From Startup to Swag Titan: Jeremy Parker Helps You Build Your Own Custom Products Business

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Kyle Stevie in my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Kyle Stevie in the building to my right once again. Yeah, made it in man, no requirements of kids or anything.

Speaker 2: 0:36

He came in here complaining Dude, if you're an entrepreneur and you don't have children yet and you're 30, if you're an entrepreneur and you don't have children yet and you're 30, don't fucking have children. There he goes. You'll save all your money, you'll save all your headache and you'll probably look a lot younger when you're 43, like me. These are Kyle's problems right now, every day is like something new. It's like you guys were supposed to be past this.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Yeah, well, you get to deal with it, and we've got Jeremy Parker today on the podcast. Thanks for joining us, jeremy. Thank you for having me. Great to be here, jeremy. You got kids or anything?

Speaker 3: 1:13

I do. I have two. I have a three and a half year old daughter and a 60 month old son.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Okay, when did the problem start?

Speaker 2: 1:21

Kyle yeah, for us it didn't start until they were teenagers. Okay, well, jeremy, you got that to look forward to all three of them. And we're we're fine growing up. It's the the teenage, but the hormones are just I remember these days.

Speaker 1: 1:36

I wasn't that long ago.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Well, yeah, it was, it was 20 something years ago, but I know I try and I try to do that and I try to put myself in their position and be understanding yeah, and and like 35 seconds into it, I'm like knock it the fuck off. Quit being pansy, suck it up, move on, figure out a solution to your problem. I can't stand listening to you whine about it any longer.

Speaker 1: 2:00

Well, Kyle deals with it. Kyle's got this stuff. He wants to be an entrepreneur. He's working at a company. He's been there for a while.

Speaker 2: 2:08

I just interviewed to be an adjunct professor today.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Oh, good for you. He's actually got his law degree. He's never. He hasn't done anything with it, but he keeps, he keeps paying the only thing I ever do with.

Speaker 2: 2:16

It was the only way I qualified for this position was because I had a JD oh I love it. And the guy emailed me and said Dr Stevie's like fuck yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:25

I am Dr Stevie now. So, jeremy, let's talk promotional products. Man, swagcom, swag space. You started swagcom and I have a question about that.

Speaker 2: 2:36

How long ago did you have to buy that domain, or how?

Speaker 1: 2:39

long. Yeah, that's a great domain.

Speaker 3: 2:41

Yeah, so it's actually a very interesting story. We started swagcom in 2016. Having the brand name swagcom was very important for kind of my thesis. The thesis, high level, is that people you can't just advertise swag Like it's not impulse purchasing. So if you're like browsing Facebook and you see an ad for a pair of shoes, you might just buy that pair of shoes because you might want it for yourself. But if you ever see an ad for swag on Facebook, the odds that you need to buy swag in bulk $3,000 worth of corporate promotional products at the exact right time it's just unlikely.

Speaker 3: 3:17

So what we found is we need to get in front of people, let's say, in January, through ads, but ultimately they're going to be placing their order in September, november, december, during holiday season, so we have to stay top of mind to people later on in the year. So the whole idea was we really needed this brand name to convert offline conversations, like what they have with their boss and their co-workers, to online purchasing and we felt like swagcom was the right name. Now, I didn't have the money at the time to buy the name. They were asking, I think, a little over 1.2 million. At the point I figured it was going to be expensive because that's a prime name, very expensive.

Speaker 3: 3:48

But what we did is we were somewhat creative about it and we negotiated a deal. We brought the price down. Obviously, we negotiated the price down, but we also worked out a deal where we could exclusively license the name for a two-year period with the option to buy, and for that right we did a couple of interesting things, but basically it allowed us to have the domain from day one without actually having to purchase it. We were licensing it and then ultimately, we could see is this business going anywhere? And if it is, then we'll have the money to. Either we could raise money around it or we, with the profits, we could use that money to buy the name full out. Or, if it doesn't work, you know there's no skin off our back and we didn't lose anything.

Speaker 1: 4:24

Nice, Nice. Well, that was creative. I mean, that's what you got to do in business all the time. I mean you have to, especially if you're a young company. You have to get creative with some things. You have to get creative with the way you compensate people who are working for you, Even uh, there's a lot of things you have to do. How big was yourcom up and then you sold it at one point? Now you're with the acquiring company, building another product inside of their brand.

Speaker 3: 4:50

Yeah, exactly so swagcom when we got acquired I don't know the exact number we were a little over 100 people at that point. We started in 2016. I'll do a quick rundown of the numbers. Initially, we did about 350,000 of sales our first year. Me and my co-founder, josh, were traveling salesmen knocking on doors. We had no technology platform, we just had a. Oh, we should probably want to use them as well. So that was our initial strategy Learned as much as we could about the industry, ultimately launched the first version of our eCommerce site in 2017. We did about $1.1 million in 2017, 2018, $3 million, $19 million, $7 million Then went to $15 million and went to $30 million a year, and in 2021, when we were completing a little bit over $30 million a year, custom Ink who's like the largest leader in our industry acquired us, and I've been running as CEO for swagcom underneath Custom Ink for the last two years up until December, where I left that role and I'm starting a new division underneath customing called Swagspace and high level.

Speaker 3: 6:11

Swagspace is taking all of the technology that we built over the last eight years with swagcom, and swagcom makes it easy for companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook to buy promotional products.

Speaker 3: 6:18

And our idea is what if we took all that awesome technology, white labeled it and gave it away for free to the 23,000 other promo distributors who want to easily make sales? Wouldn't it be amazing if they had the technology $20-plus million worth of technology to start selling to their clients? And then, once they actually make a sale, it hits our back end and we become the de facto supplier as well? And then this technology is so powerful that we're thinking well, it doesn't just work for promo distributors. It could also work for the 20,000 screen printers or the 70,000 party planners or the 150,000 graphic designers or the college kid that wants to start a business. It's basically a business in the box, like instantaneously. Anybody uploads their logo, selects a brand logo, you know colors, it instantly spits out an amazing e-commerce experience with 7,000 products. If people check out through the site, it hits our backend, we handle all of the work and we give the seller a large commission on every order. So it really allows people to scale up and build a really amazing business for themselves.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Yeah, I think the key here is the number of products that you can print on. I think there's a lot. I mean, if you're a dentist, I mean I'm looking at toothbrushes right here I mean there's all kinds of promotional things, but I mean there's stuff that's more than just promotional on here. I mean you're, you can essentially like, use this and build a, build your own brand out of this in a way. I mean there's blankets, there's candles, there's all kinds of stuff on here that you could like you could start a company totally and we have with swag space.

Speaker 3: 7:47

We have, um, we had a person who, about three months ago when I was in beta, we just launched swag space about 25 days ago, but the last quarter of last year I was doing some tests and trying to refine the user experience we had somebody who's never sold swag in their life. He wasn't in the promotional adjacency space. He was never like an event planner who could sell swag to their audience, or a designer. He had no experience and he had no connections. He started, he built the site for free in seconds and he started knocking on charities doors and reaching out to like local high schools and different things and he's done over a hundred thousand dollars of sales in like three months.

Speaker 3: 8:22

He started the business from nothing and now he has a business and he's making a large percentage commission and honestly I think he'll probably do a million dollars this year in sales. I believe that and he'll make over $300,000 for himself. So before he had to get ever paid $300,000, you have to have a really, you have to have a lot of experience, you have to get an amazing job, you have to spend a lot of work building a really amazing business here. You can literally start it for free and just start selling, because every single organization charity, et cetera company buy swag. So as long as you're good at sales, this is a great space for you to be in.

Speaker 1: 8:58

Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, it's just, you know, I was at a high school today. I was talking to these kids about things that they could do. And these are high school kids I'm talking to right and I'm telling them like hey, there's existing businesses out there. You can go on broker websites. You could buy cash flowing businesses. You know, apprentice under somebody, learn how to be a plumber, an electrician, something like that. There's so many of those businesses out there that are cash flowing that you could use an SBA loan to acquire right. You could do that. Or you could do something as simple as this while you're still in school. As long as you've got sales skills and you've got a little, like you said, a little grit, a little ability to go out there, you're not afraid to talk to people. I mean, this is a self-made business for a lot of people.

Speaker 3: 9:43

Exactly, right. And there's no upfront costs whatsoever, not even just cost for the platform itself. There's no cost for like warehousing products. Very simple Imagine you're a college kid that wants to make an extra $10,000 in the year. Right, that could be life-changing for a lot of people. To pay off college debt, to take themselves out for a vacation, to go on dates, whatever they want. All they have to do is go to people who want to buy swag, that's, their local chapters, fraternities, sororities, I mean just literally. There's millions of potential clients out there, tens of millions of potential clients out there. They go out there and they make a sale.

Speaker 3: 10:14

Now, what does that person buy? That person can buy t-shirts, hats, notebooks, candles, whatever they want. We have 7,000 products on our site. But they upload their logo. So let's say they go to a local coffee shop and the coffee shop says yes, I want to buy some hats. The coffee shop finds the hat on this college student site. It's fully branded, fully white labeled. They upload the coffee shop logo, they mock things up, the pricing is done in real time. The coffee shop pays $3,000 for those hats and t-shirts, et cetera. It hits swag spacesspace's backend. We do all of the production right. We give 30% of that order to the college kid. So if they sell $3,000 worth of stuff, that college kid just made $900. Didn't have to touch the products, didn't have to front the money, didn't have to warehouse anything. They can start focusing on their next sale.

Speaker 1: 10:58

Essentially just linked someone over to a website that looked like their website and really that's it, and let the client do the work and there's more.

Speaker 2: 11:07

They're more like just a finder's fee. Yeah, so for the sales people, I guess repeat business for something like this would be very important. How frequently do you I mean I guess that's a good question, I'd be I bet I get let me phrase it so it doesn't sound like I'm stuttering how often do you see you guys get these big accounts with repeat customers?

Speaker 3: 11:27

Oh, I mean I, we're so new to this new thing. But I'll tell you from the perspective of swagcom, we have customers who check out an average about three to four times a year and the average order size for a client is $4,000. So if you could kind of play that out, it's 12, $16,000 a year for for a good client. Some of our clients are spending millions of dollars, and then so Icom I mean you can get really big clients. You spend a ton.

Speaker 2: 11:52

So they just go straight through, they go, they go through the portal or whatever that the salesperson gave it, and so it's not something like he has to send a link every time, like I'm thinking, I'm thinking what I recommend clothing.

Speaker 3: 12:05

Yeah, I guess this is what I recommend. You know the odds that somebody, a college kid, has a website and shares a link to Joe's coffee and says, hey, joe, figure it out yourself. It's probably not likely because Joe's not. He doesn't want to be pawned off to a site. So what we recommend and what we did at swagcom, that's worked. We built tools where, let's say, jennifer the college student can go builda cart for Joe's Coffee. So she's talking to Joe, she's having a normal conversation like a sales rep and Joe says, yeah, I'm looking for Moleskine notebooks and this hat, this mug, this water bottle, etc.

Speaker 3: 12:34

Jennifer goes into her site. She finds exactly the products that Joe wants. She uploads Joe's logo. She does all the work. It takes 30 seconds. It's like a really simple e-commerce experience. There's a button that says create cart. She presses that button. There's a link created. She shares the link with Joe. All Joe has to do is click on that link. Everything is already defined and priced out and perfect for him to check out. All he has to do is put his credit card information in the checkout.

Speaker 3: 12:57

What we found is, when Jennifer, in this case, does that about two to three times for each customer, they get so confident They'll start buying stuff without ever speaking to Jennifer. They'll go into their my Order history and see all the order history to easily reorder. So we've seen the same thing with Swagcom. You have to kind of guide them and handhold them through the first couple of orders, but it's kind of like allowing them to dip their toe into doing it themselves and eventually, like with Amazon, have we have a client, amazon. I mean we have 45 different buyers within amazon buying at swagcom.

Speaker 3: 13:29

The first couple of orders we had to do we had to manually create cards for amazon. Now they never talk to us and they just check out because it's so easy. That's the. That's the. That's the point. You gotta kind of use your sales ability to get the sale in. We make it really easy with this build a cart feature, with this presentation deck tool. We've all these kind of cool tools that make it easier to make sales. Once the sales come in, you can always you know upsell them and they can always do it themselves eventually.

Speaker 2: 13:49

So there's not like a risk of having, like multiple reps with one customer right. Like the same coffee shop orders twice One. I get the credit one time, you get the credit the next time. Once that's more customers on the website, that's my customer, totally Okay.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Interesting customers on the website. That's my customer, totally okay, interesting. So what is this? Uh, you know, do you get a lot of people who have, since I'm a graphic designer, I'm an ad agency people send me crap logos all the time.

Speaker 1: 14:15

Yep, white backgrounds, right. They oh my, my artist sent me this, right. They don't know. They're seeing a vector in a raster file. Yep, it's not scalable. It's like a gif from their website that they'll drag off like how do you control for that? What's the? Is there any quality control mechanisms in place? Is there is there any ai tied into this or something that maybe like cleans it up a little bit before it goes on the product, or are you just? Do you give people like a how-to guide or something like that?

Speaker 3: 14:41

yeah, we make. We make it really simple. So this is how it works. Imagine Joe's Coffee, in this situation, uploads a logo and let's say the logo is a low res. Our system detects that it's a low res in real time. So they upload the logo. It detects it's a low res. Let's say they upload the JPEG, there's a pop-up on the site't have one press here and continue without it. Fine, they can continue with the low-res file. They can mock it up.

Speaker 3: 15:06

We don't want to stop anybody from checking out. They ultimately check out. It hits our backend. We're custom ink, we're owned by custom ink, we have 2000 employees.

Speaker 3: 15:13

We have a whole team that converts low-res logos to high-res logos. What we do is, once the order comes in, we see it's a low-res logo, we redesign that into a high-res vector art file and then we have a virtual mock-up. We send the virtual mock-up to the college student who's now the Swag Space member to review it to make sure it looks perfect. If it looks perfect to the college student presses yes, jenny says it looks good then automatically gets sent to Joe's Coffee to get approval from them. Only when Joe's Coffee looks at it and approves it does it ever notify us to go into production. So we have a lot of different things built in to make the process super smooth.

Speaker 3: 15:46

But in terms of converting low-res to high-res, we do that in-house. We handle it, we streamline the entire process and for you in general, you're a designer. If you create a logo for somebody, they're going to take that logo and they're going to go to a custom bank to buy their swag. That's what they do, or they go to somebody else. Why don't you make the money off of it? Wouldn't it be great if you could just say hey, by the way, we just created this logo. Here's a couple of products we designed specifically for you that we think will look good for you, be within your brand guidelines, etc. And they could check out. They check out. It hits our backend. You don't have to deal with any of it and now you have a whole new revenue stream without doing anything. Yeah, this is a no brainer for designers.

Speaker 1: 16:22

I mean, when I do a logo for somebody, anyway, I've got an Envato product I use, called place it, so I'll just upload. The logo is a high, you know, higher res kind of PNG. It is like, you know, 1400 by 1400 or something. I'll drop it on there and it can, it automatically places. It does all the wrinkles and everything on every. You know they've got some mapping tool or whatever and I don't have to do any image of their logo. I'll send it on products, right, I'll send it. On ads, I'll send it.

Speaker 1: 16:52

Depends on who it is. Like. It could be, uh, it could be PPE masks, right, it could be, uh, you know, workout outfits, if it's a athletic brand or whatever it is. They've got pretty much anything that you can mock it up on, right, which actually would be a probably an interesting acquisition for custom ink or if you guys had something like that, that. But it's really cool because as a designer, I can send that out. And then people are like, wow, I really like this on the shirt and I'm like, oh well, we can make you shirts, I mean, for an agency or for a designer or somebody like that. This makes total sense because I find myself recreating people's logos all the time and there's things you can upload logos to. Now that'll take them from raster to vector and then then you can go in and kind of adjust them afterwards. You don't have to like recreate the whole thing and it's. I'm assuming that's something like you guys are using as well, but for someone in my business that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 17:42

We had a lady on the show a while ago who's been doing custom products. She was from New York or New Jersey, remember her, and she does custom products. She did custom products for years and she's using a different type of service or whatever. She was funny, she was really funny. Yeah, but this to me I'm going through your products and everything. I mean these products. I mean they're, these aren't the typical things I normally see. I mean these are like really nice, there's some really nice stuff on here and it's it's not your everyday stuff either.

Speaker 1: 18:13

I'm like I'm seeing things I've never seen on a site like this before.

Speaker 2: 18:16

Did that come with custom makes, uh, purchasing of swagcom, or was that? Um, no, that was, that was swagcom for the focus.

Speaker 3: 18:24

When I was starting this business, it was very clear I wanted to make sure we offer products that people actually want to keep Like. The worst thing you could do is if you're Facebook and you buy swag and it's a bit of trash, it's costing the company money, it's not good for the environment, it's tarnishing your brand, but swag is such a powerful impact if it's actually done right. So that was our whole thing. Let's just focus on the quality stuff. If we're going to test out 1000 mugs, we only want to offer the top 20. We don't want to have to be, we want to be a place where people get lost by too many options and 99% of it's bad.

Speaker 3: 18:53

Everything on our site has been hand selected by us, has been tested by us, has been compared to others in the light categories, like us. And then we have, you know, obviously a lot of cool brand names that are not traditionally found in the industry. Right, we like no more London backpacks and we've sell all birds, sneakers and we have all these kinds of cool things that are just super different than what the industry is offering.

Speaker 1: 19:14

Yeah, I really like it. I mean there's JBL speakers in here and a bunch of other things. Yeah, it's because, like when I think of swag, I think of cheap, like koozies and things like that. Like that's what I'm thinking of.

Speaker 2: 19:24

Am I going to get cancer from touching this, that type of stuff?

Speaker 1: 19:27

It's just crazy like garbage stuff, right that you like garbage stuff, right, you take to a trade show and you don't care about cause it's. You know 10 cents an item and you know this is stuff like you actually keep in is. So what were some of the challenges? I mean, you started this. I mean, did you just start this from scratch? I mean, did you have a? Are you? You sound like you know SEO, which is helpful. Did you learn SEO while doing this? Did you have a technical co-founder? Did you like this? Did you have a technical co-founder?

Speaker 3: 19:51

How did you get this thing kicked off? It's a good question. In 2016, I noticed I used to be in the industry very briefly when I was 22 years old, in the promo space somewhat, I guess, somewhat adjacency. I work for a company called MV Sport and they're a very large company in the collegiate apparel. So college apparel and promo is similar. They use similar suppliers, they go to similar trade shows and I remember I just kind of fell in love with the industry when I was like 22 years old and I used to go to different trade shows and then I left the industry by 24 or so and I just People.

Speaker 3: 20:22

When you're young, you change jobs and you do different things. In my mid-20s I started a business with my brother and we did it One of the first, I think, product placement companies. So imagine right now, everybody on Instagram makes a lot of money by having brands in their videos and YouTube stars make a lot of money by having advertising in the YouTube videos. Right Back in the day, this is 13, 14 years ago, youtube stars were living in their parents' basement and making no money, but getting more eyeballs in American Idol, right. So what we did was we partnered up with like State Farm, colgate, verizon and got these brands into YouTube stars video and just made them millionaires, frankly. And that's what we started to do. And then it kind of expanded from there. We said why are we stopping with YouTube and product placement? Why don't we partner up with major celebrities and own their Twitter and Facebook feeds? Right, I mean Twitter. At this point, just to put in perspective, when we reached out to some of these celebrities on Twitter, they had like 3000 followers. That same celebrity has like 70 million followers now. So we were very, very early and our idea was why don't we buy the rights to these celebrities profiles where they couldn't do any product deals or any kind of marketing deals without us, like we would be their de facto agency, if you will? And we signed on a lot of different celebrities and ultimately, within a year period, we sold that company to a publicly traded company. So I was 25 years old. I sold that to a publicly traded company because we noticed that there was a shift. It was like we were buying oil before. People knew how valuable it was and we knew that this was going to be the next thing. I mean if Twitter or Facebook, I mean we own major celebrities. Everyone's heard of social presences for like a three-year period, so we knew we had something really valuable.

Speaker 3: 21:55

I then did a startup that failed. I spent three years on it. It was a social networking app and then when I wanted to start swag ultimately I was 30 years old and I loved the promo industry for my earlier days of working at MV Sport and the college apparel side, but I realized it was kind of a big aha moment to me when I was 30. And I was trying to think of the business I wanted to start. The buyer was changing. That was it. I saw the industry growing. I was following all the industry magazines because of my experience 10 years prior, 8 years prior.

Speaker 3: 22:25

But the buyer was shifting. The buyer was becoming younger and younger and when I realized that, I realized well how many things of a business need to change if the buyer is different. If the buyer eight years ago was a 40, 50-year-old office manager, they're probably buying it one way. They're buying it through catalogs. They're buying it through back and forth emails. They're buying it through a very fragmented way of selling.

Speaker 3: 22:46

The buyer today is a millennial. They're 23 years old. It's maybe their first job out of college. They're 23 years old. It's maybe their first job out of college. They're given a budget from Facebook to buy swag for the office, and now they have a lot of pressure to buy $10,000 worth of swag. What's their main motivation? Their main motivation is not to look bad. They don't want to buy crap that ends up in the trash. So everything shifts when you realize that this one aspect that changed the buyer changed. So I realized that and I said well, let me build today's platform for the current buyer, the millennial, the Gen Z, et cetera. And I went all in on that buyer and started talking to so many people trying to understand how they buy it. From how I remember them buying it eight years prior, that makes sense. Yeah. And I learned a lot in those early days and I kind of figured out the right solution to build. You know, initially I thought and I was wrong I thought I would go after the marketing teams, yeah you just assume that yeah.

Speaker 3: 23:33

I would assume that Marketing teams make sense. You can have a 10-person company, but they can have 1,000 customers. That means they can buy 1,000 items of swag. There's bigger budgets, there's a bigger use case. But what I realized in the early days, knocking on doors and I literally knocked on doors at different startups and I would go up and down WeWork hallways to talk to people I realized that everyone's going after the marketing team Everyone.

Speaker 3: 23:58

What's going to differentiate me as swagcom a coming soon website, label website, no products on the site, nothing built out, just me and my co-founder, josh. What's going to differentiate us from the 23,000 other people selling swag? Yeah, and I realized there was a key insight I had early on. It's that we should not be going after the office manager, we should go after the. We should not be going after the marketing teams, we should be going after the office manager. It kept leading back to the office manager.

Speaker 3: 24:20

Now, what's the office manager? Most people don't even know what that. That's even a real job. They control the office. They're buying swag for internal purposes. If it's a 10 person company, they're the ones that are buying the 10 t-shirts for the different employees. This is kind of like the secret, like it was the key insight. It was like an aha moment because they do not have the biggest budgets right, it's nowhere near the marketing team, but they're the gateway into the company, they're the Trojan horse. If the office manager at a hundred person company is buying a hundred t-shirts, every t-shirt is going to say swagcom in the inner label. That was one of our marketing strategies in the early days printing our logo in the inner label.

Speaker 1: 24:52

So, like removing bella and canvas, removing, you know, nike, whatever is putting swagcom as the inner label, because that will like be a way that you know obviously swag is meant to I was gonna ask about that, like how do you self-promote even though, like, if people are holding on to this gear, how do you self-promote if at&t's logo is on there, or if Verizon's logo, or if P&G's logo?

Speaker 3: 25:13

Yeah, so we found that we put in the inner logo, and our tagline at the time was we made this. It's kind of a cool thing.

Speaker 1: 25:19

We made this, but also everybody sees swagcom.

Speaker 3: 25:22

We made this. At&t uses swagcom. We should probably use swagcom. And because swag is meant to be given away, that means everybody who's buying swag from us ultimately will be giving it away. It's like a pair of jeans where it gets cooler the more you wear it. They give it away. So now we're getting all of our customers marketing it for free to all of their contacts and presumably, if a client is giving out swag to somebody else, that person who's receiving it probably has some decision-making ability. And we found ourselves just growing because our clients were doing the marketing for us. So there's all these different learnings and things you have to figure out. I mean, there's not like one answer of like, oh, we were good at SEO. No, honestly, we didn't even start SEO till our third year. It was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made is that I only started in the third year. I didn't really know about SEO, frankly, when I started it.

Speaker 1: 26:07

I was doing more so you weren't tagging.

Speaker 3: 26:08

No, not really, we were just putting them up there, yeah, putting it up there, knocking on doors, making sales, maybe doing a little bit of Google ads to drive more awareness. Google ads are way too expensive but we learned based on those customers. Then we started SEO, then we started partnerships, then we did. I mean, now our company, you know, is doing a lot of money per year and I mean we're doing a lot. It's a real business at this point and things are going really streamlined and we have 10 different traction channels that are driving traffic. And so I would just say for entrepreneurs listening, you don't have to have all the answers. A lot of times you don't have any of the answers. You just got to start. You got to learn on the way. Listen to your customer, figure out the right thing. I'll tell you one quick story Before I started Swagcom, and the reason how I think it was such a success from the start is because I had the mentality of learning from customers from the early days.

Speaker 3: 27:00

My previous startup that failed that social networking app I mentioned earlier. I was the head of product, so I was like head of design. I lost sleep every single night thinking about every little detail about this thing what happens when you swipe right or left or what, what should this color of the button be, what should this do and all. And then we launched a year later and I realized all the things that I lost sleep over and cared about no one else cared about. The customers didn't give a shit about that, Like there was other things that they really wanted that I wish I just got out of my own way and launch something. Anything You're trying to make it perfect.

Speaker 3: 27:32

Yeah, yeah. I try to make it perfect. And I was making the wrong, I was building the wrong thing, I was building the thing that I thought was the right thing.

Speaker 1: 27:37

You jumped ahead in your MVP kind of thing Like you weren't.

Speaker 2: 27:39

you weren't just building, and that's what they always say. Perfect became the enemy of good.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Yeah, you got to again ask your customer iterate. That's one of the things you learn that we didn't know. Like, I didn't know that either when we were doing our startup. Right, I no clue, but you said something. You just kind of got to jump in there and you learn right, especially when you're doing something innovative and different, because you don't know, there is no benchmark, there's nothing else you can look at. You know, maybe you didn't go to business school. I didn't. At the time I hadn't gone to. You know, I didn't get a MBA or any of that kind of stuff. So I mean, me and my co-founders just kind of had to learn.

Speaker 1: 28:20

And then one of our co-founders was just an animal and he he kind of took it, ran with it, did a lot of the work, getting our investors, finding, you know, customers early on, going to trade shows, all that kind of stuff, just to get the name out there. And eventually one thing leads to another when you just never know when that meeting is going to hit that changes the direction of your company. It could be one client that just changes it all. Like we had Keller Williams right, which at the time they had 80,000 agents. They signed up. That gave us instant credibility. We didn't have a group that big, and then 85% of the work they did was with other brokerages, so they became our salespeople and when you said something you said, they did our sales for us. Right, that's what you need. You need to hit that network effect where your customers then become your salespeople.

Speaker 3: 29:12

Totally, and I would even say, even take us even a step further. I had a moment in 2017, we were in Techstars, just like an incubator program kind of like a Y Combinator Texas.

Speaker 3: 29:22

Chicago and I was at this program. I was there for three months and I mean it's fine, we learned. We learned some things, we met some people, all good. There's the last couple of weeks they connect you with other entrepreneurs, local entrepreneurs to kind of meet and network, et cetera. So one of these entrepreneurs was the CEO of a company called Jelly Vision in Chicago and I met with Jelly Vision, a fairly big company, 200 plus employees, I believe. I'm trying to remember it's been a while, but we went to the office and it's a really cool office and the CEO said hey, I want you to connect to my office manager Because at that point we knew the office manager was the buyer.

Speaker 3: 29:56

We were already doing sales. So she's like meet with the office manager and learn as much as you can, ask some questions Whenever you want you have them for the day to learn. And I went to their office and I saw the office manager with five, five of our coworkers all on the floor unboxing swag that they bought from different locations, repackaging it up in boxes, writing handwritten note cards, and I said what are you guys doing? They said, well, we're doing this thing called account-based marketing, which is basically the ability to send swag in the mail to individual, different or best customers to say thank you for something or to engage with them, and it's been really helpful for our business and I left that one meeting in 2017 being like this is the future. I don't know when we're going to be able to build this, but right now our site can handle swag bulk orders. People could buy 1,000 t-shirts and it sends it to their office or to their trade show booth. But wouldn't it be cool if they could click a button and we'll hold the swag in our inventory and then give them the tools to individually distribute that swag to remote employees? They tools to individually distribute that swag to remote employees. They could upload a CSV file of different ship to addresses. Our system will detect the shipping costs. They pay for the shipping and now we're boxing things up together for them and shipping it globally, all over the world. That was kind of the idea and I started building that. I got back to New York 2018. I started building this feature, integrating with the three PLs. I wasn't so efficient at it, but we ultimately got it to a place where we were launching it in January of 2020.

Speaker 3: 31:14

Now, obviously, everyone knows what happened in 2020. The world shut down. We launched in January of 2020 as this account-based marketing platform meaning all of our homepage, our branding, our website, everything was designed to help marketing teams do account-based marketing. Now, when the world shut down in March of 2020, covid hits. There are no events. There are no events. There are no trade shows. No one needs our service at all. Right, right, but here's the thing. There was a disconnection. Everyone who bought swag for the office, no one's in the office. So how do you keep company cultures thriving even when no one's in the office? You send them swag at their home addresses. So we repurposed all that technology, all the sites, all the advertising, everything, the SEO, the content marketing, our ads everything was changed to how to keep company culture thriving even when no one's in the office.

Speaker 3: 32:00

And our business, the industry, went down 20, 40% in a year of COVID. Right, it makes sense. Everything is shut down. Our business scale from 7 million to 15 million. Wow, we were able to capitalize Next year, 30 million. How do we do that? So, as you said, you never know where you're going to go.

Speaker 3: 32:14

When I started swagcom in 2016, I never thought of account-based marketing. I never heard that term. I didn't know individual distribution, I didn't know COVID was going to hit. You kind of have to put yourself out there and meet with people and no one said, hey, jeremy, do this. I was in the room, I saw things happening and I realized maybe this is our future, this is where we could go, this is what we could do. It became a nice to have feature or something that maybe some companies needed our distribution platform to frankly need to have Everyone's disconnected, and we were the only platform that built it. So we had this amazing solution that no one else had and that just comes from. I don't know what you call it Is, is it? There's a lot of things that go into it, but I would say, just get, get out of your own way.

Speaker 2: 32:52

Reach out to people, talk to people, learn, change, pivot, and as long as you keep doing that constantly, you're going to keep learning and getting better with it I'd like to say that beside I mean outside of your company the, the energy that you speak with and the passion you speak with reminds me of um a few of the very, very, very successful entrepreneurs that I know. Seems like you've got that it factor to lead an organization to you know, beyond all plateaus and to where you want it to go, where you ultimately see it going. How, how, how is your office structured? Do you, do you guys, work from a centralized location? Is everything decentralized office structure? Do you guys work from a centralized?

Speaker 3: 33:33

location Is everything decentralized? How's that set up? Yeah, so with swagcom we were all working in an office in New York City. Covid hit and we never went back. We have everyone's remote, the whole company's remote. It's not an ideal situation but we were very lucky that our business could still grow and thrive even in a remote environment. We didn't need to be in a physical place. You know, some people go in and out of the office here and there if they want to see people or if they want to, you know, change the scenery from working at home. But, um, so we have like different hubs in New York city. We have an office in Fairfax, virginia, for custom ink that's where their hub is and then we have an office people could go, but most people just work from their computers and do it.

Speaker 3: 34:10

And you know, for us, because we're disconnected, we like to not have a lot of meetings. I hate sitting on meetings. That waste time. But we schedule a lot of like 10 to 15 minute catch up sessions, so it's like something where you could see somebody talk to them, connect with them, without having to kind of waste everyone's time, because I find at least most meetings are run fairly poorly. Um, and 90% of the room is just sitting there waiting for other people to do stuff.

Speaker 3: 34:35

It's like I don't really need to be here. Why am I even here? And then you feel bad of doing other things while you're on the meetings. You have to focus and you're kind of wasting it. Everything is wasted. So we just cut that out and we do like quick 10-minute, 15-minute meetings. If we book a 30 minute meeting and it gets to the minute 10 and we realize there's nothing else to speak about, all right, guys, we'll see. See you next time. Like we don't, we don't just have to fill up space because you know people feel the need to be on the call. Like you get on the call, you get on a meeting, we say, hey, if you don't think you need to be here, just leave. Right, there's no. Like you don't have to stay around and try political corporate game. Yeah, that's not. It's not our environment yeah, that's, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 35:10

I mean, it doesn't seem like you're the kind of guy that would be in the environment for a year more. The way you speak, how quickly you speak, it seems like you're more of a let's get shit done type mentality, as opposed to tell me how you're gonna get the shit done. Yeah, right tell me how you're planning to make this happen. It's more along the lines of I trust you. You guys are here, let let's get it finished, yeah.

Speaker 3: 35:29

Yeah, that's exactly right. I, I, um, yeah, I, I feel that way, I a hundred percent. I also feel like I don't know all the right answers. So I I like, when my team comes up with ideas, there's no stupid idea. Every idea that anyone comes up with, as I said before, you never know where it's going to lead. It could spark something else, it could spark somebody else to come up with something really cool. So that's just kind of the mentality we always have, from even swagcom days to now swag space days. It's an open door policy and there's no bad ideas and let's just kind of come up with the right, right solution.

Speaker 1: 36:01

I love it, man. Well, this is great. I love, I love the energy you've got. I love the entrepreneurial attitude. It sounds like you did everything right and you continue. I mean, you obviously have a ton of value to add, otherwise Custom Ink wouldn't keep you on and have you run a brand new division, this swag space stuff you guys are doing now, and I'm definitely going to check it out. I'm going to recommend it to people.

Speaker 1: 36:24

I was just at a high school earlier today, the one I went to. It's an art school, and the kids were asking, like you know, I was telling about my background and everything and they're asking, like, well, what can we do? And I'm telling them you know real estate and this and that. But this would be a great thing for kids. I mean, if you're a high school kid or whatever, go knock on some doors. Man, you want to make some money, and this is an inner city school, this is downtown in the country, but these are the type of things that people can sign up for and take advantage of. That weren't available to me when I was in high school, but this would be a great one for young people to start.

Speaker 3: 36:56

Yeah, totally. By the way, when I was starting swagcom if Swagspace existed, I may never would have started swagcom. Honestly, we did all the work. You know. It's legitimately nearly $20 million of tech work. We reinvested all the profits every year into this business. Yeah, you did so. All the technology that everyone gets is the swagcom platform I love it, by the way and every new feature that swagcom builds will also be available to the swag space members. So it's we're going to. This is just the beginning, where we have so many amazing ideas of how to make this even better and better and keep building things and to make this even better and better and keep building things and and just making it a really great experience. But anyone instantaneously could have a business Anyone's thinking about. I want to be an entrepreneur, start a business overnight, for free.

Speaker 2: 37:36

I would think that the coolest thing you could do if you were thinking about doing this would be to get an actual like database of some sort that codes. You know all industries have their own codes so that you know, like every industry has a Las Vegas exhibit, I mean convention, everyone will have, like, a Los Angeles convention. They'll have a Miami or convention in the Chicago convention. So you know which conventions are coming up in the companies that are in your area and you can contact them and say, hey, I know this is coming up. You're going to need, you know, potentially you're going to need this, this, this and this to give away to people as marketing. Oh yeah, how about you take a look at a site that I can provide you and let me know if there was something?

Speaker 1: 38:19

that I could help you prove Yep.

Speaker 2: 38:22

I mean this totally makes sense, but having the codes, having the business codes and just lining them up like that, yeah Because. And just lining them up like that, yeah Because you have like concrete guys. You could have people that build that, create conduit, like all these little obscure companies that run with like 40 to 50 guys that nobody knows about yeah, these manufacturing. Instead, it was like here in Cincinnati, oh, I'll go to Kroger, no, you won't. I'll go to Procter Gamble no, you won't. No, no, they're going to kick you right out the door. That's right. But if you go to bob's bob's uh gypsum company or go down silver grove, and where they're running all this drywall.

Speaker 2: 39:00

You know they go to conventions. They need this stuff like that. Those are the guys that if you were looking to get into it, I would think that'd be the first thing you'd want to do is get that, that, that rolodex, that yeah, don't go to an apparel conference.

Speaker 1: 39:09

Don't go to a custom products or a products conference. Go to a conference for a specific industry where a guy might not be there selling these things.

Speaker 2: 39:19

And you've got the whole supply chain.

Speaker 1: 39:20

He's giving you the whole supply chain Like everything's figured out. You just Everything, you sign up yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:27

Front end, back end, inventory, logistics, shipping, everything, State taxes. I mean. Just imagine you go to the local coffee shop. Joe's Coffee spends $3,000. Swag Space is collecting the full amount. We're collecting the sales tax, we're remitting the sales tax. So now the local entrepreneurs don't have to worry about any of that stuff. They don't know any of that stuff Hits our back end. We handle the mockups, we handle converting the low-risk files to the high-risk files. We handle the production. If Joe wanted to do custom boxes of five different products kitted together, we're the ones kitting it together. If Joe wanted to hold inventory and do individual distributions to his best clients, his investors, whoever it is, we're doing all that. All the sales rep is getting the products in front of Joe and maybe in the early days, building the cart for Joe, which, as if you ever went to any e-commerce site swagcom it takes literally less than three minutes to build a cart for somebody. Build a cart, press a button, have the link, share the link, let the person do it themselves. I love it, man.

Speaker 1: 40:21

I love it, so tell people how they get on here. What is there a?

Speaker 3: 40:33

is it custominkcom slash something, or did they go? No, no, no, no, you can go to a swag dot space. So the url is swag dot space. It's not dot com, just swag dot space. There is a apply button on the top right. We're having applications, um to. You know, we want to look it over and you know what. We're happy to approve some people. Once they get approved, we onboard them, we train them up and they're ready to go man, I love this guy with the domain names.

Speaker 1: 40:51

I mean this is the second. I mean custom makes behind you now, but that's a great domain name to swag dot space. Yeah, perfect, man. Well, jeremy, I really appreciate your time today. I thank you for coming on, something I'm going to check out. I'll recommend it to some other people. But this is great. Guys, check it out Swag dot space. Guys, check it out swagspace. Thanks, jeremy. Thank you, guys so much. Have a good day. Thank you, thanks for joining us on this week's episode of side hustle city. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on facebook side hustle city. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.