(here is the link to part 1 if you missed it)

(here is the link to part 2)

I used to have a T-Shirt that said "No Money, No Problems."

But starting PosterBurner proved that my shirt was wrong.

And we had to make some hard choices.

We realized that if we bought paper in large batches, we could save a lot of money per roll.

So my brother sold his car to buy our first big paper order.

And every day, he would fill up his backpack with poster tubes, and bike them up to the post office.

But soon there were too many tubes to fit in a backpack.  And there were too many prints for us to do alone.

We needed help.

Fortunately, we didn't have to look far.

Our roommate Daniel - who we played baseball with growing up - was working a crazy job.

He was a military contractor on an overtime push that lasted months. 

So we made a deal for him to join PosterBurner.

And soon after he figured out how to make canvas prints.  We added canvas as a new product, and that took off fast.

And in the blink of an eye, we needed more people.

We hired two more guys. One of them was Nick, who is now our operations manager.

And the house started to transform.

The living room where we used to watch TV became the canvas room.  The kitchen became an ink depot.  And the den was packed with printers and workstations.

Big mac trucks started showing up with deliveries of paper and supplies.

The trucks had to make 30 point turns to get back out of our dead end street.

And we made a lot of noise.

Air compressors would fire at midnight.  We'd hammer together stretcher bars and all day long you could hear the clack, clack, clack of staple guns.

But thankfully the neighbors never complained.  And in fact, they were supportive.

They seemed to enjoy watching PosterBurner develop.

Then the 2008 crash happened.

It was a scary time, but the big companies pulled back, and that gave us an opportunity to grow.

It also allowed us to get a real office.

Here is what it looked like.

It was huge for us at the time.  

We met the landlord at the new office to sign the lease.  And signing those papers, my hand shook with a mix of pride, excitement, and disbelief that we had made it this far.

We were a real business now.

The added space let us add more products.  We added decals next and they took off.

We were flying high.

Then disaster struck.

And I'll explain that in part 4.

And as always, we have the same popular deal we've been running since the days we used to bike poster tubes to the post office.

Movie Size Posters for 19.99.

Rick @ PosterBurner