincere reflection of how others should manage growth while understanding their own true wishes and intentions with the company they are building. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.