YouSaid · the spoken record

Mariam Naficy

lines on the record: 69
first: 2019-12-09
most recent: 2019-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think so much of it is luck. I mean, think about what would have happened if I had not been able to leave Iran, right? How many people are in areas around the world where they can't escape what the situation that their governments are creating for them? Think about all those talented people who won't ever have a chance. And I guess I would say the other thing is just sheer wanting it very badly, right? I mean, there are a lot of people who are smarter than I am. And I think it's just, I really focused in on something I'm happily extremely passionate about and love to think about all the time. And I would say that's luck and passion probably outweigh the raw skills.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think grown up with. And then, of course, a couple of crashes in the market, it tends to make you a paranoid person. You tend not to forget any of this. It just stays with you. But yes, I can.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question because I think for the first, believe it or not, five or even six years even longer of the company, there was constant survivability risk, actually. Now I feel differently. I feel like the company, given that it's profitable, given that it's growing so well, it's a great feeling and yes, I can breathe. paranoid immigrant mentality that I've”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the first generation of companies had been around that captivated people just by the sheer fact that they could make custom stationary for you at a decent price, right? That was just, they're almost like an outgrowth of the printing and manufacturing industry, frankly. We came along with real design vision and really tried to change that entirely into a branded high-end European stationary product with lots of bells and whistles and really changed the industry. So yes, there were choices, but we felt that design could be better and more exciting. And then as this community creative community blossomed and developed, we realized that we were a creative community of all kinds of different people, some people who were former lawyers. You know, there's an oil rig worker from Alaska. There's a plumber, a master plumber in New York City who's winning stationary challenges. There are all kinds of people who want to be creative and who want to earn money creatively.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to this day, that has left a taste in those people's mouths around this potential competitor that still, I think, is still there.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we found another two printers who were gracious enough to take us on, and Call still inside the company, it's called Printer Get In at Minted. Because the amount of work and hell our people went through to do that integration at top speed was dreadful. That was”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I never feared that we would have to sell. Not once. I knew we would find a way around it. I just, I just, there's just no way I would let that happen.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would this work? And I thought in the meantime, God, I cannot, I gotta get out of this meeting right now and call my. Out of supply chain so he can and the engineering team so they can work and start working on this immediately. Like, you know, I left the meeting and I called everybody, the team is waiting and we had a conversation and they were racing around the country trying to find printers who would work with us.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was in his office, kind of stuck there, so I had to say something. So what I basically said was, well, let's talk about it.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And basically, he said, can you come in next week to talk to me and invited me, and I think for like a six o'clock meeting, the following week. So I went in for the meeting, and after a little bit of chatter, He said, we'd like to buy you. We'd like to buy your business. And I realized in that moment that that whole thing had been constructed to basically force us to sell our business.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes So it's 2013. We have two printers who handle all of our holiday card orders. One does 50%, the other one does another 50% First week of October, my cell phone rings at about 5 o'clock. It's the CEO of a much, much larger company of competitor. And they basically say we want you to hear the news from us. We have bought this printing company of yours that you use this 50% player. And we'd love to talk to you about how we could continue supplying you with printing services through the holiday season. Now, this is mind you two weeks from the start of the holiday season. All of the, you know, what hits the fan, meaning you have to be prepared, you're spending 10 months of the year preparing for this moment because the seasonality is so high for holiday cards.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, but I think also they understood why tie themselves up selling online at Minted if that's just not what's working and the sales aren't happening. In the meantime, we couldn't print fast enough the work of the emerging designers who the customers themselves were picking.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was really rough because I had gone and sold, minted as a partner to all of these stationery brands, and I felt very ethically bound. Like, you know, I've made a commitment. I've explained why we brought them on. And now instead, this crowdsourced design coming from unknown designers from all over the country is just taking off. And I felt very uncomfortable. And I was lingering in that discomfort for many months. It took me at least nine months to say, We've got to cut and run. We're going to lose all the money we put into building out those brands on our site. We've got to just cut that. And shed all of that work, all that money, and all those relationships, and we need to completely pivot towards a crowdsourced model 100%.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's how the business model launched. But because the only thing that sold was the crowdsourced product and not what we spent the entire year launching, which was all the stationary brands, we actually made a hard cut over and by Christmas of that year we went 100% crowdsourcing. And so we turned it around. We actually decided to move into the Holiday Cards business against the advice of all of our investors who probably rightly said you should focus on what you started, which was wedding. We decided to ignore the advice, launch into holiday cards, and we had an exceptional first Christmas. I mean, we were so oversold. We had to actually shut off our marketing, our search marketing at one point because we were getting too many orders So that's when the company went through a huge increase in sales”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way it worked back then was that we had the stationary brands who were basically in a wholesale relationship whether we would take the product and resell it and earn a cut. And we had the crowdsourced side where designers would submit and they would receive a couple things. So first of all, they would receive peer critique and feedback from their peers. We built in a critique phase into the process, which was a benefit. And second, if they won, they would receive an upfront cash prize that was completely at our risk, meaning if the product never sold, they could still keep. And then on top of that, if the product sold, they would receive a percentage of every sale.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that if I were a man, I would probably have gotten a little bit more credit for what I had previously delivered. I think the personal reputation effect of what had happened with Eve would have magnified. But I don't think stationary was very, and design was very interesting to a lot of male venture capitalists, and I don't think that when I say Silicon Valley doesn't have design confidence, I mean the investors in Silicon Valley don't really understand design and why it's important.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason why they invested in us was personal reputation. That was it. I delivered one thing successfully before and this one brave investor from IDG, now Ridge, ventures Alex Rosen, decided to take a chance on me. And that's it. That's the only reason. And nobody else was interested.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and we have a couple hundred thousand dollars left in the bank. But then we started seeing that tiny sign of life, and I thought, well, maybe what I can do is take some capital and at least save this business just to recoup the initial investment. And that's it So, my good friend, an angel, one of my really good friends, Alex Sluski, called me and said, you know, I'm just getting, he's like, I'm just getting nervous about this market. I think you should take some capital, some institutional capital. And I thought, you know, I feel the same way. I should get on it. So I went out and I decided to break my own rule and actually raise venture capital. And we raised we basically closed our first institutional round of capital. So that's where we raised a couple million dollars.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Our runway at this point is running out. Our conversion rate, which is a critical metric that e commerce companies use to determine success with something like 0.1%, meaning out of all the people who come, 0.1% buy. And that is really, really low.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was within a couple of months, we started getting, let's say, one order a day. Seriously, one order a day, maybe by June. And then, you know, a month after that, it went to two orders a day, maybe three orders a day. Still nothing to write home about.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already said the say of the date or wedding. It was all sorts of things, wedding invitations, other things that people provide. And we launched all of that stationary wedding stationery product online. And then just our little tiny collection of 66 crowdsourced Save the Day cards. What was really different is that immediately the submissions that were coming in were breaking. Lot of barriers and a lot of molds that have been assumed about that category of product. For example, people started putting photos on them. And I remember our printer who we signed up to do this tiny little bit of business said to us, you know what? In our industry, people... Don't put photos on Save the Day cards, Mariam. They don't do that. I said, I understand, but that's what's actually being submitted, and that's what's winning. So we're going to sell them”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cards out of that competition based on voting. So the way that minted works is everything is submitted to us via a design competition. We picked about 66 designs and we launched those, but we had hundreds, if not actually really thousands of SKUs that we were carrying from established stationary brands that we launched at the same time.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when we opened our doors in April, we had our very first design competition for what people call Save the Date cards that people send out when you're about to get married. And we had very few entries. And I think what would happen is we picked something like 66.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So they just made some assumptions and had just a terrible, like that was our freshman, our debut. So what happened was, and this is what is really fascinating when you look back on it, we just didn't have enough data. And so what happened was we didn't have enough traffic to really assess whether we were successful or not, because nobody knew about us and nobody was coming. And then when they did come, what they were buying were that it was a tiny little crowdsource selection that I mentioned to you that was my little personal secret hobby passion. Explain how.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible idea this person's failed before. I think that they didn't really even understand that we had, you know, it's successfully sold the company for as much money as we did.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was not a sail to be had. It was terrifying and horrible, horrible. With Eve, we opened the doors and the makeup was just flying out from day one. I mean, it was this massive amount of sales. Here there was not one thing sold in the first 30 days, not one sale. We almost, I really contemplated that moment. This is a failure. We need to shut this business down. To give whatever remains of the money back to investors because it's a total failure.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So our engineers built a way to see your customized text appear on the screen inside your stationary design, and that you couldn't buy from any other technolog So I spent most of the two and a half million dollars I raised going around signing up all these exclusives with stationary brands that you would see at a papyrus store, for example. You see them, they've already gotten distribution. They're a well-known wedding brands, stationary brands. I spent most of the time in the money doing that. And then I just couldn't let go of this other thing that was really risky and unproven, which was to have a design competition. And I really, really wanted to let myself do that, but I just couldn't let myself do it. It was this tear. So at night I worked with a college student who I found on rent a coder, which is embarrassing to admit. And we worked on this at night after everyone admitted went home. I would build the competition structure with this guy.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we spent almost all the two and a half million on an in house team who came on board, an engineer, and the key challenge was how to render the customization of your stationery online. And that wasn't something we could buy off the shelf from anyone. So we had to build it ourselves.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To launch minted, I had virtually no one. There were maybe five of us, something like that. And that's when I finished the Angel round. We sublet a little bit of space in Jackson Square, and we started with just a few people. First year”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. At this point, I wanted much more control. I decided not to have a co founder from the outset. And so I put the plan together. And what I found was many of my friends were a little bit, they were very, very supportive, incredibly supportive, but they were all a little bit wary of crowdsourcing because it was not a tried and true model at this point. What was tried and true was e-commerce 1.0, which is take all the brand names, put them online, and provide convenient access online. So that's what I did. I signed up all these stationary brands and I put them online. And in the background, I hired a coder who was in college in Portland. And I would work at night on the competition structure, which was my real passion, which was to try to crowdsource the content”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So at this point, I was going to friends. And because I had successfully sold Eve, they were willing to listen. And so I was actually able to raise a pretty big angel around of two and a half million dollars, which is big for an angel round.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that gave me an opening for crowdsourcing. On the one hand, on the other hand, I was a little bit, honestly, a little bit risk averse, and I thought that I did not want to raise venture capital again because I had had some bumpy experiences in the first go-round. So I thought I need to find a business model to apply this idea to that is very, very cash flow positive and doesn't require a lot of cash. And I'm going to run it as a cash flow business.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the idea was focused around stationary retail, and it had fantastic economics associated with it, good margins. It was an inherently viral product. Because your name is on the back of the card, your company name, but the shopping experience offline was pretty archaic. You'd go to a store, there'd be a piece of paper you'd fill out. To order some custom cards, they'd have to fax it in to the supplier. It was an archaic, slow, and really inconvenient process. And I thought, in my opinion, the design could be improved greatly.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a slightly embarrassing idea I had, which was to run a design competition around the side and crowdsource designs that weren't available through the established stationary brands. And I was going to do that on the side.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I decided to take stationary, which was an interesting model for me, and mash it up with this kind of experimental idea, which was crowdsourcing.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have entrepreneurial tendencies, sometimes you'll see something that you can't resist. And I saw a change in what consumers are willing and excited about consuming. So, for example, bloggers were starting to emerge that were disrupting journalists at really established institutions. And consumers were willing to read them over those established institutions, and there was great talent coming to the fore. And so I was thinking to myself that perhaps in product design, there would be a similar opportunity, that you could find talented designers that people would rather buy than not talented designers. So I started getting really interested in the idea of having design competitions and this idea of crowdsourcing.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And fundamentally, there was a perception that we got lucky with Eve.com. And I had this feeling that that saying once you're lucky, twice you're good, I wanted to see if I was actually good or not. And so I think I needed to prove to myself that I could do it again.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did take a year off, and my husband and I traveled around. It's true. But about two months into it, I was absolutely miserable. I felt like I was missing out on what was happening.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build this business. I mean, we were working, I basically lived at the office during this time. I never left. So we built a pretty good business in a year. It was $10 million in our first year. Yet, yes, people were, I think, were very resentful that we had sold at the right time.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were a lot of cases where people were convinced by investors or convinced themselves to keep going and wait for the public exit. Because clearly at that point, everybody was enamored of the IPO. And I do think people were resentful of us for this, and they considered it lucky versus any type of hard work or intuition or anything else. That was unfortunate because we worked our butts off.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so this was a time when we were trying to raise a series D, and honestly, the market was starting to get a little skeptical. When are you going to make a profit? What's going on? And so I start for the first time in that for the 14 to 16 month period, I started realizing that getting the next round was going to be difficult. And we could have safe harbor for the company inside another company. I thought it would probably be a wise move. And we closed it in April 2000, two weeks later, the market started crashing.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge. But we were, lest anyone be confused here, we were working till 10 o'clock at night every night in the office. This is where the investment banking background came in handy because we were trained to operate like that. And you know, my husband would come meet me at the office at 10 and we'd have dinner at 10 30 every night.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the minute we open the doors, literally the product started selling ridiculously quickly. Wow. I mean, we did $10 million in sales in our first year. Amazing. It's a very, it was a runaway year given that it was our first year business.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yup, so we ended up with a massive amount of press coverage and we actually had a lot of money for marketing and we were encouraged to spend it because at that time it was land grab time. Everybody was trying to grab market share as fast as they could. We launched in and there were four competitors who launched right behind us. And one of the big things I learned to do was just completely block out any fear or notion of the competitors keep your head down.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At Idea Lab. In Pasadena. So we had had this third term sheet, and we were planning to call them, but we just didn't have the time. We hadn't had the time to call him. So instead of calling him to turn him down, we put the phone down with the other group. We picked the phone up. We call Bill Gross and we said we're signing your terms sheet. We'll be in Pasadena tomorrow morning. And we exited the side door.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's a term sheet is unfortunately not binding, it's an indication of interest that's really a buildup of good faith. And so you could do it and get away with it. Absolutely. And it happened a lot in the late 90s when you didn't have online transparency and reputation where other entrepreneurs could learn about what people were doing to you. And so there was no consequence. And so you could become as an investor much more abusive.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was fantastic. We were very happy. It was a prestigious firm. They had an office on Sandhill Road. But they turned around and actually decided to partner with another firm and they called us and said, we're sorry, this is now their deal. The terms are changing. The terms now became, we need you to move cities to where this other firm is. We're going to bring the valuation down to $4 million. And it was a collusion, like a textbook collusion.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financing, and it was Idealab plus a couple of others. But two of the firms decided first they found out about who we were talking to and they decided to collude. So we signed a term sheet with one player and they were valuing us straight out of the blocks just as people and with this PowerPoint presentation at $6 million.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They loved our pitch, they loved us and they loved our pitch, and we had a lot of interest, and we ended up in an interesting situation where we did experience some collusion, actually. This was a really difficult part of that journey where in the old days you could have VC firms gang up if they could find out who else you were talking to, they could collude and basically work with each other and partner together to drive your price down, your valuation down. And I had heard about it at business school in a lecture, and sure enough, it happened to me. So we had a couple term sheets come in for our first round.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was starting to boom. It wasn't the height, but it was getting there. And I sense that there was an opportunity for me to get capital, even though I was 27. And had no work experience really. And people liked your likes.”
2019-12-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Minted: Mariam Naficy (2018) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT