Swag.com

This program was very intense. At this stage of the business, we were able to handle orders almost entirely automated. We were doing approx $100k in revenue a month. But we were a team of 3 people. Me and Josh (Cofounder) were in Chicago, and we had an ops manager who was working from home in NY. Josh was flying pretty much every weekend to be with his wife and son in NY. This was really an exhausting summer. Very little sleep. late nights, slept on an air mattress. But made some life long friends.

This was not pretty. you could barely place an order. Every order still needed to be done manually. We were doing maybe one order a week at this point. We were just trying to get it to a place where orders would happen seamlessly. At this point, we were very far away from that.

The day after we sold to Facebook, we went to the WeWork HQ. When they asked who else we work with we said Facebook! I assume they thought we had 100's if not thousands of other customers. They ended up placing a nearly $20k order for their annual WeWork Summer Camp.

Our strategy from the very beginning was to get several big-name customers. If we could get the Facebooks of the world, then we would be able to promote those logos on our Landing page and it would be the ultimate social proof, and give other customers the confidence to work with us. So that's what we did. We sold $3k worth of tees to Facebook.

We just had a Landing page, no site was built. We used this landing page to make our first sales. Our goal was to learn as much as we could during this period. Who are our customers and what do they really want. Once we were able to figure that out, we would start building the right platform.